Maybe she shouldn’t wear the headscarf and giant hoop earrings.
They were most likely Romanichal. From my own limited experience and what I’ve seen on the cable TV, they could be generalized as classic white trash, but with a cultural identity.
FrankJBN, please use the quote button. Your posts are difficult to interpret, we don’t where the quote comes from, and sometimes you forget the quotation marks and we can’t tell whether the words are yours or someone elses.
In this case the original quote comes from another thread, but if you quote the post it was displayed in you can see the quoted text and copy it from that.
The odd thing is that I do remember seeing a gypsy encampment - motor caravans, very distinctive appearance - sometime in the 1990s, in Central California. It startled me, like finding a Dutch family wandering around in wing hats and wooden shoes, but it was unquestionably authentic and I was not mistaking Latinos.
We did see quite a number of Roma in, well, Rome, around the entrance to Vatican City. Many were doing the sidewalk cripple and starving-baby routines.
Have you ever been on a university campus? Ethnic diversity is something most institutions of higher learning take pride in. As for harboring a belief that the local university librarian would be hired without qualifications, plenty of people (no, let me more specific white males are the majority of this group) are willing to believe that minority members are not qualified to do the jobs they are hired for.
Now to grude’s general questions. Yes, there is anti-Roma prejudice in the United States. It is not remotely as bad as occurs in parts of Europe.
I don’t think I ever saw a motorized gypsy caravan such as this in the US myself. But I do recall cautionary tales about them back in Texas in the 1960s and 1970s. I also remember a series of news reports on them at about the same time, on the national news.
ZPG Zealot, do you really think the typical American white male who encounters you at the reference desk sees you as Roma? You are so distinctly Roma looking that the typical American white male wouldn’t simply process your appearance as “Swarthy White Person, maybe Italian maybe Greek maybe Albanian, Turkish, who knows?”
Again, I really think Americans only process “Gypsy” specifically within the context of certain (valid or unfounded stereotyped) cultural trappings such as bandanas and hoop earrings, the caravan encampment setting described by NitroPress, fortune tellers.
Behind the reference desk with none of the cultural indicators people really still look at you and think “Roma” or “Gypsy” rather than just “Generic Swarthy White Person”?
I remember when, i think i was in high school, which would have been the 90s, a friend told me not to use “gypped” because it was an ethnic slur. Until then, I didn’t know gypsies were a non-mythological ethnicity.
If ZPG is a bit on the brown side, I can imagine some people prejudicially assume her to be uneducated. But I find it more likely that she’s assumed to be Latino or most likely, middle eastern, than Roma. Most Americans have never even heard of Roma.
The first piece of ignorance we need to fight is the catchall use of the term “gypsy” instead of “grifter,” “con artist,” etc. I seriously doubt that the Roma of Central Europe and the Irish Travellers consider themselves to be in the same clan, triber or family.
As far as anti-Roma sentiment goes, my family of Hungarian immigrants had a pretty strong case of it, but my general impression is that Roma weren’t loved or hated any more than Ukranians, Poles, Slovaks, etc.
Every ethnicity has their idiot cousins who they wish could be locked in a basement. I tell people it’s a realistic to Roma/Traveler life as the Wild and Wonderful Whytes of West Virginia and Here Comes Honey Boo Boo are to Southern white people.
The typical American white males usually perceives that I am different and wants (if not demands) to know why. Furthermore it is no more acceptable to ask me to hide my ethnicity than it would be for a Jew, Hispanic, or light-skinned black.
Do you live in an area where there is a lot of racial prejudice and/or very few people who aren’t white? Granted, as a white person I am not on the receiving end of too many comments about my race. And I am aware that there are idiots out there who make stupid comments and racial assumptions. That said I find it hard to believe that “typical” white men go around demanding to know the race or ethnicity of various people they encounter.
My great-grandmother, first generation American with eastern European parents would not allow her daughter to pierce her ears because “only gypsies pierce their ears!” Also, generations of my family have been told that if we don’t behave we’ll be sold to the gypsies.
Great-grandma also had less than glowing things to say about Catholics and Democrats. I can’t speak to strong anti-Gypsy sentiment in the US but it existed in her house.
Most of the time I shy away from nitpicking but can’t seem to stop myself from pointing out that it was Eva on green Acres, not Zsa Zsa.
Gypsy, yes. Typical? Wasn’t here ancestor supposed to be a gypsy princess or something?
I tend to think that the very fact that the US has all sorts of people in all sorts of colors tends to mute any specific anti-Gypsy prejudice.
I mean, here in Texas I’d imagine they’d get confused with Mexicans.
Not suggesting you hide anything, but you seemed to be implying that on sight people avoided interacting with you at the desk. If people strike up a conversation with you, pressure information about your ethnicity, then they avoid you because you’re Roma, well that’s a different scenario than what I was imagining.
I must say, though, it sounds like it sucks wherever you live.
If I’ve met someone a dozen times and only then does some element of conversation reveal that the person is Jewish, was that person hiding the fact all along? Of course not, it just never came up and I never had any preconceived notion whatsoever. Take any other ethnicity not obvious on sight and substitute for Jewish in the above example and nothing changes.
I am definitely aware that some people feel a need to know into which “box” they should put each person that they meet. And I have witnessed such people put forth prying questions when they meet someone they can’t box on sight. But if you’re getting this from many people in a university setting . . . then, yeah, you live somewhere that really sucks.
I keep wanting to contact TLC to let them know some folks consider the g-word to be as offensive as the n-word. But they must know that, right? And they continue to produce multiple shows with that word in the title.
Yeah, I was going to say that I don’t think that most Americans had an opinion positive or negative about them until those TV shows started giving everyone the idea they are in fact horrible people.
I had never heard of the Irish Traveler thing before, at all. This is a thing? I’m also surprised to learn that there are actually Gypsy caravans in the US within recent memory.
There is a little memory in the South, and the Roma & Travelers tend to blur & blend in folks minds.
More common in rural areas than cities.