In 2000, in Bloomington, Indiana, I was asking Jewish people what they thought of Poles and Poland. I was researching what would become my prize-winning book, „Bieganski, the Brute Polak Stereotype”. My informants were nice people living in a self-consciously progressive university town. They insisted that they would never tell a dumb Polak joke. Then I would ask them a hypothetical question. „You need brain surgery. You have a choice between two doctors whose qualifications, on paper, are all but identical. One is named Dr. Smith. One is named Dr. Kowalski. Which doctor do you choose?”
Their jaws would drop. They suddenly had to confront their own prejudices, prejudices that they did not know they had.

Nazism was the product of highly educated, modern people. (…) This simple fact – that Nazism was a product of shiny and clean university classrooms and books written, edited, and published by the best-educated people – is just about impossible to confront for those who embrace the Brute Polak stereotype.

Danusha V. Goska „POLAND’S NEW LAW CRIMINALIZING SPEECH ABOUT THE HOLOCAUST”

5 Odpowiedzi do “„What is crucial to understand about the controversy””

  1. To śmieszne bo Kowalski mógłby być 3 lub 4 pokoleniem imigrantów ergo Amerykaninem.
    (i dlaczego ci ludzie byli „informantami”?)

      1. …oraz gógla:

        Folklorist Alan Dundes concurs. „Lower-class whites are not militant and do not constitute a threat to middle-class white America … with the Polack [joke] cycle, it is the lower class, not Negroes, which provides the outlet for aggression and means of feeling superior” (Dundes „Study” 202).

        Persons too sophisticated ever to tell a Polak joke may still sup on the Bieganski stereotype. Hollywood filmmakers, who stake millions of dollars on their every aesthetic choice, exploit Bieganski.

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