I can recall from memory hearing racists using various slurs about various races/ethnic groups from Jews to asians in the USA, but I can’t recall every hearing gypsy used in such a sense. I don’t doubt it did but it doesn’t strike me as widespread or common, I think the average person to this day would not have an instantly bad reaction to the word gypsy, they probably just get an image of a tarot card reader or Madam Zora or something from an old film/TV show.
Come to think of it I can’t recall a negative film portrayal of Gypsy/Roma, insensitive or caricatured maybe.
I could swear I remember Irish Travelers coming to the attention of USA media almost a decade ago because they were tangentially involved in a big story, and remember people going huh wait gypsies are like real?! Neat!:rolleyes: I can remember more than one person having that reaction which doesn’t really rise to the level of hate to me.
Were there pockets of virulent anti-Gypsy/Roma sentiment in parts of the USA or something? I’m wondering what the recent attempts at political correctness are about.
I’m not going to tell him he’s wrong about his own experiences, but the claim is pretty surprising to me.
An abbreviated Copy&Paste from what I said in the other Thread:
I would guess that 9 in 10 Americans don’t even know the word Roma outside the context of spaghetti and old Dean Martin songs. Of the 1 in 10 who do know who Roma are, I’d assume we’re dealing with a more educated and less ignorant segment of society.
Sure, Americans have some notion of “Gypsies” but I’d say that the typical American notion of Gypsies is about as connected to the Roma people as the typical American notion of Witches is connected to religious adherents of Wicca. For most Americans, “Gypsy” is nothing more than a Halloween costume.
Any actual familiarity with “Gypsies” would be tied to notions of that traveling lifestyle in rickety wagons, telling fortunes and dancing performances at town fairs. Once you’re living a lifestyle of working a steady job at a university with a stable permanent resident, I can’t imagine many Americans even recognizing you as a “Gypsy”- and since they have no idea what “Roma” is, I can’t imagine even the bigots knowing which properly labeled bigot box to put you in.
ZPG Zealot constructs a lot of chips to delicately balance on her shoulders. IIRC she also likes to equate a man offering to shake hands with her as sexual assault.
I had to Google that to find out if it was real or if you were making it up.
Yes, you’re right. That can’t be helping things much.
I’m not really familiar with ZPG Zealot’s posting history (I even incorrectly referred to her as “he”). If she participates in this Thread, I’ll have an opportunity to get to know her better.
While I’d stop short of calling it a ‘big story’, in September 2002, a security video showed Irish Traveler Madelyne Toogood beating her child in a Wal-Mart parking lot. There was a frenzied manhunt before she turned herself in and gave a press conference. Further investigation revealed that her husband Johnny Toogood had a record of crooked dealings, overcharging for shoddy home improvements and skipping town.
This story of Americans with slight brogue accents who lived on the semi-lam was the first time a lot of people had heard of Irish Travelers and their insular society.
The Travelers claim that they’ve been unfairly maligned. This wiki page on Madelyne Toogood was apparently removed:
The “big story” that comes to mind is the Disneyworld scam. A Gypsie/Traveller woman went to Disney world and faked a rape and beating in one of their hotels. She then sued for millions and was basically about to get away with it but of course she and her accomplices argued over the loot and someone ratted her out.
I grew up near a town that has a population of them in New England. Luckily for us they don’t commit their crimes close to home, generally speaking, and are secretive. In the spring they head south to run their scams on the snowbirds. When they are short of money they are the people you see holding signs out in front of businesses advertising a sale or wearing a costume.
The kids that I went to high school with all carried knives. They kept to themselves, but nobody wanted to mess with them.
My understanding is that in this area at least there are two families. Any fortune teller, palm reader or local roofing contractor-scammers are affiliated with one of the two of them. They have established territories sort of like the mafia, but are also a real family that are all related to each other. They don’t always get along.
