Slavic Identity and the Discourse on Race

As you probably heard this a few times in your lifetime, race, as we know it, is inevitably a social phenomenon that occurred as colonial propaganda for white people to exploit non-white people’s labour. Today, there seems to be a slow positive shift towards understanding the systemic racial injustice that non-white people face. In the midst of this big, mostly online, discussion, I came to realise that there is an ongoing debate about whether Slavic people are truly white. Some find the answer to this question rather simple, while others, believe it or not, find this a very complex topic to debate. Let me start off by saying I am a Slavic woman, although I would never define myself as such. Primarily due to the fact that I would hardly want to identify myself based on the country, region, or continent I live in, but also due to the fact that Slavicness was never something that occurred to me back home in Croatia. Growing up, the country was too busy trying to identify itself as ‘not-Balkan’ that we had no time on our hands to even think about our Slavic identity. After all, we so hardly tried to escape our past as part of the socialist state of Yugoslavia (in translation ‘the land of southern Slavs) that ‘Slavicness’ was just not on the repertoire for a big chunk of my educational life. <a href="https://aninjusticemag.com/slavic-identity-and-the-discourse-on-race-6ffc148ab8b1?source=tag_recommended_feed---------166-85----------discrimination----------6234e27b_fd10_472c_8da0_e8e1fe86eb87-------">Website</a>