There’s about 1,000,000 people of Romani descent here in the United States which isn’t a lot in a nation of more than 300,000,000 people. Just to put that in perspective, we have almost three times as many Russian and four times as many Swedish descendants. In addition to being a very small minority, when the Romani came to the United States they were typically counted as belonging to whatever larger group they were a part of. I.e. If the Romani came from Poland they were Poles if they were from Italy they were Italians.
I was a bit surprised to find the vehement hatred of the Romani by many Europeans. I’ve seen similar slurs against the Irish Travelers here in the United States. I think the first time I became aware of them was in the late 80s or early 90s on one of those news magazine shows (Dateline, 20/20, or something) and it revolved around asphalt and other construction scams.
Its hard to say, because it 1895, the U.S. made “gypsies” a class that wasn’t eligible for immigration. But a lot of Romani can assimilate - and many - like my great grandparents - did in order to immigrate. There are less than 1,000,000 cultural Romani in the United States, how many assimilated Romani like me - that’s impossible to tell since we aren’t a census category and many of our forefathers assimilated deeply enough that our racial status is lost (you have some Native American in you, type of lost. Or “surprise” your great great grandmother was enslaved, but when freed, chose to pass and married a white man.")
And yeah, in real life I wouldn’t disclose this to any European. One of the few times I did, I lost a friend. The bigotry and bias runs deep. But dark skin, dark eyes, the Italian last name explains a lot.
Same. Head scarves, flowing colorful clothes and lots of gold hoops. And, while I don’t remember directly equating them with thieves, it was a common enough joke that you would “sell the kids to the Gypsies” which doesn’t exactly cast them in a flattering light. But, as also mentioned, I think most people in my neck of the woods saw “Gypsies” as a mythological collection of stereotypes rather than as an actual ethnic group.
I once worked with an executive who had Gypsy as her legal first name, as opposed to a nickname/stage name.
I had a similar experience when I learned this, though not recently. To the extent I thought of “Gypsies” at all, it was very neutral. As an American born and raised in New England.
This is pretty much how I grew up. The first actual Romani person I met was another student in a college class I took. The topic of the class was “nomads”, and he was disappointed that it only covered pastoral nomads, and not urban nomads. He’s also the first person who told me (the class) that the term “gypsy” is offensive, so I’ve never really applied it to any actual human beings – just to the mythological fortune tellers.
The only person I have met whom I was aware was Romani was a female teen who was in juvenile detention where I work in Illinois. She spoke little English and was very mistrustful of everyone. I felt terribly sorry for her. I started reading articles about the Roma while she was detained. I had little knowledge prior to that regarding the difficulties they face in some countries. She had been in an orphanage in Sofia, Bulgaria, for several years. It was apparently common for Romani children to be taken from their families and placed in state orphanages to prevent them from growing up in the Roma culture. The orphanages were often poorly run and abusive. She was eventually adopted by a family in the US, but due to difficulty in bonding with the new parents, they placed her in residential treatment in the US midwest, over 1,000 miles from their home. She was even more of a fish out of water here. She got in fights, was charged with Battery, and ended up in juvenile detention. She needed an interpreter for her court hearings. Her situation was unusual enough that despite only being detained for about 3 weeks over 15 years ago, I still remember her name. Snooping on the internet reveals to me that she seems to still be living with or near her adoptive family, so things may have eventually worked out to some extent.
My one other “gypsy” anecdote relates to one of my great-grandfathers. For some reason, my mom’s family found it significant to pass along a story that my great-grandfather was known for buying and selling horses with “gypsies”. They seemed to think that was unusual or exotic, not bad or disreputable. I have no idea whether those “gypsies” would have been Romani, Irish Travelers, or some other group of wanderers who passed through Missouri periodically in the early 1900’s.
I learned the concept from Disney’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame. The way Esmerelda is treated was obviously bad, but she also used the term for herself at times, including in a song.
I assume the movie is on Disney+. Does anyone know if there is a disclaimer before the video, or perhaps that the word has been edited out?
My mom told me a story that happened when she was a kid. One of her younger sisters was on a swing that was set up on a small hill, so that when you swung forward there was a big drop to the ground. My aunt was very young, four or five, so she was only swinging a little bit. A bully came up behind her and gave her a big shove. The swing swung out, and my aunt fell off the swing. Fortunately, she fell into soft earth or a pile of leaves and was not physically injured. However, she didn’t grow at all for over a year. Pretty unusual for a kid that young.
