I do have first hand experience of this. Coming from a place that has a yearly influx of travelling folk. This is a mix of Romany Gypsy and Irish travellers and others.
The Romany were never any trouble and were welcomed. They grazed horses on the verges but were tidy and law-abiding.
The Irish travellers were not welcome because of the mess they left, the gates they broke down, the fields they trespassed on, the roads they raced on and the petty crime and civil disturbance that followed them.
As I say, this is first hand from my own experience plus family and friends and also a close connection to the police and local council that had to deal with the aftermath. In that case at least the more ethnically “different” group were far less of a problem than the mere culturally “different”.
I’ve no doubt that there are well-behaved groups of travellers out there who would make excellent temporary neighbours and indeed they would be mixed in with the problematic ones that stayed near us. You wouldn’t notice them though as the disruption caused by the others ends up tainting them, by association.
It unfortunately happens on Reddit quite often. I’ll start to think Reddit is okay, becoming less bigoted, and then one of these threads will show up where randomly the bigots are on top.
And for goodness sake, saying all of any people group is bad is bigotry. The only exception is when the underlying concept is itself bad, like murderers or rapists. Saying all Romany are bad and associating them with the thieves and fons is the same bigotry as associating all black people with street gangs. Extrapolating from one bad part to the whole group is what bigotry is.
It’s not political correctness, just knowing the underlying concept of bigotry.
Of course not, but nor is it explicitly a bigoted statement either.
Just because it is an excuse used by bigots doesn’t mean that it is automatically invalidated. If we are honest with ourselves then we have to admit that not all group, cultural practices or beliefs are benign, or even neutral. (ETA - and by group cultural practices I mean something that is held or practiced commonly within an identifiable group)
If someone claims “cultural practice/belief A is common within group B” then that is not a bigoted statement, it is a factual claim amenable to testing.
If someone claims “I treat all members of group B as if they all behave according to cultural practice/belief A”. Then that probably is a bigoted statement seeing at is a vanishingly small possibility that it is true and you’d be admitting a prejudice.
Do Europeans in general view the genocidal actions of the Nazis against the Romani differently than they do the genocidal actions of the Nazis against the Jews?
I ask partly because I think that in the US, if asked that question, the majority of people wouldn’t know what you were talking about, even if you referred to it as the attempted genocide of Gypsies instead of Romani.
The Reddit thread makes it seem like their culture values the idea of scamming outsiders. It’s not outside the realm of possibility that a human culture could develop with this concept being one of their shared values. The Vikings went around raiding and pillaging; that was just their culture. There were Vikings and there were non-Vikings and if you weren’t a Viking, they took your shit, end of story. Does that make Viking culture “bad”? I don’t know. Since they existed a really long time ago and aren’t around anymore, it’s not controversial to make generalizations about them.
The idea of a traveling culture of raiders has plenty of historical precedent - didn’t the Cossacks essentially do the same thing? - but in modern times, you can’t get away with brazenly robbing and raiding, you have to be a bit more sly about it. So you commit petty crimes, con games, and other nonviolent scams. At any rate, doing so could become ingrained into your culture, an idea passed down through generations, and widely held that it’s OK to do so.
The thing is, I’m not saying the Roma actually are an example of this. I just don’t know. The Reddit thread has a lot of specific examples of bad things that members of this group have done, but there’s a certain number of bad actors in any given population, and I don’t think a thread consisting almost solely of posters who have been burned by them is an accurate representation of who all Romani are. I do want to learn more about their culture after reading all this, and I wonder if any independent journalists have traveled with them and documented it.
And also, that when people say “like hell you can’t say who’s Roma by sight, I bloody well can,” they don’t even realize they’re only seeing those who do follow the stereotypes: sometimes because they’re traditional, others because they base part of their livelihood on the stereotypes, and yet others to tweak payo noses. The person they’re seeing may not even be Roma but happens to work at a tablao, I swear there’s people who’d see a Japanese flamenco dancer* and swear she’s Roma.
For example, in Southern Spain, which includes Madrid, part of the stereotype of the male Roma includes pomaded hair slicked flat with a row of curls at the back. In Northern Spain that’s just an Andalusian… and in fact two of the guys who famously wear that kind of hair, Bertín Osborne and Mario Conde, are Roma like I’m Russian; they’re also not Andalusian. Osborne was born in Madrid from an English-turned-Andalusian family; Conde is Galician; both payos.
