White Flight: Nationalists take on the shifting grounds of Polish racial identity

When United Kingdom-based far-right activist Tommy Robinson posted a video on Twitter of a white nationalist demonstration he was attending in Warsaw, one exasperated user chimed in, stating: "One minute we're being [asked] to support Poland the next minute their [sic] taking our jobs, I'm confused." Indeed, anyone who recalls the anti-Polish sentiment that British white nationalists espoused in the run-up to Brexit (crystallized in the myth of the "job-stealing" Eastern-European migrant) will feel perplexed by the dueling narratives about Polish racial identity that are now playing out in Europe. While there are many nationalities thought of today as "white" that were at one point racialized as non-white (Italians, the Irish, etc.), today's Poles are pulling off an exceptional feat. They have the distinction of being white in Warsaw, but not white if they fly just 2.5 hours west to London. As sociologists József Böröcz and Mahua Sarkar have explained it: "Whiteness is inherently unstable, heterogeneous, and impure. So is 'Eastern Europe.'"

The march Robinson attended in Warsaw took place last year on Nov. 11, Polish Independence Day. That afternoon, a crowd of 60,000 protestors marched through the streets of Warsaw chanting "Pure Poland, white Poland." Others carried signs that read "White Europe of brotherly nations" and "Europe will be white or uninhabited." The far-right march was just one event associated with the day's many celebrations, but it was nonetheless the focus of international media attention. It was a source of alarm particularly for the journalists, activists, and concerned citizens who have been anxiously tracking the xenophobia and white nationalism that has increasingly become a central node in Eastern-European politics.

It's important to note, however, that this is far from a local phenomenon. The events in Poland are part of a larger crusade of far-right agitation that extends well beyond the country's borders. Notably, two of the organizers of the Polish Independence Day march (the Polish Nationalist Movement and All Polish Youth) also convened an international conference for far-right extremists that took place that same morning. Held in the Polish parliament building, the event was attended by nationalists from Belgium, Estonia, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, the Netherlands, Spain, and Sweden—some of the European countries that have seen a swing to the right in the wake of the migrant crisis and austerity cuts. The American white supremacist and leader of the so-called "alt-right" movement, Richard Spencer, was also scheduled to be there, but was barred by the Polish government from entering the country.

Making an especially strong showing at the Polish march were far-right activists from the United Kingdom. As reported by the Southern Poverty Law Center blog "Hatewatch," in addition to Tommy Robinson, the event was attended by Jack Buckby, a former member of the British National Party (BNP), a white-nationalist organization previously headed by a Holocaust denier. Though Robinson has insisted he has no problem with Polish migrants in Britain, in July 2017, he responded to journalist Yaroslav Trofimov on Twitter in a way that suggested otherwise. When Trofimov reported that migration of Eastern Europeans to Britain had "collapse[d] to 5,000 from 48,000 a year," Robinson replied: "Sorry fatcats, no more importing slave labour to undercut us."

Robinson's tweet and subsequent attendance of the Polish Independence Day march point to one of the most confounding ironies of this new wave of white nationalism in Poland. In 2016, just a year before the march, the U.K. was confronted with a spate of what were described as "racially motivated" hate crimes against Polish residents. When 21-year-old Telford resident Bartosz Milewski was stabbed in the neck after someone heard him speaking Polish with his friends, police treated the attack as a "racially aggravated hate crime." The implication was that the Polish residents of Britain were somehow racially distinct from white English citizens. Observers of the Polish march must then be left...