Gypsies have been portrayed as unjustly outcase in popular drama over the years. There was an episode of the Big Valley where Nick had to accompany a couple of Gypsy women and was mistaken for a Gypsy himself. Instant lesson in tolerance. This same them was repeated in other shows. The movie King of the Gypsies covered criminal activity.
I grew up around an area with a large population of what we called “Gypsies” in Georgia/South Carolina, but I don’t know if they were Roma or Irish Travelers or something else. I think they got a pretty bad rap - everyone thought they were violent thieves and scam artists, and a lot of my friends in HS that had food service jobs bitched about them often for running out on checks. So I think there’s a pretty engrained sense of non-acceptance among the general population. They may not be burned at the stake or anything, but they definitely get discriminated against just for being part of that group.
My impression, from a variety of sources and influences, is that there never has been a native or ingrained anti-gypsy sentiment in the US, but that some immigrant groups brought pockets of it with them. The cultural tropes all seem to have been imported as stories and tales.
Speaking as an American who academically knows who the Roma are, were I a racist I wouldn’t be able to distinguish them in order to discriminate against them- unless I actually saw one being born in the wagon of a traveling show.
“The Gypsies were skilled Blacksmiths and there’s a legend that goes along with that part of their history. The story is that a Gypsy made the four nails for the Cross of Jesus. But the Gypsy Blacksmith stole one of the nails. The story continues that God then granted this Gypsy’s descendants the right to steal when they needed too. Paintings of the Crucifixion began showing three nails instead of four at about the same time period Gypsies arrived in Europe.”
And Zsa Zsa’s character on Green Acres was portrayed as from a very stereotypical gypsy family.
I think what everyone seems to be forgetting is that ZPG Zealot works at a University Library. The general US experience with Roma/Gypsies have less precedence when you consider that he could easily be talking about foreign students bringing their cultural baggage with them.
In my town, the local PD keeps a watch on the local members of this community-they seem to indulge in scams of all kinds. Until 2005, there actually was a fortune-telling operation in town-they also did a bit of business removing curses from money. They also do a bit of auto insurance/accident fraud.
My family story happened in the 1940’s, and I’ll use the term “Gypsies,” because that’s how the story was told.
My mom was a teenager in Freeport Illinois and in listened to her small radio on the front porch. One night she forgot to bring it in and it was gone in the morning.
A caravan of Gypsies had passed through in horse-drawn wagons, and were camped in a pasture on the edge of town. The sheriff visited the camp and retrieved the radio.
Probably racial profiling, but Freeport also had a clear color line. Even earlier, in the Gilded Age, the White elites had lived in the genteel Taylor Park neighborhood; which still had the ruins of their old harness-racing track when I was growing up. Similar to The Magnificent Ambersons, when the automobile created the suburbs, the elite whites moved, but their Black servants had nowhere else to go.
My point being that the cops weren’t going to turn an entire neighborhood upside down for a girl’s radio. But since there was a Gypsy camp temporarily set up, there a search/threat was thought worthwhile.
ETA: obligatory “and everyone wore an onion on his belt, because that was the style in those days”
This. A woman and her child came into the store where I work asking to use the restroom. We don’t have a public one, so I told them where the nearest Starbucks was. After they left my co-worker started going on about how they were gypsies, they wanted to fake an accident in our bathroom so they could sue, etc. I was baffled because to me they looked Latin American. He said he could just “tell.” He’s an American from Iowa- I have no idea if there’s a Roma population there or not, he didn’t elaborate and I didn’t ask.
Other than that I’ve never heard anyone mention Roma people aside from a friend telling me about that show, nor have I ever met any Roma individual, although I don’t ask people their ethnicity nor would I recognize anyone as being Roma if they didn’t tell me.
“I am a reference librarian at a university. I’ve had faculty and students not want to work with me because they believe I can’t possibly be competent at what I do because their preconceived notation based on my ethnicity is that I am uneducated, probably borderline illiterate and a criminal.”
I just absolutely don’t believe this. Any one here know offhand the ethnicity of the local reference librarian? Or possibly harbor a belief that the local university librarian would be hired without qualifications?