Ruining Dessert: On Chocolate Cake and White Supremacy in Poland

Abstract

This thesis seeks to establish how deeply anti-Black racism has become ingrained in Polish culture through the everyday example of murzynek, a chocolate cake that became popular with home cooks in twentieth century Poland. Its name in literal translation is the diminutive form of an offensive racial epithet used to refer to a Black individual. In order to show how this cake is just one manifestation of mundane efforts to distinguish Poland as a white nation, where whiteness signifies power in a Western colonized world order, this series of essays approaches this example from multiple points of entry. Each chapter is bookended with fictional vignettes, a story across time and space of a family much like the author’s family. Fiction grounds the main issues of racial superiority, working class struggles, and colonial desire in the real world by experimenting with anti-racist creative praxis. Because food is a tangible and comforting thread that connects us to our homes and heritages, inventing new stories through speculative fiction changes the narratives of race, empire, and power that circulate throughout Poland and its diaspora.