So, my grandmother took my aunt “to the Gypsies.” She never said anything about what happened, but almost immediately my aunt began to grow again…although she was always the shortest of the five girls.
It’s such a weird little story that I wonder if it really happened. It was in a very small town in southern Ohio. My grandparents were Hungarian immigrants.
A number of well-known artists are supposed to be of Roma descent: Chaplin, Robert Plant, Bob Hoskins, Adam Ant, Joe Zawinul, Denny Laine…
I’ve also read that many Roma women were forcibly sterilized under Sweden’s eugenics program, which was implemented in 1934 and wasn’t formally abolished until 197-fucking-6. 
My experience is that here in the US the term gypsy and the Roma people have barely a passing relationship. In fact I wager only 1 in 50 average people know that the Roma are even a ethnicity, let alone that the term gypsy typically was used for them. In fact, you’re probably more likely to encounter a Irish Traveler here in the Midwest and I’d bet they’d get called gypsies more times than not.
As I grew up gypsy simply meant and organized group of vagabonds or hobos. It was a person who didn’t really have a home and made their way living on the fringes of society, often on the margins of the law just like you’d expect from any vagrant. A gypsy could be any color, ethnicity or belief. This is reinforced by the fact that all the gypsies we ever saw characterized on TV were old white ladies with a crystal ball, a colorful head scarf and too much makeup. They were vanilla white people who maybe worked with a travelling circus and read your fortune. In fact, if you asked a panel of 100 random people off the street in the 90s to name a famous gypsy, they’d probably have named Miss Cleo.
So yeah, at least here in this part of the US, seeing the word gypsy recharacterized as a racial slur is more than a little head scratching.
NEVER learn cultural sensitivity from Disney movies. From Song of the South through Peter Pan through Pocahontas to the live action Mulan, even when Disney tries (which is recent) they often have problems. (And don’t learn gun safety from Fox and the Hound).
And don’t learn Roma culture or issues through Victor Hugo, who wasn’t Roma.
Its been considered a slur for - well, I’ve been aware of it since the 1980s. And its a lot like Native American culture. My culture is reduced to being fortune telling, gold hoop earrings and printed skirts and Halloween costumes. Roma culture has been systemically destroyed and suppressed both in Europe and the United States - in Europe for hundreds of years. Roma were held in slavery in Romania almost as long as African Americans and were rounded up and killed in the Holocaust - fewer proportionally died, but there were fewer to start with. (Mengele especially liked the Roma for experimentation). And now you know. You’ve been doing it wrong all along and “I didn’t know” is fine - I’m going to keep my preconceived notions and not understand why this is bad now that I do know is offensive.
It really doesn’t matter that here in the U.S. my family has been passing and benefitting from your ignorance when every sign points to them still being slaves in 1850 and 80 years ago they had a genocide committed against them.
I can’t parse this at all.
But I guess I’m an ignorant racist, I’ll blame Disney. 
What I am trying to say is that it doesn’t really make any difference if this hasn’t been an issue in the United States. Just because I live in a Northern state doesn’t mean I’m not a beneficiary of the legacy of slavery. Just because you live in the United States, doesn’t give you a pass to write off Roma injustice now that you know.
Aside from the others mentioned (fortune tellers, colorful clothing, etc.), the other stereotype I’m familiar with is that they often work as tinkers. I’m not sure how true that was, or what the basis for it would be: Perhaps most towns didn’t have enough tinker-work to support a resident tinker, and so the only way one could make a living at it was to live on the move and take on the backlog of jobs in every town one passed through?
Certainly it’s not as disparaging as most of the stereotypes, since tinkering is legitimate, necessary work.
And I did that how?
I would agree at least in much of the U.S. there may be more personal experience with the “Irish travelers”, and I would say the perception of those people is quite bad. Usually once a year you hear about a rash of “roofing scams” and other things of that nature that local police often link to an Irish traveler group. This is one of those things where I’m not sure where the stereotypes and reality synchronize, these Irish travelers are definitely their own little society, but as far as I can tell they also are involved in a significant amount of criminal activity.
Boxer Tyson Fury comes from Irish traveler stock and refers to himself as the “Gypsy King.” While there’s been a lot of theories about where these groups came from, I’ve seen it suggested that they likely emerged in the 1600s in response to Cromwell’s depradations of Ireland. It lead to some people becoming displaced, and they just became permanent nomads. I think they’ve been a distinct group long enough they have identifiable DNA differences from the population of Ireland at large and the other host countries they operate in.