Rhetorical question but I’ll venture an answer. My father’s parents were from Hungary, and he also lived there for awhile. The Romani were often nomads (because they were driven out of places they tried to settle,) they spoke their own language, and were associated with petty crimes. They were, to use an American insult, thought of as “trailer trash.” Even the term “gypsy” (as in “Egyptian”) was a slur against their darker complexions and alienness.
Moderator Note
The OP of this thread was split off from the GQ thread as it was off-topic for that thread.
This thread is for discussion of the term “gypsy”, which has often been used as a racial slur, and is now therefore considered offensive.
The original thread that this was spun off from is here:
Some discussion of the issue may be found on the wikipedia page here:
I have to admit, I wasn’t aware of it being any kind of culture until it was brought to my attention. IIRC, it was brought to my attention here. There was (is?) a poster that was of Romani descent and would regularly explain the problems with the word when it came up. In fact, as I recall, the first time I walked into a thread where this was going on, it was over another poster’s use of the word ‘gyp’. I don’t think, at the time, I was even aware that gyp (as a pejorative used about someone ripping you off) was short for gypsy and as I said before, I wasn’t aware that gypsy was a culture.
That was quite a while back, but after a few posts like that, I don’t think I’ve used the word since, at least not in that sense. This was also right around the time that gyp or gypsy was falling out of favor as more people were learning this. So I certainly wasn’t alone and this poster wasn’t just getting offending over nothing.
I’ll have to look back and see who that was.
Quick ETA, the first thread I found, while looking for that poster, was from 2012 when it was being discussed. Someone in that thread mentioned they’d started hearing about it at least 10 years earlier.
This is not an uncommon dog name. I do wonder whether their owners know that it is actually a racial slur.
I would guess that would be ZPG_Zealot, no longer a poster on this board.
I was wondering if it was her, I just didn’t want to put that name out there if I was wrong. In the first thread I found she did mention that it was derogatory, but no family connection.
Human as well.
I’m Romani - about a quarter - quite possibly half. But completely assimilated - my great grandparents decided to pass when they came to the U.S. It was hard enough to arrive here as Eastern Europeans.
And I have faced discrimination when people discover it - notably an Irish friend of mine just dropped me - she told other friends that I wasn’t to be trusted. Romani are associated with Irish Travelers (though they are two distinct groups of people) and both are associated with crime in much of Europe.
There is still a lot of anti-Romani sentiment in Eastern Europe, although my understanding is that it is getting better with more education and integration.
Interestingly, although the Romani were treated nearly as bad as the Jews during the Holocaust, it took until the 1970s for Germany to recognize that it was a formal systemic genocide against the Romani.
Just saying, but he n-word also used to be a “not uncommon” dog name. At least, common enough to make it into two pieces of popular media that I’m personally familiar with.
No, I think Joey P’s talking about Kal, who had a lot of interesting and informative posts about Romani culture and anti-Romani prejudice.
Kal was a much better source of information. Much truer to my understanding of the culture.
As Fate would have it, this topic was addressed in a Staff Report more than a few years back.
That’s possible. I looked through some of the posts and that name did pop up a few times (and these threads were going on way back in the early 2000’s. In one thread GFactor even said he was doing a column about it (for here) and listed off his bibliography for people to pick through about the subject.
Ninja’d (kinda) (here’s the post I was referring to).
Is this one of those situations where the term was offensive to the Romani people the whole time, but it just took a while before outsiders learned about it and/or started to care?
Germany enacted a “Law for the Fight Against Gypsies, Vagrants and the Workshy” in 1926 (pre-Hitler.) That gives you an idea of where they stood.
Granted, the term doesn’t have the same emotional impact in the U.S. as it does in Europe, if only because the actual Roma population is so small here. Popular culture here treats the term as more of a collection of stereotypical traits than an actual group of people.
My own feeling is that it belongs in the same category as “Oriental” or “Colored” - antiquated and imposed on the group by outsiders.
In early Ceausescu Romania (1970) Romani were pretty much given a pass from laws that strictly prohibited private enterprise. On Sundays, Romani would take the train into town, laden with produce from their farms, and set up a black market. Tho police would wait until late in the day before moving in with a show of force, and chase the laughing Romanis back to the depot.
And yet German culture of the same time period had a very romantic view of Native Americans (e.g. Karl May’s books).
I guess it’s easier to romanticize an ethnic group that you don’t see on a daily basis.
Though the flip side of that overlooking of Romani during a horrifying regime is that Romania also enslaved the Romani population until 1856. (Although by 1856 it was a minority of the Romani population.
When I read this post, I thought you might have been referring to Kal, who gave his insights as a Romani in this 2002 thread I started (I was curious about the Irish Travelers, which led to a discussion of the Romani). He has not posted in a while, but was seen on the board in August of last year.
I’ve always encountered Romani as figures of at least suspicion if not outright criminal, from the Famous Five books onwards. At least, adult Romani, they often got assistance from good Romani children.
This often sat alongside romanticizing their lifestyle - the Five were always going off in caravans. Look also at The Wind in The Willows, where travelling in a Romani-style caravan is painted as an awesome adventure, yet a Romani horse-dealer is characterized in less positive terms.
My mid-century origin American perspective is that the casual view of the Romani / (always called gypsies until like the 1990s) was that they were an exotic / mysterious people of Europe who lived in colorful wagons and were associated with things like fortune tellers, casting of curses, and other things supernatural. Trying to think back to my knowledge of decades ago, I think at one point I frankly just understood gypsies and their caravans to be an old “cultural practice” that mostly had died out in modern times, I don’t think I even really understood there were actually large gypsy populations, that they were a distinct ethnic group etc until years later. I never knew of a serious negative connotation of them until I spent time stationed in Europe in the 1980s when I found out that many locals loathed / hated them.
I definitely have zero awareness of Americans disliking or hating gypsies, and like the post referenced by the OP I mostly remember them being portrayed as “mysterious” and “exotic” people in media of my youth. By the 90s I definitely remember that at least some level of awareness was building that “hey this is actually a historically persecuted ethnic group of nomadic peoples who have lived mostly in Europe for hundreds of years.” Something that has only grown over time.