City's Polish Community Up in Arms Over Stereotypes in Article
An article published in the Haverford College alumni magazine that uses racist stereotypes to describe Greenpoint's Polish community is riling up Polish people across the city. The author defends the article as satirical.
A recent graduate, David Langlieb, penned a piece for the magazine's "Moved to Speak" column in the fall issue in which he describes Greenpoint as a community with several problems, including "the high density of Polish people infesting its rowhouses."
In the article, Mr. Langlieb describes Greenpoint's business district as "even uglier than the morons who work there."
"Why do I live in Greenpoint? Because if I didn't, it wouldn't get any better," he writes, figuring himself as a pioneering gentrifier who tolerates the present to ensure a "non-ethnic" future for the neighborhood.
Mr. Langlieb's article first raised eyebrows among Polish student groups Wednesday morning when a Cornell University student, Kasia Fertala, who is Polish, sent the article via e-mail to various Polish groups, many of whom failed to see the humor in Mr. Langlieb's comparison of Poles to vermin.
"It's obvious bigotry when you call people vermin," the chairman of the anti-bigotry committee of the Polish American Congress, Frank Milewski, said.
"Reading the article is like coming from a Jurassic park of Ku Klux Klan times and racial ethnic hatred," the consul general of Poland in New York, Krzysztof Kasprzyk, said. He described the article as "pure ethnic slander."
Mr. Langlieb, who graduated in 2005 and works as a project manager in the city's parks department, defended his piece, calling it "obvious satire."
"I have nothing but fondness for Polish people," Mr. Langlieb said yesterday. "It was a satirical send-up of a certain type of Haverford grad who comes into a strong community and does very little to contribute to what that community really is."
"If he defines it as satire, he has a very peculiar sense of humor," Mr. Kasprzyk responded. "Even if its satire, it's not William Safire."
The president of Haverford College, Thomas Tritton, agreed that Mr. Langlieb's weak prose undermined his attempt at social critique.
"The writing was insufficiently clever and the language so ineptly employed that, rather than a work of satire with an arguable point, the end result came through as mean spirited and close minded," Mr. Tritton wrote in an e-mail to a Polish professor at Columbia University, John Micgiel, who had expressed concern over the article.
A spokesman for Haverford College, John Van Ness, said the offense caused by Mr. Langlieb's column has underscored the magazine's need for an editorial advisory committee. He said the "Moved to Speak" column, a forum for alumni to air their views, undergoes very little editing.
"It's poorly written," Mr. Van Ness said. "Even if you want to strain to see it as satire, it's so awkwardly written that it's hard." The college has no plans to issue an official apology.
A spokesman for the Department of Parks and Recreation, Warner Johnston, distanced the agency from the views expressed in the article by its employee. "He's writing as a private citizen and not as a member of the agency," Mr. Johnston said.
