europeans: *throws bananas at black athletes and politicians in their countries*
europeans: you americans are so obsessed with race… so strange….
Britain: *harasses the fuck out prince harry’s gf meghan markle for being a biracial black woman despite being white passing*
Britain: right? I don’t get this whole “race” thing Americans got going on
Europeans: pissed off about immigration in their countries
Europeans: *colonized the whole FUCKING world*
Australians: *supports the ‘stop the boats campaign’. let’s one nation back in. closed refugee detention centres and displaced the people*
Australians: we’re so tolerant and multicultural. idk y america has such an issue with race.
Canadians: *experience a rise in hate crimes against Muslim Canadians. Forced indigenous peoples off their land and into the horrific residential school system. Has a higher incarceration rate for poc than white people.*
Canadians: we’re way better and more tolerant up here than America. Why can’t they just learn from us.
Europeans: America’s race problem is so backward how did they even get like that LOL
Previously, on the last episode of Europe: Ugh, fuckin’ Jews and G*psies, amirite?
01. Gypsy is a slur & there is no “positive” or “acceptable” way of using it if you aren’t Romani. It should not be part of your vocabulary – the same goes for the term “gypped”. If you want to talk about the slur censor it or simply call it “the g slur.”
02. Anti Romani racism exists everywhere and there is a slur for the us in every language. Gypsy is the slur used in the English language but there is also Zigan, Tigan, Cigan, Gitano, Zigeuner, etc. – a lot of them stem from the Greek word for “slave” and are considered even worse than the Gypsy slur. However all of them are still slurs and shouldn’t be used by you if you aren’t Romani.
03. Gypsy has never been anything other than a derogatory slur against Romani that has been screamed at us while we have been branded, enslaved, hunted down, murdered, put through a genocide and a holocaust, segregated and discriminated against.
04. Romani is the proper name of the people that are being targeted by the G slur. Some people write it as Rromani which is also correct. The term Roma/Rroma can be used too, however not all Romani are Roma.
05. Romani and Romaniando not mean the same thing. Romani are the people that are being targeted by the G slur and we are brown people originally from India. Romanians are people from the European country Romania.
06. The official term for racism directed towards Romani is called “Antiziganism”, that term however is offensive since it includes the word “Zigan” which is a horrible slur against Romani. Please do not use that term and instead use “Anti-Romani racism”, “Anti-Romanism”, etc.
07. Anti-Romani racism is very extreme in Europe (segregation in housing, education and health care, forced sterilizations, evictions and demolition of settlements, police brutality, etc), which is why we even received the title of “Europe’s Most Hated”, but it’s not an exclusively European thing. Anti-Romani racism exists in America and Canada as well. (Canada even has an immigration ban on Romani.)
08. “My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding” does not display actual Romani people as far as I have heard so it does not represent Romani people/culture at all.
09. Your believes that Romani “don’t want to work”, “don’t want to send their children to school”, “steal children”, “are dirty”, “genetically prone to crime”, “are lazy”, etc. are nothing but racist stereotypes and left over Nazi propaganda. All of them are untrue as well. (Also: Romani would love to work and go to school but the extreme discrimination against us in the field of education makes that very hard. And the widely spread traditional anti-Romani attitudes and prejudices don’t make it any easier either.)
10. Stereotypes such as that all Romani women are “sexual temptresses” and promiscuous disregarding of age are obviously incorrect too. Virginity is actually considered important in Romani culture. Believing in those stereotypes is very harmful and dangerous as well because despite Romani being only a minority in most European countries we make up the highest % when it comes to sex trafficking victims.
11. Romani culture doesn’t have anything to do with witchcraft, wicca, paganism, etc. We didn’t create tarot, palm reading or crystal balls either. You can stop calling yourself a “Gypsy Witch” and faking Romani heritage now. The only reason why assumptions like that came to exist is because of racist believes and lies spread by the church. Our skills with medical herbs and palm reading were seen as “evidence of heresy” and from the 16th century onward we were outlawed, expelled and persecuted, culminating in the organized killing of our people.
12. Fortune teller costumes are racist. Romani women have always been stereotyped as fortune tellers which is why the stereotypical image of a fortune teller is always linked with Romani women – dark skin, messy black hair, a big nose, a “weird” accent, a headscarf, big hoop earrings, gold coins added to clothes and an “untrustworthy/deceiving” nature, etc. (A lot of people even use the term “fortune teller” like a synonym for the G slur nowadays.) A person’s race/ethnicity is not a costume, so if you ever consider dressing up as a fortune teller chose something different.
