Media Storm - White (Other): Anti-Eastern European prejudice

Episode Date: November 3, 2022

Media Storm’s latest investigation looks at a new, post-Brexit era of exploitation targeting Central and Eastern Europeans in the UK. Today’s bonus episode looks at the attitudes behind this exploitation, and asks why a workforce who have proven invaluable were dismissed as undesirable “low-skilled” workers. Is it just a question of economics, or is it a question of prejudice? This bonus episode from The Guilty Feminist and Media Storm looks at the role of pop culture, class, geopolitics and history in shaping misconceptions and creating simplistic stereotypes of diverse cultural identities. The episode is hosted by Mathilda Mallinson (@mathildamall) and Helena Wadia (@helenawadia). Guests Alex Bulat @alexandrabulat Kasia Tee @KasiaTee @cursedobjectsuk Dr Dagmar Myslinska @DagmarMyslinska Marzena Zukowska and Magda Fabianczyk @polishmigrants Jelena Sofronijevic @jelsofron Eliza Meller Sources Hate crime stats http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/racism-hate-crimes-increase-brexit-eu-referendum-a7113091.html  Production Researcher: Eliza Meller Media Storm music: Samfire @soundofsamfire The Guilty Feminist theme: Mark Hodge, Nick Sheldon Chopin played by: Anait Karpova  More on Media Storm Follow us on Twitter http://twitter.com/mediastormpod or Instagram https://www.instagram.com/mediastormpod or Tiktok https://www.tiktok.com/@mediastormpod like us on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/MediaStormPod send us an email [e-mail] check out our website https://mediastormpodcast.com  Media Storm is brought to you by the house of The Guilty Feminist and is part of the Acast Creator Network. Become a member at https://plus.acast.com/s/media-storm. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Last week on MediaStorm, we looked at the rise of exploitation in a post-Brexit, low-skilled labour market. In particular, the exploitation of central and eastern Europeans. Our dad was working at a stable. He was working full-time, but getting paid part-time hours. As his employer was working with foreigners, he could do wherever he wanted. This week, we look at what's behind it. I am a white other person. This is white, other, anti-Eastern European prejudice. We will be taking back control.

The largest group of small boats migrants are from Albania. Many of them claim to be trafficked as many slaves. End low-skilled migration to our country. Following the Brexit boat, there's been a surge in reports of hate crime. What if you've got against Romania? Nothing, but I've got a problem with Romania. Very big problem with Romania. You'll hear a few lived experience voices in this.

episode, sources we interviewed who are living around the UK from central and eastern European countries, including Poland, Bulgaria, Romania and Hungary. Many of the people we spoke to experienced a rise in prejudice around the time of the Brexit referendum. When I was a student in Aberdeen and I was walking with two of my friends, all of us from Poland, while crossing the street we were talking in Polish and a guy came up to us and he was like, oh, you're in the UK, speaking Queen's English. You should go back to your country. You have no right to stay here. He was very aggressive. He said, oh, go back to your country. Go back to where you come from. I got a very discriminative immigration officer. She was like, we're not paying our taxes for people

like you to go to colleges. And she just gave me a tourist visa, which wouldn't allow me after leaving school, neither to work or study. They'd identify you as just being the first. foreigner without your actual name. He started telling me about how he can't be racist because he employs Polish people on his farm, which I thought was quite a funny comment. Especially after the referendum, I remember seeing on the news, on Facebook, there were comments like, oh, this guy, he's from Lithuania, he's been convicted for theft. After Brexit, we're going to send him back home and we can rot in jail there.

And there are many comments like that. He immediately sort of picked up on the fact that my accent was a bit different. and asked, where are you from? And I said, well, I'm British. He said, oh, no, like, you're not really British. Like, where are you from? Come on, mate, you can tell me. And I said, well, okay, I mean, I'm half British.

I'm half Polish. And he said, ah, see you, there we go. And like, now I see it. You're not really British, are you? The referendum saw a significant spike in hate crime. 331 incidents were reported in the week that followed, compared to the average 63. Six British teenagers are free on bail

after being arrested on suspicion of the murder of a Polish man. It is being described as a hate crime. Anecotal evidence suggests there's been a huge rise in cases of racist abuse in the wake of the UK's referendum vote to leave the EU. But it's hard to actually measure prejudice against Eastern Europeans when we don't collect any data.

