Like many Polish people of African descent, Sara Alexandre still remembers when she first realized she was seen as different. \u201cFor me it was kindergarten,\u201d says Alexandre, whose father is Angolan, describing an incident when she was barred from playing dollhouse. \u201cI was five and [another girl] didn\u2019t let me in, saying that she cannot allow a little\u00a0Murzyn<\/em>\u00a0in it. That was the first time I knew I was different.\u201d<\/p>\n A campaign against the word \u201cMurzyn\u201d \u2014 a Polish racial epithet used widely to describe and address Black people \u2014 is at the center of an emerging movement in Poland to reckon with 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 gone global. The movement that grew in the wake of the killing by U.S. police of George Floyd now extends beyond countries with sizable African diasporas from slavery and colonialism to places like Poland, where 97% of citizens are white.<\/p>\n \u201cThe hashtag was mainly thank you to George Floyd,\u201d says Nigerian-born Arinze Nwolisa, who lives in Warsaw and co-founded the anti-discrimination Porta Foundation in 2014 with his wife Lidia. \u201cNow people say, \u2018why are you protesting something that happened in America?\u2019 But the reality is that we still need to stop something that Americans are facing but we in Poland are [also] facing as Black people. Because that is what we are facing. It [racism] is a sickness.\u201d<\/p>\n The word is not just a symbolic focal point of anti-Black racism, he says, but an unwanted term that Black Poles find insulting. \u201cI don\u2019t want to go out there and have people call me \u2018Murzyn,\u2019\u201d Nwolisa continues. \u201cThis is very, very offensive, I\u2019m telling you.\u201d<\/p>\n Dont call me Murzyn:\u00a0 Black Women in Poland are powering the Campaign Against a Racial Slur!!! Like many Polish people of African descent, Sara Alexandre still remembers when she first realized she was seen as different. \u201cFor me it was kindergarten,\u201d says Alexandre, whose father is Angolan, describing an incident when she was barred from Read More…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6446,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[133,39,5,920,1],"tags":[1044,1045],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6440"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6440"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6440\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6443,"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6440\/revisions\/6443"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6446"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6440"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6440"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6440"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}