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Paper short abstract

This paper analyzes Polish aid programs as tools for Romani racialization and "institutional whiteness." Ethnographic data shows how state assistance reinforces ethnic divides while ignoring class and religious shifts, cementing the Roma as the "Other" within a super-homogeneous nation-state.

Paper long abstract

This paper investigates how state-led assistance programs in Poland, ostensibly designed to support marginalized minorities, function as mechanisms of racialization and the reproduction of "Institutional Whiteness." Drawing on long-term ethnographic research among Roma communities in Wrocław and Bystrzyca Kłodzka, I analyze how aid distributed along "ethnic lines" reinforces the image of the Roma as a permanent "Other" within a super-homogeneous society, where 96% of the population declares an exclusive Polish identity.

I argue that Polish institutional practices operate within a "white habitus" that conflates Polishness with Catholicism and specific class performances. When the state intervenes through ethnic-targeted programs, it often essentializes the community, fixing it in a rigid, racialized category while ignoring internal class dynamics and the transformative role of religious shifts, such as the Roma conversion to Pentecostalism. This "racializing gaze" of the state became particularly visible during the 2022 refugee crisis, where the selective mobilization of solidarity further exposed the boundaries of institutional whiteness and the "Pole-Catholic" myth.

By examining the friction between state-sponsored aid, class exclusion, and changing religious identities, this paper contributes to the understanding of how European state settings produce "difference." I suggest that as long as assistance is predicated on essentialist ethnic categories, it will continue to alienate those it claims to help, maintaining whiteness as the invisible, normative center of the Polish nation-state. This study calls for a re-evaluation of how "inclusion" policies might inadvertently deepen racialized divisions.