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}BRIAN PORTER-SZŰCS
Whiteness and Polishness
In 2019, the New York Times launched a series of articles entitled “The
1619 Project,” which argued that we should reorient our understanding
of American history by using as a starting point the year when the first
African slaves were sold in the territory that would become the United
States.1 Not surprisingly, Donald Trump immediately countered by
sponsoring “The 1776 Project,” which attempts to position the liberta-
rian right as the heir to a long tradition of American greatness.2 A furious
battle over historical memory is now being fought around these two
texts, with school districts mandating that one or the other be adopted
into the curriculum, depending on the political orientation dominating
in any particular district.3
This was the backdrop for me when I read Adam Leszczyński’s
Ludowa historia Polski (“The People’s History of Poland”), so the book
felt familiar even before I noticed the references to Howard Zinn’s (1980)
A People’s History of the United States. The country of my birth and the
country that I study as a historian are rarely so explicitly aligned. Both
1 See https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/1619-
-america-slavery.html.
2 See https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/
The-Presidents-Advisory-1776-Commission-Final-Report.pdf.
3 Some conservative state legislators have attempted to ban the use of “The
1619 Project.” For example, see Schwartz 2021.
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Americans and Poles are experiencing a parallel moment of historical
reassessment. Zinn’s book is forty years old, so there’s nothing new about
seeing US history from the “bottom up.” But most Americans were,
until recently, taught to perceive slavery as a tragic moment in our past,
a vanquished evil whose legacy we must transcend. Even those of us
who think of ourselves as progressive saw racism as a stain on our
nation—something that needed to be cleaned off so that the ideals of
the Revolution could be more fully realized. These past few years have
opened many eyes to the fact that bigotry has an enormous constituency
in this country, and (more important) that it is not a mere stain—it is
woven into the very fabric of our country. The term “structural racism”
is no longer an obscure concept used by historians and social scientists,
but instead a regular component in our public discourse. With “The
1619 Project” and the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, we White
Americans have been forced to recognize that racism is not a mere
character flaw embodied by a small group of bad people.4 It is, instead,
something so deeply rooted in our politics, culture, and society that it
is perpetuated even among those who sincerely renounce prejudice.
Adam Leszczyński’s contribution is quite similar. Explicitly, his the-
oretical models are Zinn, Hayden White, Michel Foucault, and most
of all, James C. Scott.5 Yet to cite those authors is misleading, because
it makes Leszczyński seem behind the times, as if Poles are only now
ready to consider arguments that were made in the US and Western
Europe many decades ago. It is true that the trends that reshaped the
discipline of history in the 1980s and 1990s had less resonance among
scholars in Poland at the time—but how could it have been otherwise,
given everything that was going on back then? Leszczyński’s most impor-
4 A recent change in standard capitalization rules in American English has
been to capitalize Black when referring to a racial identity. The canonical Asso-
ciated Press Style Guide accepted this in June of last year, see: https://apnews.
com/article/71386b46dbff8190e71493a763e8f45a. It has remained controversial
whether to capitalize White or not, and there are good arguments on both sides.
In my opinion, Whiteness needs to be marked in the same way as any other
ethnic/national/racial identity, precisely because it has for so long been the unmar-
ked, normative, privileged condition. I am not “white,” but a sort of pinkish-beige.
I am, however, undeniably White.
5 Scott’s work might be less widely known than the others. His most impor-
tant books are Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States (Scott 2017);
The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia (Scott
1976); Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition
Have Failed (Scott 1998); Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance
(Scott 1985).
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tant contribution is not to help Polish historians “catch up” with the
West; instead, this book is momentous because it is a Polish instantiation
of a dramatic and much-needed shock that is now happening in many
different countries: the difficult recognition that structures of oppression
and exploitation exist in our societies that cannot be easily eradicated
by individual commitments to think nice thoughts and treat others with
respect. In country after country, people are coming to realize that the
point of discussing historical injustice is not (at least, not only) to recon-
cile previously hostile communities or come to terms with the wrongs
that our grandparents committed. In fact, those conversations can easily
be led astray, deflected by the insistence that the sins of the parents not
be passed on to the children. Much more important are the ways in
which engrained patterns of thought, institutional discrimination, unack-
nowledged privilege, and inherited “cultural capital” perpetuate those
past wrongs into the present. In this regard, in Poland, the power of the
nobility over the peasantry is at least as important as the history of
violence and discrimination against “minorities” (Jews, Ukrainians, etc.).
