It’s time to tackle anti-Roma racism in the United States | Rome

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On December 8, the US Senate passed a bipartisan resolution celebrating the heritage of American Roma and honoring Roma history, culture, and contributions to human progress.

The adoption of the resolution, the result of years of activism and lobbying by Roma and our allies, was a crucial step in our long struggle to have Roma history and heritage officially recognized and respected. in the USA. While this important resolution is to be welcomed, our work is far from over.

I was not born in the United States, but as a Roma living in the United States for years, I have lived and witnessed the detrimental consequences of American public prejudice on Roma people, their history and their culture.

I left Romania where my people faced racism, discrimination and institutionalized violence for centuries in the United States to attend Harvard University in 2012. Given the wealth of studies on racism in the United States, I assumed that I would enter an environment where I would be surrounded by people who are familiar with anti-Roma ideas and who know how to talk about their many manifestations.

I realized pretty early on that my assumption wasn’t right. Several people I’ve encountered here, despite having a nuanced understanding of racism, its ideologies and manifestations, casually mentioned the g*psy crime myth as fact or alluded to a specific way of life of Roma.

One day, as I was walking out of class, for example, a classmate asked me if my family had a lifestyle similar to that of the characters in the reality TV series Gypsy Sisters, one of the spin American offs of the hugely popular British series Big Fat Gypsy Weddings. His interest in my culture was real, but like many of his compatriots, his perception of Roma had been distorted by the transatlantic migration of anti-Roma sentiments and the amplification of harmful stereotypes on television.

In a 2020 study my colleagues at the Harvard FXB Center for Health and Human Rights and I conducted in collaboration with Voice of Roma, two-thirds of American Roma surveyed agreed that American television shows portrayed Roma in ways negative. Indeed, shows like My Big Fat American Gypsy Wedding portray violence, vulgarity, and early marriage as Roma cultural characteristics. Episodes of these series carry titles such as Birthday Party Turns into a Massive Fight, G*psy Truck Fight, and even Mama Bear Attacks the Bride.

Not just so-called Roma-focused reality TV series, but many American TV shows and movies portray Roma as one-dimensional g*psy stereotypes. They misrepresent us, as Roman-American filmmaker George Eli once said, as mystical creatures, vampires, wanderers, wandering beggars, criminals, thieves or pickpockets. In fact, they not only present Roma culture as vulgar, inferior and violent, but they also sensationalise it so that they can exploit it for profit.

This continued misrepresentation and sensationalism impacts the daily realities of American Roma. A Roma we interviewed for the 2020 study told us that the school environment, in particular, is much worse now that teachers can see My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding. They think that our children are worthless, that they are not worth educating or protecting in school. Other American Roma agreed that their children had suffered because of racist portrayals of Roma as subhuman or of Roma girls as overly sexual. They said that many Roma children had dropped out of school due to bullying related to their ethnicity and explained that such incidents had led them to advise their children to hide their ethnic identity and to endure any anti-ethnic prejudice. -Roma they met in silence.

Of course, anti-Roma discrimination in the United States was not invented by reality television executives. Today’s exploitative television programs only amplify deep-rooted prejudices and allow them to spread much further than before. Decades ago, in the Change in Social Standing polls of 1964 and 1989, American adults considered g*psi to have the lowest social status. In fact, they rated Roma, as well as Mexicans and Puerto Ricans, lower than a made-up ethnic group, the Wisians.

Of course, anti-Roma prejudices are not isolated. As is the case elsewhere in the world, cultural and racial prejudice against Roma justifies and reinforces deeply harmful discriminatory actions such as racial profiling, institutional neglect and disrespect towards members of our communities.

It is therefore high time to change. The recent Senate resolution celebrating America’s Roma heritage is a good start, but we need more. We must end the exploitation of Roma culture and the dissemination of harmful Roma stereotypes in popular culture. One way to achieve this could be to ensure that Roma play a prominent role in writing, producing, directing and acting in TV series and films. We need American policy makers to take meaningful action so that we can fully regain control of our identity, our history and our heritage and that we can finally feel that American Roma are valued and respected members of American society.

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Al Jazeera.

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