ABSTRACT
While scholarship has sought to consider migration in Poland, there has been limited engagement with the ways in which race and racism interact with migration. In this chapter, I map some Polish imaginations of non-white populations and examine whether Poland has different, if related, histories of racial thinking. I ask how such histories have been conceived, shaped, and mediated. To make this effective, I focus on the lived experiences of sub-Saharan African immigrants and their children (black/mixed-race) who are often portrayed as non-Europeans and seen by some as “not quite Polish”. In doing so, this chapter provides racial contours of Polish self-conception and the perception of the “Other”. I call this logic “Polish-centrism” – a specific focus on some aspects of Polish culture that indicate the exclusion of a wider view of the world. It is within this logic that I examine what it means to be black and Polish in Poland.