This is why there is, and must be, a productive presentism in Lesz-
czyński’s book. The last line of his conclusion reminds us that “Polska
zaś zmienia się przez stulecia w znacznie mniejszym stopniu, niż się
Polakom wydaje.” The historian is usually the one who pops into every
argument in order to say “It’s more complicated than you think” and
“Don’t forget that the past was very different from the present.” We tend
to be professionally allergic to generalizations, and that’s a good thing.
Every so often, however, we need to step back and notice that despite
all the shifting specifics, there really are some continuities that merit
explanation. In this case, these persistent themes involve the cultural
attitudes, social hierarchies, political institutions, and economic practi-
ces that systematically disadvantage some and privilege others. It is banal
to say that there have always been poor and oppressed people while
others enjoy wealth and privilege. Jesus said it (Matthew 26:11), and so
have countless others before and after. The analytical challenge is to push
deeper and discover the structures and forms through which power is
exerted and maintained, and trace how and why those change. This is
what Karl Marx, and Adam Smith before him, did by outlining a theory
of historical stages of development characterized by different forms of
authority. Our moment, however, is more difficult than theirs, because
it is much harder to believe in capital-H-History. In 2021, few can
sustain a faith that “progress” will make everything better.
One alternative to placing our trust in historical progress is to relo-
cate our ideals from a future time to a geographical space. This tendency
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is particularly common along the European periphery, and it is exem-
plified in “The People’s History of Poland.” While Leszczyński eschews
a faith in progress, he still seems to believe in Europe. The book is
punctuated by references to how badly Poland looks when compared to
the “kraje cywilizacyjnego centrum,” and how much “oriental barbarism”
or “oriental cruelty” can be found along the Vistula. Leszczyński is fami-
liar with Larry Wolff’s argument that 18th century West Europeans were
engaging in an ideological project by constructing an “oriental mirror”
that concealed their own flaws—yet he concludes that those observers
were nonetheless basing their projection on a realistic portrait of the
East.6
They probably were. But the point of Wolff’s book, like the canoni-
cal writing of Edward Said that inspired it, was not that the orientalists
were misrepresenting what they saw—rather, the problem was that they
were describing it in a way that deflected attention from the injustices
and flaws in their own societies (Said 1978). They depicted a barbaric
racial and geographical other which could be marked, so that their own
status as racially White and geographically Western could be rendered
invisible, as the taken-for-granted “normal” against which all others
should be measured. This left Eastern Europe in a strange transitional
zone, and ensured that the specter of Whiteness would haunt the way
we write about the region. For far too long, those of us who study this
part of the world have acted as if we don’t have to think seriously about
race, given that nearly everyone in the area we study is White. Although
racialized hostility towards Jews and Roma was a major issue for many
decades, post-WWII Poland is reflexively described as racially (and eth-
nically, religiously, and linguistically) homogeneous. This has allowed
us to forget that in the modern world, race is of central importance even
were it cannot be seen.
While recognizing that chattel slavery and serfdom were not the
same, Leszczyński nonetheless argues that “mimo tych zasadniczych
różnic istniały także strukturalne podobieństwa między tymi oboma
systemami społecznymi.” These structural parallels are indeed as nume-
rous as they are obvious, but I think one particular similarity noted by
Leszczyński deserves attention here: „W USA miał on rasowy charakter,
ale w Europie Wschodniej (…) różnicę pomiędzy chłopem a szlachcicem
uważano za równie wrodzoną, jak kolor skóry w Stanach Zjednoczonych.”
6 The canonical reference here is Larry Wolff (1994) Inventing Eastern Europe:
The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment. Less well known, but
also worthy of attention, is the more recent book The Idea of Galicia: History and
Fantasy in Habsburg Political Culture (Wolff 2010).
