Racism in Poland

Racism in Poland in the 20th and 21st centuries has been a subject of extensive study. Ethnic minorities made up a greater proportion of the country's population from the founding of the Polish state through the Second Polish Republic than in the 21st century, when government statistics show 94% or more of the population self-reporting as ethnically Polish.

Beginning in the 16th century, many Jews lived in Poland, so much so that it was referred to as the center of the Jewish world. Occasional pogroms, such as in Kraków in 1494 and Warsaw in 1527, punctuated a period of material prosperity and relative security for Polish Jews. 30,000 Jews were killed in the Cossack Chmielnicki Uprising in Ukraine. After the second partition of Poland, Frederick the Great, considering the Prussian-occupied territory a new colony and its people to be like the Iroquois of North America, began a Prussian colonization campaign aimed at replacing Polish language and culture with German.

During World War II, Poland was occupied by Germany and subsequently was the main scene of the Jewish Holocaust, the Porajmos (Romani genocide), and Nazi atrocities against the Polish nation. These genocides varied in how, when, and where they were applied; Jews and Romani were targeted for immediate extermination and suffered the greatest casualties, while the Poles were targeted for destruction and enslavement within 15–20 years. Robert Gellately has called the Nazi racial policy of cultural eradication and mass extermination of people based on ethnicity a serial genocide, since in its broader formulation it targeted multiple ethnic groups whom the Nazis deemed "sub-human", including Ukrainians, Belarusians, Poles, and Jews.^{: 253, 256}