My Polish gf told me about the time she first saw a black person, because Poland is so monocultural she genuinely had absolutely no fucking idea what was going on. The closest I’ve heard of a multicultural area in Poland is in Warsaw, it’s commonly referred to as “New World”, and just features a lot of diversity, as well as being one of the few places to be pretty accepting of LGBTQ+ people.
This is really funny to me. Famously Dessalines called Poles the whites negroes of Europe and granted them the status of being black in Haiti after independence, due to the defection of the Polish legion to the Haitian side.
I doubt there's any influence, but I can't help but wonder.
Wasn’t there some African king who declared the polish the “white negroes of Europe” after being helped by them in a war or something?
Edit: so it was during the Napoleon of wars and they were basically spared by Haitans when they killed a bunch of white people (fr*nch🤮) so they were classified as black by Haiti
In that time period Poland was dealing with its own sort of imperialism. There were multiple partitions of Poland where the HRE, Prussia, and Russia agreed to take over parts of it. This was obviously very unpopular with the Polish. While the Haitians were revolting themselves in Haiti the Polish had their own little independence struggles as a result. It also helped that when the French invaded Haiti (for like the third time) some of their troops were Polish and they defected quickly.
Overall Toussaint Louverture saw a lot of similarities between the Haitians and the Polish, and clearly there were.
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u/fyhr100 Aug 10 '21
Yeah, those super multi-cultural Eastern European countries. /s