Brian Porter-Szűcs
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It is quite striking how American and Polish scholars use different ter-
minology to talk about structures of oppression. Let’s compare “The
People’s History of Poland” to three similar works from this side of the
Atlantic: the aforementioned book by Howard Zinn; a canonical history
of slavery, David Davis’ (2006) Inhuman Bondage; and the only book
I’m aware of that systematically compared slavery and serfdom, Peter
Kolchin’s (1987) masterpiece Unfree Labor. I ran a textual analysis on
all four books, and the terminological variations were revealing:7
The differences between these texts might seem so obvious that they
don’t even warrant mention: after all, race does not appear to be a salient
category of analysis in Poland, while in the US we have “farmers” rather
than “peasants.” And for all that Leszczyński compares serfdom and
slavery, he is mostly discussing the former. Yet I think we should think
seriously about his claim that the apparent differences between US sla-
very and Polish serfdom are not as great as they might appear, because
we Americans describe as “racial” a form of exploitation that is catego-
rized otherwise in Poland, but is nonetheless quite comparable. The first
section of “The People’s History of Poland” is devoted to the various
attempts to describe a separate genealogy for szlachta and peasants. This
is, in fact, a very old story. At least as early as Aristotle, we can find the
myth of the “natural slave.”
All men who differ from one another by as much as the soul differs from the
body or man from a wild beast (and that is the state of those who work by
using their bodies, and for whom that is the best they can do)—these people
7 The analysis was preformed on the main body of each volume, excluding
the notes, bibliography, and index. I used the apps available at https://voyant-tools.
org/. The asterisk in each search term indicates variable letters in order to capture
alternative word forms. I manually reviewed the findings to catch false positives.
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are slaves by nature, and it is better for them to be subject to this kind of
control (…). Nature must therefore have intended to make the bodies of free
men and of slaves different also; slaves’ bodies strong for the services they have
to do, those of free men upright and not much use for that kind of work, but
instead useful for community life (…). It is clear that there are certain people
who are free and certain who are slaves by nature, and it is both to their
advantage, and just, for them to be slaves. (Aristotle, Politics, chap. 5)
Aristotle made the idea of the “natural slave” central to his vision of
the ideal polity: one in which the work would be done by those created
for that purpose, thus enabling others to have the leisure needed to attend
to public affairs. For Aristotle, a world without slaves would be necessarily
a world without citizens, for that latter depended on the former. From
the δημοκρατία to the res publica to the rzeczpospolita, participatory govern-
ment was linked to unfree labor. It is thus no coincidence that the word
obywatel was a synonym for szlachcic as late as the early 20th century.
With this in mind, we understand more clearly why “The 1619
Project” could argue that slavery was at the core of the American project.
One of the most powerful US politicians of the 19th century, John C.
Calhoun, said this in a speech from 1849:
With us the two great divisions of society are not the rich and the poor, but
White and Black, and all the former, the poor as well as the rich, belong to the
upper class, and are respected and treated as equals, if honest and industrious,
and hence have a position and pride of character of which neither poverty nor
misfortune can deprive them. (Calhoun 1883, 505–506)
No defender of the złota wolność could have put it better. The paral-
lels between the America republic and the Rzeczpospolita Obojga Naro-
dów are clear. We can see how serfdom/slavery was more than just a bad
thing that existed alongside the proto-democratic institutions of the First
Republic or the American Revolution. Instead, the system was one inte-
gral whole. It is highly relevant that the timelines leading to the Nihil
Novi constitution and the establishment of a mandatory minimum
pańszczyzna are almost exactly aligned.
Yet if this parallel between America and Poland is so apt, then why
is there such a significant terminological differentiation in how we talk
about the two locations? The concept of race does indeed flow through
both stories, but the term “race” does not. Perhaps it should.
I found one tiny misstatement in “The People’s History of Poland”—
something so trivial that it would not on its own be worth mentioning.
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Leszczyński writes that the flow of emigrants from Poland to the US
declined because of restrictions put in place in response to the mass
unemployment of the Great Depression. This is off by a few years. The
stream of émigrés from Eastern Europe was slowed to a trickle by the
“Emergency Quota Act” of 1921, and then nearly entirely closed with
the immigration act of 1924. Both of these were explicitly racial in
nature, designed to keep White hegemony secure in the United States.
