This should be no surprise. I know the majority of the forum users are from the US or the english speaking world, so for them this could be quite difficult to understand and i want to clarify that it's no excuse or justification for this mishandling, but...
Poland, and the bulk of the countries in eastern and southern europe, all those countries that never had a colonial empire, are basically ethnostates, the people living there never had to deal with a person from an ethnic minority or from another country/continent even once in their lifetime.
It's very easy to misrepresent ethnic minorities when the only contact you had with them is badly localized 80's US movies and television.
Again,THIS IS NO EXCUSE, since we Live in 2020 and the management of CDPR should at least be aware of certain issues and done MORE, but i can see where all of this come from.
I'll add to this, from my own experience as someone who moved to North America at a relatively young age from a former Soviet republic.
Back home, most people live within 2 hours drive from a border with people who feel they should own where you live. You grow up with that. You grow up having ideas about people who speak a different language. Asking "where you're from" to a stranger is basically essential, to get an idea of what group they belong to, and what they're likely to think of you, and people like you. When I did sensitivity training in Canada, I found out that's considered a "micro-agression", because it presumes that the target (a minority, usually) wasn't born in the country. This is not something that's easy for first-gen immigrants to get their heads around, and I've been living in North America for almost 20 years
Everyone back home is "white". And no one thinks of themselves as "white". Because everyone defines themselves by the language they speak, or the church they follow, or the country they're part of.
People in North America, who inhabit continent-spanning countries inhabited by all kinds of people have no idea what that's like. It's a whole different way of thinking, one that's full of grudges that go back centuries. Stereotyping and profiling is a way of life, profiling other "whites". You're gonna have a very hard time explaining to the people whose great grandparents were serfs to some German or Russian-peaking noble why they should be treating other people with more respect, because of slavery that happened across the ocean.
Once again, I'm not trying to justify anything CDPRED is doing, because by becoming a global brand, they SHOULD be held to a higher standard- and Western games media SHOULD be full of constructive criticism, because critical feedback is the only thing likely to clue CEOs into the need to change; But there's a lot of misconceptions being voiced here, so I just wanted to inject some perspective about what Central and Eastern Europe is actually like. And it's not gonna be receptive to change, if the criticism is addressed as them missing something obvious; because the reality is, for people who aren't immersed in the kind of North American diversity, it's NOT going to be obvious.