I’d WAG most people aren’t even aware that the Nazis sent Romani into concentration camps in the first place (or Jehova’s witnesses for that matter - Jews and gays are fairly well covered in media/schoolbooks but that’s about it). In my high school history books there was cursory mention of “tziganes” IIRC, but it’s kind of a specific (and old-fashioned) word that people don’t necessarily associate with “gypsies”.
Also, now that I’m thinking about words, it’s kind of telling that one of the French words for Roma people, “romanichels” (or its “romanos” shortening) has become a generic pejorative for unkempt/begging/dirty/dishevelled people…
English has the word “gypped” which means “swindled” but I’m pretty sure there are a large number of Americans who are unaware of the fact it’s racist because, one, people have a remarkable ability to use words without thinking about them or where they come from, and, two, Americans have so little contact with “gypsies” that making the connection is even less likely.
That said, English used to have “jewed” as in “jewed down” to mean “negotiated down the price” and that’s pretty much completely gone at this point, directly because of most people not wanting to come off as antisemitic assholes. So there is hope.
Unfortunately, “to jew down” a price and the like are distressingly common in the area in which I live (South Chicago/Northwest Indiana). As it happens, I never actually heard the term before I moved here and the first time was genuinely shocking, but most people here seem completely unaware of the potential for offense.
American Roma learn to stay hidden if they want to succeed for the most part which I personally don’t think is a good thing. It tends to lead to a lot of simmering anger just below the surface of our personalities.
I don’t know anywhere near as much about the Roma as I probably ought to, so I don’t know how relevant this is, but:
For most of the existence of the human species, most people lived in groups that moved through specific territory, using different parts of it at different times and/or during different weather conditions, different availability of game and water and bearing fruit trees, etc. Nomadic peoples don’t generally just wander at random; knowing where the next spring is, where the ripe fruit is, where the lions hang out most, etc. is important for survival. Of course people occasionally expanded territories or even moved to new ones, went exploring, sorted out new trade routes, and so on.
Over the last relatively few thousands of years, the number of people who took up a settled lifestyle increased, and the amount of area claimed by people who lived a settled lifestyle increased. Eventually the settlements took so much territory that there’s by now almost nowhere on the planet where it’s possible to live in any other fashion.
Trying to live as nomads in areas claimed by settled people poses an inherent difficulty. The settled people generally think they’ve got the only right way to live. The nomads, obviously, disagree with them; but they’ve got no non-settled areas to work with, any longer; anywhere they go they’re impacting the settled people, who tend to resent it. The way we lived for hundreds of thousands of years is no longer accepted as a permissible way to live.
I’m a settled person, myself – more so than many people in USA culture, which often seems to assume that homes are interchangeable and anybody ought to be willing to move anywhere. But I think we lose something major when we say there’s only one way to live properly. And I think that saying ‘it’s the culture, not the people’ is often a way of saying ‘everybody ought to live the way I do.’
Kinda like being any sort of visible cultural minority, yeah - although possibly worse than many because the beginnings of the prejudice spiral dates back to the Middle Ages, so it has had time to go through many, many loops.
It’s also a lot like historical persecutions of Native Americans, complete with forced settlements or relegation to the shittiest lands available, forced “civilization”, child kidnappings, prohibitions from using their own language or plying their traditional trades etc…
And even if they are like us, we’ll find a way to make them different from us.
Does anyone really think in the ethnic stew of Central and Southern Europe there are any genuine difference between generic “Slav”, Romani, Magyar, Romanian, Moldvanian, Ukranian, Ashkenazi and who knows what else. Maybe at one time they spoke different languages, but what else?
I am not really asking why people are racist in general. It just seems like hating the Romani (or travelers) is accepted even among people who are not otherwise racist.
and in fact two of the guys who famously wear that kind of hair, Bertín Osborne and Mario Conde, are Roma like I’m Russian; they’re also not Andalusian. Osborne was born in Madrid from an English-turned-Andalusian family; Conde is Galician; both payos.