You Love Our Music But You Hate Our Guts

Guess which people I’m talking about. They:

• assemble in concentrated masses in our cities
• live side by side with us but don’t assimilate
• are (on the other hand) chameleons, adapting to the host culture
• are parasites (since they have a host culture)
• are dirty, have poor hygiene
• are thieves, not to be trusted
• kidnap children, do bad things to them
• engage in non-mainstream, highly dubious occupations (which they’re brilliant at)
• are bloodsuckers, contributing nothing to our economy/culture
• should be watched/fingerprinted/expelled/ imprisoned/sterilised/tortured/destroyed

Until recently, this was commonly/openly said about Jews. Someone crossing the Pale of Settlement would’ve probably seen all my great-grandparents as dirty, parasitic etc. But if these points were heinous libel against the Jews (or they were imposed by society itself, eg. restrictions in employment), what are the odds they’re NOT heinous libel against the Romani (aka gypsies)? Because they’re still openly said about the Romani. And they’re so common (in the Czech Republic 90% of people do not want Romani neighbours), that some of these remain in our consciousness.

Moral panic should always be viewed with suspicion, and nothing is panickier than accusations of child kidnapping. Today Romani women still get arrested on these suspicions (a “white” baby is often born to a “dark” Romani mother). There are other reasons people still believe in this list. There’s confirmation bias: a barefoot gypsy girl is seared into our memory, one looking more ordinary is forgotten. And of course most Romani are much poorer than the general population. If they commit a crime it’s likely to be street-crime. Whereas we don’t see all the white collar crime behind CBD office walls.

Whatever the reasons, it’s shockingly ok to say these things about Romani people. (In fact many groups have suffered from the same accusations: Chinese in the US gold rush, Irish immigrants etc.) Romani get screwed even in supposedly tolerant countries. Norway was having them sterilised well into the 1970s. In July 2008, Italy’s highest court ruled that it was ok for people to campaign to the council for the eviction of the Romani population because “gypsies are thieves“. Even if like me you’re against hate speech laws, the ruling is absolutely atrocious.

Perusing the website of Gogol Bordello, I encountered their Romani solidarity page. It said: “You love our music, but you hate our guts, we know all about you, you don’t know thing about us” (from the albumless All the Lies About Roma). That sentence made me realise how often people have the above misconceptions, though they complain about the same libel against their ancestors. Genocide often comes from racial stereotypes. These can come from our cognitive inability to consistently apply the same standards to others that we apply to ourselves. Despite some progress, we’ve yet to overcome this.