Immigration from Asia was shut off entirely, but so was the flow from
southern and eastern Europe. Reading the congressional transcripts from
the debates surrounding these laws, it is clear that the primary concern
was racial supremacy. Those who could fit into the American racial
structure could be welcomed in a controlled way: thus, seasonal farm-
-worker programs for Mexicans could be retained. But the growing
urban areas with enclaves of Poles, Chinese, Jews, Japanese, Greeks,
Italians, etc. were seen as dangerous to White hegemony. The Asians
were blocked because they had no recognized place in the White-Black-
-Brown triumvirate of the American racial system. The Eastern and
Southern Europeans were blocked because they were simultaneously
too White and not White enough. The very potential of assimilation
was the fear in this case, because there was no way to immediately dif-
ferentiate a White protestant of English ancestry from a White Catho-
lic of Polish ancestry. The peripheral Europeans, in other words, could
“pass,” which was a great concern in the American racial ideology of
that time.
Leszczyński tells us that peasants who emigrated to America would
write home with stories about how easy it was to succeed in the States,
where only their skill mattered. It was irrelevant to the Americans, they
wrote, whether someone was peasant or noble. Poles could establish
a much higher standard of living and even advance socially in the still
thinly populated American Midwest during the late 19th and early 20th
centuries. What they did not see—what Polish immigrants in the US
or Western Europe often fail to see even today—is that their ability to
“pass” as White was crucial to their success. They could prosper in the
US not because America was so very different than Poland in the rigidity
of its hierarchies, but because the categories were drawn differently. As
the American cities grew and racial fears of diversity grew with them,
Europe’s Catholics got temporarily re-racialized as non-White, and thus
grouped together with Asians in the prohibitions of the 1921–1924
laws. Later, the dynamics of the Cold War made Polish-Americans (and
Catholics, more broadly) White once again. Race is a mutable category
in this way, but that fluidity is limited. It can become more or less
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capacious in the definition of precisely who is considered White, and
in this sense, race works just like nationality or ethnicity. But whereas
the opposite of “Polish” can be lots of different things depending on the
context, the opposite of “White” is always “Black.”
The fear of not being White sits very deeply in Polish culture, even
though it is virtually never expressed as such. Leszczyński tells us about
the nicknames used in the 1950s to denigrate Nowa Huta: Dziki Mek-
syk and Kożedo (the latter referring to a POW camp from the Korean
War). The power of those labels rested precisely on the perceived scan-
dal of Poles being treated in a way that they considered unsuitable to
their identity as White Europeans. The poverty and abuse of the lud
throughout Polish history is awful, and deserves to be analyzed alongside
other regimes of unfree labor. But race enters this story in two pernicious
ways. First, in the outrage generated by the fact that Poland appears so
much worse than the (White) European world to which it is assumed
to properly belong. Second, in the invisible power and privilege that
comes with Whiteness even for those with peasant ancestry.
Inside Poland, the lack of enduring racial differentiation made it
harder to sustain the old divisions once the institutional structure of
subordination was gone. It is undeniable that the cultural capital of
those with szlachta ancestry continues to exist. “The People’s History of
Poland” would not even be a controversial book were it not for the fact
that a historical narrative designed by and for the nobility defines Polish
history, even now.8 Nonetheless, the fluidity allowing people to assimi-
late into this elite is vastly greater than that of those designated as a racial
other in the United States or Western Europe (or Poland, for that mat-
ter). Yes, we did have an African-American President for eight years, but
the fierce backlash brought us Donald Trump. How many Poles even
know which of the III Republic’s Prime Ministers were from peasant
and which from noble background? The enduring cultural power of
szlachta identity means that all of them acted as if they were from “good
families,” but the porousness of this category allowed them to do so. No
matter how hard he tried, President Obama could never not be Black.
There is a flexibility surrounding nonracial hierarchies that is missing
when they are racially marked. More importantly, I think, the concept
of race exists for Poles themselves, for whom “Whiteness” is unseen but
vital. It is evident every time someone in Poland worries about declining
8 Leszczynski cites Smoczyński and Zarycki 2017. I would add a magnificent
book on this topic that has not garnered the attention it deserves: Jakubowska
2012.
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birth rates yet cannot even imagine that immigration could resolve that
problem. It is evident when Poles see a deep injustice in the economic
gap between Poland and Germany, but take as self-evident the (much
larger) gap between Poland and Nigeria, or Vietnam, or Guatemala.
