Gypsy / Romani discussion (spun off from GQ thread)

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.