Okay, I was looking at data on hate crimes targeting Eastern and Central Europeans, but we don't collect that data. That's just not a category we acknowledge, knowledge as in itself targeted and marginalised in a very, very deliberate way. This came up in the discussion between Helena, myself and Dr. Alex Bulat during last week's recording. Alex is the UK's first Romanian-born counsellor. Yeah, and there's no, like, I don't think there are very many targeted programmes

encouraging different groups into politics or into media, because at the end of the day, when I complete any kind of survey for any training program, I am a white other person. most of us are within this like white other category. It would be really interesting to see what the makeup of the population is because you can't actually say, oh, we need more Romanians in politics or we need more Polish people in politics if you have no idea how many Romanian or Polish counselors are

because we're all white other. And doesn't that actually just reflect how little understanding we have of all these cultures that are just kind of clumped together as white other? And I feel like that's directly reflective of how they are presented in pop culture and the wider media, because this is something that actually came up with some of the sources I spoke to. I don't know if you remember Borat, right?

Sasha Baron Cohen's Kazakhstani caricature. This Natalia. He kind of embodies all of these nasty assumptions about white eastern populations. She is my sister. She is number four prostitute in all of Kazakhstan. Nice. Siltzy or sexually lewd or misogynistic. And even though Kazakhstan is in Central Asia, people that we spoke to from Eastern Europe

would say that this is the stereotype they're kind of confronted with the most. The amount of times I can get like the Borot accent. They always like try to do the Borot accent and like, oh, are you from Kazakhstan or I'm from Bulgaria and like, oh, are you from Romania? It's very different. Alex, what do you think of how the media represents Eastern European populations? When I see representations, they're either quite stereotypical or just simply wrong representations. So I'll give one example. I was watching the series, picky blinders, right? I was watching

with my partner and I was like, oh my God, they're speaking in Romania. So there's like a very short scene where Shelby speaks some Romanian phrases. And I was like saying to my partner, like, that's wrong. I mean, he's supposed to speak a Romani language. He's not supposed to speak Romanian from Google Translate. I mean, like, we laughed about it, but it was like really representative of like how certain nationalities are not really understood, not even in terms of like what language each group speaks. We have all those generalizing stereotypes of like ex-eastern bloc or like Eastern Europeans. They all speak the same language. They're all like kind of in the same category where there's like so much diversity not only within Central and Eastern Europe,

but also within countries. So for example, in Romania we have several ethnic minorities, including Romanian Roma people, Romanian-Hungarian people, Romanian-Jewish people. And like this kind of diversity of our population is not really understood. When I was growing up, I think one of the biggest pop culture representations was Dorota from Gossip Girl. Yeah. But if Mr. Chuck come tell him Mr. Carter is more attentive to a woman's... Enough. I'm not going to play. Where's Waldorf all night? How much is it going to cost? How much?

So she was Blair's Polish housemaid. A, the stereotype that she was a cleaner. And B, the stereotype almost in a way, because she was so scheming, so much so that everybody thought she was gossip girl. There were a lot of quotes that Dorota said, which were just so, like, I have one here, which is, in Poland, we have a saying, love is like head wound, it makes you dizzy,

you think you die, but you recover. And it's just like, I wonder who wrote that. Oh, God. I doubt they were Polish. Yeah, that's really interesting. It's one of the examples I thought about, it's often either the villains or the victims. If you think about, like, the villains in movies,

they're usually, you know, Eastern European, they have Eastern European accent. Yeah, they're like unspecific Eastern European accent. Good luck. This is taken. Good luck. Taken, yeah, that's a good example. Albanians.

