How are Gypsies regarded in various communities in the USA and in other nations of the world? Are the stereotypes they’ve had to labour under still present, and if so, is anything being done to alleviate the hardships they must endure, that result from the negative attitudes held by many of the majority cultures that surround them?
Two recent and relevant threads:
In the UK, they have the same protection as an ethnic group as any other under anti-discrimination legislation. But few groups face more, and more open & explicit, racism. The sensationalist elements of the media manage to print things that they would not get away with were they about any other group, and otherwise-responsible people will spread all kinds of rumours and malicious gossip.
I live in Hungary and here they are almost universally hated. The general belief is that they are lazy, smelly, thieves, over breeders etc. The worrying thing is that it is a very common belief in the young. You virtually never see a gypsy working in a shop, only sweeping streets, cleaning and other forms of manual labour.
Apparantly I am rare in that I allow them in my coffee shop, must to the disgust of ‘real’ Hungarians.
Problem here is, anti-Gypsy sentiment is not seen as racist, but as normal. It sounds like an exaggeration, but I cannot think of any time when I’ve heard one positive statement about them. Apparantly, it is the same in the bordering countries.
So this is an admittedly stupid addendum here, but wasn’t Jenny Calendar on BTVS a Roma? She had apparently left the tribe and assimilated. Is that common?
Irish Travellers are not Roma but have the same problems.
There is a lot of discrimination against travellers. There is also a lot of real issues with travellers and how they can live alongside settled people re: were to set up camp, amenities, rubbish etc.
The above site is a Travellers site with a lot of info.
Not many Americans are even aware of Gypsies in contemporary society, I suspect, but for those who are, the prejudices of Europe have survived and persisted here, alas. I’m aware of no Federal or Ohio law defining the Roma as an identifiable class deserving of special legal protection. They enjoy all the rights of every other American citizen, however, if born or naturalized here.
A fellow prosecutor once handled a case involving Roma defendants and told me he was disappointed to have the oft-repeated accusations borne out by the evidence at trial: the defendants were (properly, in his view) convicted of running a scam, and he was barraged with phone calls by people with strong accents who wouldn’t identify themselves, but had nothing good to say about the defendants.
My Roma relatives have completely assimilated, married people of other ethnicities and by now (third generation here), we’ve all been melting potted. I’m Roma like I’m German or Dutch.
However, my Dad was taught to say they were Romanian to keep from any backlash. That would have been just post WWII and his mother would have been half Roma (and half Romanian).
Once when my sister referred to “my gypsy blood” my father turned on the stare of death and sharply told her “we are NOT gypsies. We are Magyar.”
Considering my father was born and raised in the USA, those old prejudices must die really hard.
I guess you’ve never been to the annual Gypsy music festival in Ferencváros…? Lots of positive statements about the Gypsies there. And there were plenty of Gypsies and non-Gypsies in attendance. So they can’t be universally reviled by the Hungarians.
Gypsy musicians are a much sought after commodity. No wedding or good restaurant is complete without a gypsy band playing. The point you’re missing is that if the parents of the bride saw, say, the violin player in the street the next day, they would not greet him, and would probably look away if he greeted them. Plus, musicians make up a very small part of the whole community. Mississippi had some great black jazz musicians while their brethren were forced to sit at the back of buses and offered gainful employment as toilet cleaners.
It’s about as bad as it gets for a community of people. Nobody will employ them gainfully (at least not in any numbers), so the parents see little point in education. Thus they create a race of manual workers with little prospect of advancement- catch 22. Don’t forget we are talking about a full 10% of the country here.
Speaking as a US native, I doubt I could even a pick a Roma out of a crowd, let alone tell you whether or not they’re discriminated against here. Not an ethnic group I’ve ever encountered or even heard much of outside of old horror movie stereotypes and Stevie Nicks albums. 
The trouble they tend to get into here in the U.S. often involves finance. Specifically, some of the more recent and unassimilated groups apparently don’t “get” (or know but don’t care) that it’s not O.K. to use each other’s identities, credit, etc. here. I’ve heard of several getting into a lot of trouble, though more up north.
But believe me, Gypsies or whatever aren’t even a blip on the radar of America.
Travellers here in southern UK have a v. bad reputation.
There’s a perception that they ignore planning applications, cause a lot of anti-social behaviour, create filth and mess, and don’t pay any taxes.
Some of it’s over-reaction by the middle classes, lots of it’s on-the-mark… whenever a Traveller community move into an area now there’s usually a vehement residents’ campaign to have them shifted.
A typical website: http://www.middleenglandinrevolt.co.uk/index.html
Well, Hungarian society – from what I’ve noticed after 5+ years of living there – seems to divide gypsies into two camps: the “good” gypsies (the ones that play music and provide entertainment) and the bad gypsies (the rest).
What kis simon says, though, is not far from the truth. I wouldn’t go so far as to say they are universally reviled–you do have organizations like the Roma Rights Center in Budapest and there are free thinkers out there, but I was shocked at the blatant and open prejudice by intelligent people against the Roma in Budapest. I mean, it’s hardly taboo to say Gypsies are a lazy, lying, thieving people. I’ve gotten into arguments about comparing racism in the US (especially pre-Civil Rights era racism) and the arguments invariably devolve to: “Oh, you wouldn’t understand. The Gypsies are different than your blacks. They don’t want to change.” I mean, how can you possibly argue with such deep-seeded racism?
Oh, and I really shouldn’t unfairly single out Hungary. Much of Eastern/Central Europe is that way. My parents are both Polish and growing up I learned the words “cygan” and “cyganic” to mean “liar” and “to lie.” It was only in my early teens on perhaps my 5th visit to Poland, when my mother was visiting Czestachowa and talking about all the "cygan"s that were selling knick-knacks outside the cathedral that I realized “cygan” meant “Gypsy” not “liar.”
We have a somewhat less transparent version of this in the word “gyp” or “jip” or however you spell it, but imagine for almost half your life thinking the real word for “liar” is “Gypsy.”
In 2001 I visited northern Slovakia. I spent a day with relatives of the guy I was travelling with in a village of about 1000 people near Stara Lubovna. A 100 m or so south of the last house in the Slovak village was a separate settlement where the Roma lived in houses that were little better than shacks. The Slovaks were not well off at all; the Roma were blatantly more impoverished. I believe that the Roma settlement was not connected to the village water system and that their shacks had no running water.
My hosts said that the Roma wanted to live that way rather than in nice, clean houses like they did. In fact, I don’t think a Roma would have been allowed to live in the main village whether or not they were excluded by the letter of the law. They also said that the Roma were lazy and were bad and dishonest workers; that’s why no one would hire them. (Of course, since no one ever hired them, no Slovak ever found out whether this stereotype was true or not.)
We also visited Spisky Hrad and drove through the nearby town (Spisky Nova Ves?). There too, the Roma were segregated just outside the rest of the town. Most of them lived in small apartment blocks, but they were much more run down than the ones in the rest of the town.