If you are Romani too please feel free to add things onto this list and please correct me if I made any mistakes.
There was an acid attack on a toddler in France this week. The child had their body almost entirely burnt.
The toddler was also jewish and the father was a rabbi.
I am speechless. Like I’m legit just barely holding back tears right now.
Only a few weeks ago did a child get beaten up while wearing a kippa.
And early in january a kosher store got burnt down in Paris.
And also a child wearing a jewish school uniform also got attacked not too long ago.
Honestly the situation right now in France and Europe in general is absolutely terrifying and I’m left without words beyond sharing that it has happened.
This is… terrifying.
Acid attack against a Rabbi’s 14-moth-old child in Lyon: Acid was left in the child’s pram and she was rushed to hospital when her grandmother noticed burns on her body. Her back and thighs are burned but thankfully she is not thought to be in danger.
Kosher store burned down in Paris: The fire took place on the third anniversary of a deadly attack by an Islamist gunman on a kosher grocery in Paris. Shortly before the fire, the same store had been defaced with swastikas.
Four teenagers beat a Jewish boy with a stick outside synagogue: Four teenagers of Arab descent were arrested for an attack on a Jewish teenager. The victim and his siblings were lighting firecrackers in celebration of Purim outside synagogue north of Paris. The assailants called them dirty Jews before assaulting the boy with a baton, which resulted in his sunglasses being smashed.
[Zera] Yacob is also more enlightened than his Enlightenment peers when it comes to slavery. In chapter five, he argues against the idea that one can ‘go and buy a man as if he were an animal’.That is because all humans are created equal and with the capacity to reason. Hence, he also puts forward a universal argument against discrimination based on reason.
[Anton] Amo was not the only African to achieve success in 18th-century Europe. At the same time, Abraham Petrovich Gannibal (1696-1781), also kidnapped from sub-Saharan Africa, became the general of Peter the Great of Russia. Gannibal’s great-grandson became Russia’s national poet, Alexander Pushkin. And the French author Alexandre Dumas (1802-70) was the grandson of an enslaved African woman, Louise-Céssette Dumas, and son of a black aristocratic general born on Haiti.
An entertaining read about the preemptions of and contributions to the Enlightenment by Ethiopean and Ghanaian-German philosophers Zera Yacob and Anton Amo.
Believe it or not, just because something is a norm in a different country doesn’t mean it’s above reproach! Despite different histories! And different languages! And different oppressed groups – especially since no one said anything about European racism being exactly the same as American racism, only that racism exists in Europe and it’s healthier to talk about it than be in a state of denial (and oh my God did you just suggest Jewish and Romani people are not oppressed in the United States if they’re light-skinned)! Tumblr’s anti-SJW contingent needs to get it through their thin, fragile skulls that racism is a fucking worldwide phenomenon though the specifics differ, and shutting up about it doesn’t help anyone or anything except determined racists and the perpetuation of institutional racism…. then again, you’re probably a “Reylo,” so I don’t expect any critical thinking from you at all WHAARGARBL.
As a more or less white goy passing Jew who lives in Europe and who will talk about Antisemitism here and anywhere in the world until she’s blue in the face, may I kindly invite Anon to sit the hell down and shut the fuck up.
Everything else I wanted to say has already been covered.
What’s worse is that they take their concept of “races” and try to apply it everywhere else, which … doesn’t really work all that well (but when has that every stopped US Americans?).
EVERYONE SHOULD READ THIS!
Europeans literally introduced white supremacy to the US & the whole western hemisphere, and censoring the terminology used to discuss racism in Europe certainly hasn’t stopped y’all’s violence, prejudice, and brutality against Romani, Jews, Muslims, European minorities & people of color on your little piece of a continent, but #go off I guess lmao!!
Racist white people in the US say the same exact thing—”talking about race is racist!”—so it’s hilarious to me that white Europeans are clutching onto their colorblind racism as if it’s some special elevating thing. Whites in Mississippi do it, whites in Stockholm do it… In fact, the whites in Mississippi picked it up from you guys in the first place. Come on.
Do y’all think nonwhite Europeans don’t have internet or Tumblr to dispel your ‘colourblind!!’ nonsense? You are definitely asked for race and ethnic group on checklists because that’s, um, how demographics are set up? Who are these white Europeans fooling …
So lemme get this straight, in Europe they have racism all the same but silence the language used to talk about it? Sounds perfect! …for people who are comfortable with the status quo and don’t want to seriously face the issue.
L.J.'s Obsessions 