Bond villains. Oh my God, did anyone watch Golden Eye? Yeah, I grew up in a Bond household. Golden Eye, which is actually one of them all, not too ancient, it's the Pierce Brosnan generation. The evil sidekick, she's called Zanya on the top. And she's actually, she's played by Fam Kay Janssen, who's Dutch and who actually speaks with a very, very standard American accent

in all the other movies she does. And, of course, her surname on top is used as a play on word because it's a sexual position in Bonz's eyes. And even the way that she engages in combat is heavily sexualized. She's presented this, like, kind of depraved sexual, evil being, which plays into so many tropes we have

about the fetishization of Eastern European women. This time, Mr. Bond, the pleasure will be all mine. And again, we're taken. Yeah, it's about sex trafficking and touches on this huge problem that was experienced, you know, at the fall of the USSR and an outbreak of the sex trafficking of women in the region. But the movie taken, we only care about rescuing the kind of certified, pure, pretty American teenager. All the Eastern European women who, you know, they're just disposable. It's pretty dark.

Take it back to Gossip Girl, Deroda. I mean, she should have been Gossip Girl. Like, the end of who was actually Gossip Girl was truly one of the worst things I have ever watched on any TV program ever. Send us your thoughts about the Gossip Girl reveal. I know, it was like 10 years ago and I'm still angry about it.

What are the roots of these stereotypes? And what do they mean for those nationalities living in the UK today? I put this question to two guests. Historian, Cash Tomashevich. I think there is very much. much a class aspect here. And sociologist Dagma Mazinska. Eastern European workers have tended to be either portrayed as kind of low-skilled, temporary,

undesirable workers who are stealing British jobs. There was a strong sense that Polish people, that they were beneath English people in terms of the work that they did. And as a result, they were there to be exploited. The flip side of that was that sometimes Eastern European workers would be portrayed in a superficially positive light as good workers. But that stereotype, it's not truly positive because what it leads to is justifying their exploitation. By saying that they're good workers, what a lot of employers and the public assume is that, oh, they're exploitable.

They will work harder, longer hours, for lower wages. Dagma summarizes the modern history of central and eastern European immigration to the UK, beginning after World War II. And after the wars, since Poland was an ally of the UK against Nazi Germany, the UK passed the Polish Resettlement Act of 1943, which allowed servicemen who were fighting in the Polish military to come over to the UK of their families. This was how Kasha's mother's family came to the UK.

So my grandfather fought for the Polish Free Army. He fought on the side of the British, and they settled here. There was a lot of quite strong anti-Polish sentiment during that time. I think this is because it was a period of crisis as the UK was struggling to rebuild itself after a war that financially crippled it and also caused a deep sense of anxiety

around who Britain was as a nation. And after that, obviously, the Cold War began behind the Iron Curtain. There was just a trickling of political refugees escaping communism. That was how Kasha's story. father's family came to the UK. Dad came over in the 1980s. There was the disintegration of the Soviet Empire, essentially. Again, there was quite a lot of anti-Polish sentiment, especially around people fleeing from the communist regime, I guess. I think this still stands. A lot of people

consider Polish people to be quite hard, communist people, you know, hardworking proletariat's, essentially, which is not how Polish people see themselves, of course. In 2004, was the Eastern enlargement. And at that point, you saw a significant mobility, right? Europe is on the brink of a profound change. Ten countries are about to become new members of the European Union. I think that was the first kind of time I ever started to experience anti-Polish sentiment. It was really strange as a kind of English-born Polish woman during that time. I got the sense I was sexualized for it. People would kind of talk to me or look at me or interact with me in a way that I think was fairly uncomfortable because it presupposed that I had a huge

sexual appetite. I think there is very much a class aspect here. You had a really bad outbreak, I guess, of hotbedding, a custom where a number of people will share the same bed, but they'll take it in shift so that it's really good for shift work, but obviously really bad in every other aspect. A flat that wasn't a flat, a bed that wasn't a bed, tiny, tiny living quarters that were not fit for humans. And also I think a general sense in the population as a result of this, that Polish people, even though they were victims of exploitation, were implicit in their own victimization. They were the architects of their own demise. There are a lot of like discursive strategies that people have employed to somehow make the experience of hatred by Caucasian ethnic

groups sound more tolerable, such as xenophobia, or also. also the term cultural racism. Oh, you know, we don't dislike you as a people. We have nothing against you. We're just a different culture. Like, it's just racism. Why do you need a different term? Let's take a quick break.

