How Do You Say Mother In Polish

How Do You Say Mother In Polish – Bianka Nwolisa walks with a “Stop calling me Murzyn” sign during a protest against police brutality following the murder of George Floyd, in Warsaw on June 4, 2020.

Like many Poles of African descent, Sara Alexandre remembers when she realized she was perceived as different. “For me it was kindergarten,” says Alexandre, whose father is Angolan, describing an incident where she was not allowed to play in a dollhouse. “I was five years old and [another girl] wouldn’t let me in because she said she couldn’t allow a little bit.

How Do You Say Mother In Polish

A campaign against the word “Murzyn” – a Polish racial epithet widely used to describe and address black people – is at the heart of an emerging movement in Poland to tackle racial discrimination. The movement, which unites Black activists and allies under the hashtag #DontCallMeMurzyn, shows how a renewed focus on anti-Black racism inspired by the disproportionate impact of Covid-19 and brutal policing on Black communities has spread globally. The movement that grew after the murder of George Floyd by US police now spans countries with large African diasporas, from slavery and colonialism to places like Poland, where 97% of the citizens are white.

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“The hashtag was mainly a thank you to George Floyd,” says Nigerian Arinze Nwolisa, who lives in Warsaw and founded the anti-discrimination Foundation Porta in 2014 with his wife Lidia. “Now people say, ‘Why are you protesting something that happened in America? But the reality is we still have to stop something that Americans are facing, but we in Poland [also] are facing it as black people. Because that’s what we’re up against. This [racism] is a disease.”

The word is not just a symbolic focal point of anti-black racism, he says, but an unwanted term that black Poles find offensive. “I don’t want to go out and have people call me ‘Murzyn’,” continues Nwolisa. “This is very, very offensive, I tell you.”

The Polish dictionary only states that the word refers to someone with black skin and, according to leading Polish linguists Jerzy Bralczyk and Jan Miodek, it does not have the same negative meaning as the N word in English. The PWN website states that the word refers to someone with a dark complexion, but it can also be used to describe someone who works hard and is exploited.

However, the lived experiences of black Poles show how the word is used in practice. A respondent in a 2016 survey of a dozen African international students in Poland described how: “’Murzyn’ doesn’t wash…he likes to play in the trees,…he doesn’t go to school. Those are the three stereotypes they have when they see a black person. [sic]”

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More recently, criticism increased over a YouTube video of five African-Polish women sharing their experiences of anti-black discrimination. The video has been viewed more than 51,000 times and spread on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram under the hashtag #DontCallMeMurzyn. “I hate that word and try not to use it because it has such a negative and harsh tone to me,” says Marta Udoh, one of the women in the video. “Every time I hear that word, I feel like someone is scratching my heart.”

The five black women — Udoh, Sara Alexandre, Noemi Ndoloka Mbezi, Aleksandra Dengo, and Ogi Ugonoh — who made the discussion possible recently launched a petition on community campaign website AVAAZ to denounce the negative impact and connotations in the sense of the word on in the Dictionary of the Polish language published by PWN (Polons Scientific Publishers), the main dictionary publisher in Poland.

In June, Katarzyna Kłosińska, a professor of linguistics at the University of Warsaw, published an article on the PWN website stating that the word is often mistranslated into English as “black” — and took some of the negative connotations of that word about – while a version closest to the definition would be merely factual, i.e. “black”. But if someone asks not to use it, she added, people should listen.

It is not clear how many black people live in Poland, one of the most ethnically homogeneous countries in the world. The 2011 census was the first to ask for nationality or ethnicity, but while it described Slavic ethnic minorities, there was no option to choose black – only an alternative to tick “other”. According to informal assessments, the number runs into the thousands, helping to explain why blacks are still considered an uncommon sight there. Ndoloka Mbezi, who identifies as mestizo or black depending on the context, says there is little awareness that even complementary forms of otherness are uncomfortable and unacceptable.

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“I remember people stopping in the street… my family, saying things to my mother like, ‘Oooh, what a beautiful child! Look at her curly hair, her complexion! ‘” says Ndoloka Mbezi, who is now in England lives. Ugonoh, whose ancestry is Nigerian, says people in Gdynia, a Polish city on the Baltic Sea, took unsolicited photos of her and her sister.

But racism in Poland can also be more violent and mixed with scorn and hostility. Nwolisa says that in his nearly 20 years in Poland, he has experienced everything from being made a monkey while visiting the zoo with his children to actual physical violence. “We faced many incidents of racism and [we never] went to the police station,” explains his wife Lidia Nwolisa, who is ethnically Polish. “Why?… Because instead of protecting us, the police will be racist.” A 2011 study of African and Asian immigrants in Poland by Marek Nowak and Michał Nowosielski found that “a large proportion of racist crimes committed in Poland go uncharged.”

Bianka Nwolisa and her family are now channeling their trauma into activism, participating in local protests and conducting educational workshops through her foundation.

Nwolisa says her four children, aged between nine and 17, have also experienced racism at school. Polish perceptions of black people were informed by children’s literature awash with American minstrels and racist caricatures, write Tracy C. Davis and Stefka Mihaylova in a chapter of the book

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, a treatise on how Harriet Beecher Stowe’s well-meaning novel was interpreted as it traveled the world.

In Poland, translations of the novel, many of which differ substantially from the original text, were aimed at children and served as nostalgic anti-capitalist propaganda within the national curriculum during the communist era. These productions could only have helped perpetuate existing racist stereotypes, such as the black characters in Henryk Sienkiewicz’s novel.

In the novel, the young Polish man saves Staś Kali, a black boy who speaks “spoken” English, from a horde of violent Muslims. “Dark Continent” tropics abound. Outside the world of the book, Kali was immortalized in the Polish language in the saying “morality of Kali”, meaning “double standard”:

“If someone steals Kali’s cow, it is an evil deed. If Kali takes someone’s cow, it’s a good deed.”

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, (little Murzyn Bambo) was heavily criticized for infantilizing and turning black people into black people, according to Margaret Amaka Ohia-Nowak, a researcher at the University of Wrocław. However, it is still taught in some schools.

The Nwolisa family is now channeling their trauma into activism, participating in local protests and conducting educational workshops through their foundation. Acclaimed photographer Rafał Milach took a picture of his daughter Bianka protesting with a sign reading “Stop calling me Murzyn”, which was picked up by major Polish newspapers such as Gazeta Wyborcza.

The young women who participated in the original #DontCallMeMurzyn video submitted two more threads, hoping the campaign will gain momentum. Poland’s recent re-election of a right-wing government that opposes gay rights and ostensibly unconcerned about racism does not bode well for black people, they say, but the fight is too important to brush aside. “Yes, elections have an impact on us,” says Ugonoh. And though I’m scared, I refuse to give up. And I refuse to remain silent when I see injustice.”

They hope that Poland, which has suffered almost a century of occupation and deprivation, still understands the need for solidarity. “Poland has a lot of potential,” says Ugonoh. “It is a country that has been through so much pain. So if any country could empathize, empathize, it would have to be Poland. And I really wish we could heal together. Mother’s Day is celebrated in Poland on May 26 and is called Dzień Matki. However, it is not a public holiday, but if you are in Poland at that time, you will not miss a tip about it, as it is marked with a lot of knowledge, as it is a special day in Polish culture.

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Certain brands’ marketing is aimed at reminding you to buy a gift for your mother, no matter how old you are. The adult children visit their parents and some even have a dinner party. Children in school learn about the importance of mothers in their lives and are encouraged to make DIY cards and gifts, especially in art classes, or to write poems and gift cards. Some schools even organize celebrations

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