Amazon has produced a docudrama on the First Lady, Melania. You might love it or hate it (or, like me, haven’t seen it) but promotion of an incumbent First Lady is not uncommon. If you doubt it, ask how many times Vogue featured Jill Biden on its front cover — and then ask if the magazine would have featured another septuagenarian who was not the First Lady. There’s a reason American Eagle put Sydney Sweeney and not Jill Biden into a pair of its pants — and it wasn’t eugenics.

One might like or dislike America’s serial idolization of a President’s wife, but let’s be fair about things: on the cultural and educational scales, Melania Trump has nothing to apologize for vis-à-vis her peers. I would even suggest that if she was a liberal, the “mainstream media” would be tripping over itself, fawning at the successes of an “immigrant” who brought “cultural diversity” to the White House. But a conservative woman: no way!

I want to suggest, however, that there’s something else operating here: the Slavic slur.

In his generally unfunny daily political commentary, Jimmy Kimmel “teased” (the New York Times’ verb) the release of Melania in these terms: “Not since The Terminator has there been this much excitement for a movie about a European cyborg.” Maureen Dowd, who would (rightly) get her Irish up if somebody called her a “mick,” branded Melania the “Slovenian Sphinx” with “Barbie” feet (here).

Would anybody dare say anything analogous to that about Michelle Obama? And if they did, would they still be on television this morning — or brought back if fired?

But slur a Slav: no problem!

It’s been almost two months since the murder of Rob Reiner. Rob Reiner’s career really took off as the “dumb Polack” son-in-law of Archie Bunker on All in the Family. For almost a decade, America laughed at “dumb Polacks” and coined “Polish jokes.” Why didn’t we hear elite laments back then about the “coarsening of public discourse?” Now ask yourself: Would America have laughed for a decade at, say, “dumb Puerto Ricans” or coined Puerto Rican jokes? Would it have gotten away with it? Not that I’m giving Rob Reiner, Carroll O’Connor, or Norman Lear creative accolades. The “dumb Polack” image preceded them. Consider that Tennessee Williams’s brute animal in Streetcar Named Desire is named Stanley Kowalski. Not Floyd Smith. Not Chaim Dershowitz. Not Gustavo de Guzman.

Now, let’s invoke a comparison Mieczysław Biskupski raised in his study, Hollywood’s War with Poland, about the portrayal of Poles in American films during World War II. Take Casablanca. Refugees from practically every Nazi-occupied country of Europe found their way to Rick’s Café. Free French. A Bulgarian couple. The hero, Victor Laszlo, is a Czech resistance leader (even though the Czech resistance was but a shadow of Poland’s Underground State) with a Hungarian surname. They’re all there at Rick’s singing La Marseillaise — except for a single Pole. Even though Poland was the casus belli, the first state to stand up to Hitler, and the largest resistance, Poles — who otherwise have a proclivity to emigrate everywhere — apparently never heard of Morocco.

Of course, Poland couldn’t be treated civilly in Hollywood films framed to push FDR’s version of the War — because it would have raised questions about “Uncle Joe” and our wonderful “ally,” the Soviet Union. Might even have led to people asking about a nasty thing like Katyń Forest and the bullet holes in about 20,000 Allied officers’ skulls.

No, I think Melania could be the latest instantiation of what Danusha Goska once called “Biegański—the brute Polak stereotype” — the image of a Slav who is “strong, stupid, violent, fertile, anarchic, dirty, and especially hateful in a way that more evolved humans are not.” Poles have probably been cast in that leading role because the ten million of us Polish-Americans are the most visible of the Slavic ethnicities in the United States. Most Americans wouldn’t know where to find Slovenia on a map nor necessarily distinguish it from Slovakia (which is better than their sending Australia-bound letters to Austria).

There still remains the false etymology in vogue among some English speakers that “Slav” comes from “slave,” as if the entire Slavic world is congenitally disposed towards serfdom. Considering the Western European stereotype of the “Polish plumber,” the Slavic guy who comes to do the handiwork in your house for discount prices because he’s probably illegal, the image probably resonates with Americans used to imagining Poles as construction workers: good backs, no brains.

But don’t ask yourself if the guy who putting shingles on your roof might have been a professor, a doctor, or some other professional who now needs to earn a living for his family. Just like the “Polish tourists” of the 1980s who worked illegally in housing construction to bring money back to the old country and build houses they couldn’t afford to build on socialist funny money. We’re told to respect the illegal Latino looking for work in the Home Depot parking lot, but that “respect” doesn’t always seem to get translated universally. Especially when it comes to Slavs.

Which is why I think there’s a double standard with regard to Melania. As a film, judge it on its merits. But methinks not a few Jimmy Kimmels of the world (or those who derive their “critical thinking” from him) are not judging her by who she is but what (they project) she thinks and believes. And they feel morally justified in their denigrations because the accent is Slavic — attitudes that, if applied to other groups, would get them cancelled, not by the government but by their fellow travelers.