Racism in public discourse in Poland. A preliminary analysis

Abstract

During the last decade, representations of black people[1] in the Polish media have increased significantly. In this paper, I describe and analyze a set of linguistic mechanisms for portraying black people in the Polish media. My central case for analysis involves two media stories that took place in Poland between 2007-2010 involving two men, one black and one white, both of whom were diagnosed as HIV-positive. Simon transmitted the disease to a series of his female partners and reporting on the case consistently highlighted issues to do with his immigration status, culture, crime, violence and sexual abuse. This set of issues was not raised in media coverage of Wieslaw, a white man who was also HIV-positive. The data for the analysis are drawn from a corpus of newspaper articles of the Polish newspapers: Gazeta Wyborcza and Rzeczpospolita. Based on the qualitative methods of discourse analysis, I will attempt to elicit some discursive ways of representing the black character, a member of the out-group, in comparison to the white in-group perpetrator.[1] In this paper the term “black people” will refer to “Africans” or people of African origin (Poles of African origin or mixed heritage).

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