Here.
And Martin’s comment is why this sort of discrimination is alive and well in the U.S. People can’t tell the difference between Travellers and Romani - and when the communities only make the news because of scams, that’s a problem. We are trying to get away from reporting race so that associations between Black and Hispanic men and drugs are broken. Its the same. (Cause we all know white contractors are all honest 
)
Any flamenco/salsa fans here? I’ve seen Gipsy Kings perform several times. I never really thought about the band’s name being potentially offensive, but the original founding members were descendants of Spanish Romani people.
And I think this might be another dividing area between Americans and Europeans. I don’t really consider the Roma to be a separate race* and I remember getting into an argument online with someone from Great Britain about this. He posted some photos of modern Roma who had fairly dark complexions but it was easy for me to find other photos of Roma who were indistinguishable to my eye from the rest of the population. This was around the time headlines were made when authorities tried to take two Roma children away believing the parents must have kidnapped them because they were blonde and had light skin.
*I realize that might be offensive. But as there is no objective way to measure race that I’m aware of I consider all designations to be arbitrary and culturally relevant. Maybe such a designation is relevant in much of Europe but I don’t think it’s relevant in the US.
Jews can and do often seem white, but that doesn’t mean anti-Semitism doesn’t exist and isn’t a problem in the U.S.
In my experience, every culture has its own definitions of “race”.
I wonder about this. I have a suspicion that these groups probably aren’t that insular or strictly constituted. I imagine that some not-insignificant proportion are regular old Americans who just fell in with them for one reason or another over the years and now the group would probably be mostly indistinguishable from any other random collection of Americans.
I think Roma have some similarities to Jews. They originally arrived in Europe as a distinct people moving in from elsewhere, but they have been in Europe so long that even though they maintained separate communities, they had over time significant intermixtures with the locals. Like Polish Jews an German Jews if you do an ancestry test on a typical one, will have significant ancestry in common with local Poles and Germans, I imagine the Roma are somewhat similar.
But of course “race” is a cultural construct, and the Jews were definitely always treated as the “other” in European history.
Isn’t that pretty much a contradiction in terms? Can it truly be discrimination if the term is broadly applied to multiple groups?
That’s not really true. My parents were Polish Jews but we have more genetically in common with other Ashkenazic Jews than Polish people. Absent intermarriage, we are not European as you’re describing.
This area often has a rash of roofing etc. scams, and local police will warn against them, but I’ve never seen them link it to any ethnic group, and identified individuals have IME generally been generic “white”.
The USA standard culture, to the extent that there is such a thing, takes it for granted that many people, as individuals/families, move often and easily; to the point at which people who don’t want to pack up and move in order to chase rumors of more or better paying jobs somewhere else are often criticized for it. So while scammers of this sort may well find it easier to pull off if they keep moving, I expect most of them are neither Travellers or Romani.
That’s from 2013. There’s been a lot more research since then.
Likewise… but I still got my blond hair and blue eyes from somewhere.
Following up on my last post: Most Ashkenazi Jews are genetically Europeans, surprising study finds (nbcnews.com)
The genetics suggest many of the founding Ashkenazi women were actually converts from local European populations.
“The simplest explanation was that it was mainly women who converted and they married with men who’d come from the Near East,” Richards told LiveScience.
That is true and those definitions often make sense within the context of the culture but can be baffling to outsiders.
There has been research since 2013, yes:
This work has been expanded by Itsik Pe’er and his collaborators, including me, to show that based on the analysis of the DNA segments shared among Ashkenazi Jews, the number of founders for this population may have been as few as 350 and that the founding event occurred about 1,000 years ago (Palamara, et al., 2012; Carmi, et al., 2015). More recent work from this group of collaborators has shown that ~85% of the European segments of the Ashkenazi Jewish genome came from Southern Europeans with the remainder coming from others (Xue, et al., 2017).
Whatever the ultimate origins of the Ashkenazi Jewish population, they have certainly had significant portions of their population that came in from the “native” European stock.
Me, too. Blond and green eyed. But I also tan deeply and have a lot of olive in my skin.
We’re talking trends in population genetics and not individual genetics, which can be more variable.
Can you tell the difference between Mexicans and Puerto Ricans? Do you think it makes any difference when you are pulled over and asked to prove you are a citizen or told to go back to where you came from if you speak Spanish?
Australian Aboriginals and West Africans are about as far apart, genetically, as it’s possible for peoples to be. But I can pretty much guarantee you that if an Australian Aboriginal were to move to the US, Americans would treat them as “black”, including in terms of discrimination.
And every human population, no matter what the cultural barriers, has found ways to mix with all of their neighboring populations (and these days, “neighboring” includes the entire globe).
The thing is if you have a “founder population” of 350 people over a thousand years ago, that’s quite a small number. Even a relatively low rate per generation of say, out group members marrying into the group, is enough to significantly dilute the ancestry of the 350 founders by the time you get to the modern day.