Wanting to learn more about the Romani people, I came across this thread on Reddit.
It just seems to be full of hate. Imagine if they had vern talking in the same way about black people. And this is from a mainstream subreddit.
I can see that some of it is legitimate criticism of a culture, but some of the rethoric just seems like racism.
What is it that makes it more acceptable to hate this particular group?
Honestly? “We can’t be racist. We’re Europeans. Only Americans are racist.”
It’s partly history, as in Europeans thinking they purged themselves of racism in WWII and utterly immunized themselves against it with hate speech laws, and partly a consequence of them seeing America as being on top; it isn’t bad if you’re punching up, you see, so they can call the Americans racist and just… forget that their hatred of the Romani is also founded in prejudices about racial groups.
Romani ite domum.
[QUOTE=Derleth;21734603forget that their hatred of the Romani is also founded in prejudices about racial groups.[/QUOTE]
It’s not just the Romani. I witnessed some jaw droppingly bigoted comments against Slavs while peacekeeping in Bosnia. It wasn’t even what we in the US might term dog whistles. It was just overtly labeled bigotry. There were also quite a bit of assuming most of the ethnic/national group stereotypes were accurate and acting based on them. Mostly they were accurate about it not being racist in the strictest sense of the word. They were white people applying negative stereotypes in bigoted ways against other white people. Not all bigotry is racism.
I’ve told this story before on the board. My sister once made a joke about her “gypsy (aka Romani) blood,” and my child-of-immigrants father said to her with cold anger, “We are not gypsies. We are MAGYAR.”
I wasn’t surprised to see racist posts in such a reddit thread, but I was surprised that the most upvoted posts were some of the most bigoted, and the least upvoted were the ones criticizing the bigotry and racism.
And this is why I think Europeans, or at least the ones we’re talking about, are arrogant about the whole thing: Someone who knows their racism knows their sin, and will try to hide it using dog-whistles and justifications, fig-leaf they may be to an outsider. If you think everything is true, as a simple matter of fact, dog-whistles become absurd and justification becomes shallow and facile: “Look at them! It’s obvious, no? You’ll agree with me in time, once you get to know Them.”
As for whether it’s racism, race isn’t well-defined enough to say that without taking a context into account. Italians and the Irish weren’t always White in America. We have a special term for being bigoted against Jews, but look at antisemitism and you’ll see something fundamentally similar to racism, right down to exaggeration of (supposed) physical characteristics. If it’s bigotry based on how someone’s born, or a supposed culture that members of an ethnic group or nationality or religion are born into, it’s fundamentally similar to racism.
That’s a bit of a prejudicial statement itself, isn’t it? I mean, you’re claiming that the American definition of race is the sole valid definition of race. If an American says black Americans and white Americans are different races, and a resident of the former Yugoslavia says that Serbs and Bosnian are different races, why is the first right and the second wrong?
Europeans all look alike to me.
It’s a circular, chicken-and-egg issue AIUI. Settled people have historically mistrusted Romani (and all travelling people/people not from The Village) so accused them of anything wrong while the Romani were in town ; price gouged them ; tried to run them out of town (or worse) and so on. For centuries. Which has caused the Romani to develop an insular, bristly “we can’t trust the gadjes, they’re all assholes” culture as well as, in some cases, justifying (or at least turning a blind eye to) petty theft and scams on the grounds that “they treat us all like thieves already anyway” and Romani can’t hold long term jobs on account of always getting run out of town. Which causes non-Romani people to always go “ah HA ! Told ya they were all thieves ! We should run them out of town !” in turn. And on, and on.
It’s been long enough of this shit that “running the Romani out of town” has become quasi-institutionalized policy, even in supposedly “enlightened” places. People don’t even stop to think how stupid and self-perpetuating it all is. I’ve had a French teacher seriously, with no hint of self-awareness, complain to me about a couple of Romani students of hers who couldn’t read well enough at all - but she also said she refused to give them special attention or help because “it’s not my fault their parents made them illiterate”, and that in any case “they know they’ll be in a different school next year so they won’t listen to me, why should I bother ?”. A fucking teacher. And so the unspoken agreement was that these two kids would do absolutely nothing and learn fuck all, and the teacher didn’t prod them as long as they kept their mouths shut. D’you think those two kids will become engineers when they grow up ?..
Like Kobal2 says, it’s a pretty complicated, dug in situation, and certainly there’s issues on both sides.
If people here knew the word Romany at all they’d immediately think ‘travellers’, and there’s a significant proportion of travellers who are, frankly, causing a lot of problems. It’s not a lifestyle that can be followed while also following the rules of the rest of society.
As an example; only last week one of the local hospitals had to cancel their annual fundraiser because a group of travellers moved in to the fair site the day before and refused to leave, even though there’s actually a dedicated traveller site less than 20 miles away and there was a huge banner announcing the event on the site entrance. A legal eviction will take weeks if not months. Bear in mind that this is England, it’s a non-profit community hospital that would be treating the travellers free if they needed it, so actions like that are not a good way to win friends. And yes, there’s no escaping it, when one of these groups move in, the local petty crime rate often shoots up.