really disheartening impact in the aftermath of Brexit is that there was a hierarchy created and the kind of convenient spokespeople for who's an EU citizen, who is a respectable EU citizen, tended to be Western Europeans. Next, I spoke to the co-founders of Polish migrants organised for change. I'll start. Hi, I'm Marjana Jukovska. I am a queer, non-binary Polish immigrant. Hi, everyone. So I'm Magda Fabianchik. I came to the UK 20 years ago, over 20 years ago. They do feel that it's important to distinguish the prejudice Eastern Europeans face from racism as a term. It's not about ideas that emerge from the way we look or our ethnicity,

but it's more to do with the geopolitical context and the way that influence was divided in Europe after the Second World War. And it kind of runs along the Berlin War. This sweeping category hides more than it reveals. It completely erases the diversity of it. Polish and Eastern European identity is so incredibly diverse. And I think one challenge we constantly face is that it's often constructed as being synonymous with white, Catholic, heterosexual, cisgendered, right? You can be multiple identities at the same time. You can be black and Polish.

You can be Muslim in Polish. You can be part of the Roma community. be Polish and really it's it's in those intersections that we need to be interrogating how marginalization functions otherwise we continue to get this blanket pitting of Eastern European migrants for example against other migrant communities which is not just destructive to social movements it's convenient for the government to use various scapegoats when when it makes sense to them what gets lost in this sweeping categorization

So I am partly Yugoslav, but I never set foot in Yugoslavia. I'm sitting down now with journalist and producer Yelana Sofranievich to talk about Balkan-Slavic diversity and what we even mean when we say Eastern European. Yelana, tell us first about your personal connection to this topic. So though both ethnically Serbian, my parents came from different places in the then-socialist Yugoslavia. They met in the UK and they brought me up in the diaspora. Some of your family came over with the European voluntary workers scheme after the Second World War, which continued this pattern of immigration for labour that has played such a role in how Eastern Europeans are perceived and valued in the UK. With this scheme, the UK recruited war refugees to plug manual labour gaps that emerged after prisoners of war were released.

Tell us about that history. There was a real consciousness that this was always. already being done in other countries across Europe. So Germany had the gas arbiter, the guest worker scheme as well. And that led to the introduction of this voluntary workers scheme, which was basically then set up to plug the hole in labour that was left when prisoners of war were returned. Displaced persons could apply to come to the UK under the European Voluntary Workers Scheme. They would have a mandatory three-year service in a specific occupation that would be chosen by the government. So normally it was something like mining.

agriculture, engineering road service some kind of manual labour and after they'd completed that three-year term they could apply for any job and they were granted indefinite leave to remain. There was a real pressure on Parliament's side to get government going on a scheme like this to act quickly in order to get the best of the pick.

So for instance, Ukrainian women were often prejudiced against because they were deemed to be of quote, peasant stock. And that's something that I think is a real gap in our media in our reporting. it's almost like individuals must fit this binary where you are either an economic migrant or a political one

and actually there are so many cases where that line is blurred. What you point to is something that's come up time and again in this topic, derogatory perceptions of Eastern Europeans that are rooted in a history of being valued and treated as disposable cheap labour. But we don't really have a language for this prejudice in the way that we might around, say, sexism or racism and that's left to be wondering how to actually title this episode one idea i've had is

of calling the episode white bracket other like you know you'd get on census forms does that does that resonate with you i can see you nodding absolutely it's something i'm really conscious of and as soon as you said i'm sure you saw on the camera i started kind of nodding furiously because whenever i get that in a census i never it took me a really long time to decide how i would kind of identify within that. And even within my family, we've taken different decisions as to what we put. Nowadays, I tend to put white British other and will specify Yugoslav because that is my predominant identity. But even talking about Yugoslavia, I mean, Yugoslavia literally means land of the South Slavs. It's southern Slavic. And yet there is more of a connection, at least in terms