And most of all, it is evident as soon as we notice the countless ways in
which Poles can, under the right circumstances, take advantage of the
same White privilege that any other European has access to.9 Just con-
sider the social dynamics at play the moment any Pole comes into con-
tact with anyone from outside Europe or North America—in the emi-
gration, on vacation in Egypt or Turkey, or when dealing with the small
but growing population of non-White immigrants in Poland itself.
Two things are simultaneously true: 1) the Sarmatian mythology is
an example of how the szlachta constructed a cultural-political-economic
regime that in many ways looked quite similar to the racialized slavery
of the Western hemisphere; 2) although those social divides remain
“sticky” a century and a half after the abolition of serfdom, there can be
no real comparison to the enduring power of Whiteness around the
world—including in places where virtually everyone is perceived as
White.
References
Aristotle. Politics: Book V. Translated by Benjamin Jowett. http://classics.
mit.edu/Aristotle/politics.5.five.html
Calhoun, John. 1883. The Speeches of John C. Calhoun. New York: D.
Appleton and Company.
Davis, David Brion. 2006. Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery
in the New World. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Jakubowska, Longina. 2012. Patrons of History: Nobility, Capital, and
Political Transitions in Poland. Burlington: Ashgate.
Kolchin, Peter. 1987. Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Ser-
fdom. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Said, Edward. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books.
Schwartz, Sarah. 2021. “Lawmakers Push to Ban »1619 Project« from
Schools.” Education Week, February 3, 2021, https://www.edweek.
org/teaching-learning/lawmakers-push-to-ban-1619-project-from-
9 The history of this phenomenon has been brilliantly explored in Valerio
2019.
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-schools/2021/02
Scott, James C. 1976. The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and
Subsistence in Southeast Asia. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Scott, James C. 1985. Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant
Resistance. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Scott, James C. 1998. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve
the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Scott, James C. 2017. Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest
States. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Smoczyński, Rafał, and Tomasz Zarycki. 2017. Totem inteligencki. Ary-
stokracja, szlachta i ziemiaństwo w polskiej przestrzeni społecznej. War-
szawa: Scholar Academic Press.
Valerio, Lenny Ureña. 2019. Colonial Fantasies, Imperial Realities: Race
Science and the Making of Polishness on the Fringes of the German
Empire, 1840–1920. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press.
Wolff, Larry. 1994. Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization
on the Mind of the Enlightenment. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Wolff, Larry. 2010. The Idea of Galicia: History and Fantasy in Habsburg
Political Culture. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Zinn, Howard. 1980. A People’s History of the United States: 1942–Present.
New York: Harper & Row.
Brian Porter-Szűcs
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BRIAN PORTER-SZŰCS—an Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of History
at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. His most recent book is Cał-
kiem zwyczajny kraj: Historia Polski bez martyrologii (Wydawnictwo
Filtry, 2021), which is a heavily revised and translated version of Poland
and the Modern World: Beyond Martyrdom (Wiley Blackwell, 2014). His
earlier works include Faith and Fatherland: Catholicism, Modernity, and
Poland (Oxford University Press, 2010), and When Nationalism Began
to Hate: Imagining Modern Politics in 19th Century Poland (Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 2000), which was translated into Polish as Gdy nacjonalizm
zaczął nienawidzić: Wyobrażenia nowoczesnej polityki w dziewiętnasto-
wiecznej Polsce (Pogranicze, 2011). Together with Bruce Berglund, he
co-edited Christianity and Modernity in East-Central Europe (Central
European University Press, 2010), and together with Michael Kennedy,
Negotiating Radical Change: Understanding and Extending the Lessons of
the Polish Round Table Talks (United States Institute for Peace, 2000).
Porter-Szűcs has been a professor at the University of Michigan since
1994, teaching classes on economic history, the intellectual history of
capitalism and socialism, the history of Roman Catholicism, and the
history of Poland. In his current research project, he is exploring the
history of economic thought and the origins of neoliberalism in the
Polish People’s Republic.
Citation: Porter-Szűcs, Brian. 2022. “Whiteness and Polishness.” Prak-
tyka Teoretyczna 1(43): 239–249.
DOI: 10.19195/prt.2022.1.12
Autor: Brian Porter-Szűcs
Tytuł: Białość i polskość
Whiteness and Polishness