It’s also a very enclosed society, and puts effort into keeping it that way. The traveller community frequently takes their kids (daughters especially) out of school at a very young age, then they’re typically married in their teens and encouraged to have kids asap. They’ll marry within the community, have almost no contact with those outside it, and are not given the opportunity to get skills enabling them to do anything else.
A friend who did some council sponsored outreach a few years ago with a local Romany group said it seemed like a deliberate attempt to keep the kids in the community by making sure they weren’t equipped to leave. She was working with some kids who’d enjoyed school and learning, but had only been allowed to go when there wasn’t much going on at home, then were taken out for good at 15 (compulsory education is supposed to last until 18 here), because their parents didn’t want them hanging round with outsiders and besides, they were going to be married in a few years and it’s the man’s role to bring in money. They’re not entirely being marginalised by society, quite a bit of it is deliberate separation, they seem to want it to be an ‘Us’ and ‘Them’. I personally think there’s a bit of the same logic as the Westboro trolls for some of the groups; make people dislike you and the kids will carry on the traditions, because they’ll be unwelcome elsewhere.
Are all Romany dodgy travelling uneducated thieves? No, of course not. But there is a significant chunk of people, including the most visible section of the Romany, who ‘other’ the hell out of outsiders, so it’s not surprising that’s often mutual. And yes, some non-Romany are just straight up racist and would refuse to employ/house/befriend someone who’s got some heritage from the group but doesn’t join in with any of the problematic aspects of the culture, which also means there’s pressure for Romany not following the traveller lifestyle to not mention their background, heightening the perception that they’re all travellers. It’s been going on for centuries, time for a lot of issues to build up all round.
Whatever the historical roots of the problem, I think this is the real issue for most people who interact with travelers, not the ethnic identity. It’s not “racist” to object to a colony of itinerant thieves taking up temporary residence near your community.
There are a lot of negative comments in that thread about the Irish Travellers who aren’t Roma at all, I don’t think, they’re just Irish who live the same kind of nomadic lifestyle.
I don’t have any first-hand experience with either of these groups so I really can’t comment. But it seems to me that any group of people, no matter what their ethnicity is, who travels around from place to place, makes a mess, and doesn’t clean up, would garner hatred. That’s what the Reddit thread seems to be implying - but I don’t know if it’s actually true. For all I know, 90% of traveling Roma or Irish Traveller caravans clean up after themselves very thoroughly and the people in that thread are just letting the 10% who don’t color their perception of the whole group. 
Romani and Gypsy aren’t the same thing, and that Reddit thread about gypsies is not about a race, it’s about some Romani, some Irish travelers, some new age travelers. They don’t share a separate race or bloodline, only a quite toxic culture.
This is what scares me about the OP’s title, and the assumption behind it. It is political correctness overblown beyond all logic.The fear of “racism” is so deep among the left that they cannot see simple facts.
The reddit thread discusses simple facts…that the travelers don’t pay taxes because they have no fixed address, that the petty crime rate increases when they arrive, and then decreases when they move on, that they often make money by scams.
There is nothing wrong with criticizing other people’s culture, when it is supported by facts.
There is a lot wrong with screaming “RACISM!!!” without looking at the facts.
The Reddit thread linked from here included accusations of murder, dismemberment, and even cannibalism. From here in the United States that sure looks an awful like like the over-the-top complaints whites had about African Americans. From my vantage point it’s very hard to separate what might be legitimate complaints from outright bigotry.
okay. The reddit thread has over a thousand posts. I only read a few dozen, and didn’t see anything about cannibalism.So, yeah, there’s bigotry there.
But the posts I read sounded a lot like what Filbert said in post#9 above, and is not bigotry–it’s legit criticism.
I think you can in some ways compare it to criticism of inner city gang culture. It might not be all about race, but people are talking about a group of people like they are subhuman.
It’s telling that Romani who have moved to the US have had far fewer problems than those who stayed in Europe.
It’s not that there are no problems - there certainly are, from underage/child brides, lack of formal education, and yes, a certain level of crime - but it’s not as bad as Europe. For one thing, moving around a lot is something more common in the States than in the Old World so that’s seen as less suspicious. There is less institutionalized prejudice. A substantial portion of US Romani have adopted a settled lifestyle, started/work in businesses, and are better off than their European counterparts. Some continue to travel, but my impression is that a nomadic lifestyle is less problematic in North America than in Europe. The Romani are not the only people who move around a lot over here. Which is not saying that nomadic groups here have a blissful existence - there are several groups that move around and they do suffer from the prejudice of non-nomads, but it is possible to live that way over here without constantly breaking the law.
So while there are problematic aspects to their culture (just like every other culture) it’s clear that part of their on-going problems in Europe are due to prejudice because once that’s removed, as in US, they have fewer problems and more prosperity.
Oh, so…kinda like being Black in America, then.
“These damn n—ers need to git offa welfare”
Well they might if people would stop, you know, discriminating against them at work and red lining them.