of our communities with other eastern and central European countries. So even that's a kind of difference that gets flattened, as I said, when you are other inner space. Yelena, you actually did a BBC radio show about this based on your hometown in the West Midlands, Telford, or as you like to call it, Little Yugoslavia. Just recap for us what Telford tells us about Eastern European Diaspora Identity. A lot of people came here under the European Voluntary Workers' scheme. And they were settled in the UK on former prisoner of war camps or military bases. And the reason why Telford was so popular is because there were five bases around the military

site in Donington alone. And on those camps you had, not just Yugoslavs, you had Ukrainians, Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, and Gherians. So these were people who were spending lots of time together. There was a sense of community. It's in part a practical reality and it's in part a necessary solidarity that you have when you are othered as an immigrant. It's made me very conscious of Balkan and Slavic solidarity in the UK,

just any kind of non-Western European, actually, solidarity. A kind of anecdote to describe the connection that Yugoslav countries feel to each other is how every time the Eurovision Song Contest rolls around, we're happy to support any single country that looks like it has a chance of winning from the former Yugoslavia. Actually this year, the song that we all really backed was Moldova's entry by Zodob Zub. Which is a fantastic name, by the way,

which is Moldovan Onomatopoeia for Budumch. And their song was about a train ride that goes between Romania and Moldova. And it features the same train track rhythm that's very common to the music that we have in Yugoslavia. and everyone in my family loves that song. I mean, as soon as it comes on, my dad starts cheering and whooping in the same way

as if he listened to a song from his childhood in Yugoslavia. So I really don't want to, like I said, overstate that solidarity and make it out like it's that everyone gets on lovely and there are no hierarchies within the community. But nevertheless, there's a sense when you are an other that you club to whatever you find that is familiar, you make those connections. And that was certainly the case growing up in Telford

and growing up within a diaspora that featured so many different people. Eastern European voices have been missing from the media and from shaping how they are represented in their diasporas. One voice changing this is our own intern, Eliza. So my family's history in Britain starts in a resettlement camp in Surrey. They kept their heads down, didn't complain, and stay silent about the trauma and pain the Soviet Union inflicted on them. We'll call this section Revisionist History,

featuring some Chopin, donated to us by pianist Anait Karpova. My great-granddad was a Polish Jew from Volf, which today is called Lviv. So he was sent to a military prison when the Soviets took over as a member of the Polish army. But during the Second World War, when the Allies were in need of more manpower, they actually conscripted these soldiers to fight for them. The Polish government had some issues with fighting a long-south. their Soviet oppressor. So Churchill and Roosevelt promised them that in return, Poland would recover some of its land from Russia. Ultimately, they broke that promise. So the way polls today

are taught about Polish-British relations during World War II is that it's marked by betrayal. That's something that you don't get in British history classes. So if we were to rewrite our history in a way that was maybe more representative, how might some of that look? One thing that's been written out is the contribution of Polish fighters to the Allies victory in World War II. One example is the Battle of Britain. My own great-granddad was one of those conscripted to fight alongside the same Soviets that had imprisoned him, and he later fought in major World War II battles, such as the Battle of Monte Cassino. But Polish soldiers like him were not invited to take part in the Allied Victory Parade in the UK, which

featured representatives from all the Victoria's armies. And it wasn't just about military support, Another example is the deciphering of the Enigma Code. Alan Turing would not have been able to decipher the Unigma Code. If it weren't for the previous work of Marianne Ryevsky and a team of Polish codebreakers, they laid the basis of the decryption machine in 1933. And what explains this disregard that has been shown to the contributions of Poles and other USSR exiles in their new home, the UK? Well, when the Soviet Union joined the Allies, Soviet propaganda quickly seeped into British media.

So they painted Poles as fascists and Nazi lovers, anti-Semites. So I think it's really important that we actively play a role in the way our stories are told and taught around the UK. It's just more truthful. It's an account of history that's not bound by a particular government's political stance at a particular time. and it means Brits can understand the many reasons that polls move to the UK, which are beautiful but can also be traumatic. It's just a richer way of teaching history. We made this bonus episode as a follow-up to last week's investigation, which showed a rise in post-Brexit black market labour and a new era of exploitation of Eastern European workers. Please do go listen to it, share it and let us know your thoughts.

Our next investigation will look at polyamory, love and the limits of the law. As always, thanks for listening.