I guess it’s an individual thing, similar to Jewish or Armenian people.
I’d really appreciate it if non-Romani people stopped debating our race.
Like, yea, on an *individual* basis, some Romani people consider themselves White, but most Romani people do not. Most Romani people do not look White, and are most certainly not treated as White in Europe, or the Americas.
I don’t know where people are getting this idea that the majority of Romani people are White-passing or light-skinned because that has absolutely no basis in fact.
I get that race is a construct, but that is no excuse for trying to define our race for us. Trying to claim that Romani people in any way benefit from Whiteness erases our entire history of slavery, genocide, and oppression based on the fact that we are not White. It also completely erases our own ancestry, which has roots in South Asia for f*ck’s sake.
Also, White people do not currently nor have they ever considered us White, which is how Whiteness is defined.
There is this gross and almost evil trend of non-members of a group arguing over the race of a minority group.
It happened to the Sami, to Jewish people (esp. Us evil racist ~White~ jews) and Romani. Imagine that, nobody on this website knew of Sami or Romani and these people think that have the right to argue what race they are.
This, is something that we, gaje, need to stop doing. We need to start recognizing Romani and stop with awful stereotyping and excluding from anti-racial protests and social justice.
Also, for clarification note, Armenians are not White and no White person considers them White unless the Armenian person is like a generation American. Don’t lump Armenians in with their oppressors.
Considering OP is an extremely disgusting racist …
OP is definitely racist and reblogs from right-libertarians and fascists all the time because OP is a piece of shit
TMK OP is also Jewish – a disgusting shame of a person and a shame upon Israel.
Here is the thing any Romani, Sami, Jewish, or Armenian individual(s) can buy into the idea that they are white, but the reality that as a whole none of those groups are White.
The thing is that it’s not just unabashed racists doing this. There are a lot of people in Tumblr SJ circles who have repeated this very same line, especially about Romani and Jewish people.
“Roma are White passing in the US” and “White Jews” are commonly used as a means to both silence Romani and Jewish persons, and excuse anti-Romani and anti-Semitic rhetoric by people who claim to be avidly against racism.
On an individual level, Romani people might claim that they are White and many mixed Romani/White persons are more comfortable with that label. However, as an ethnic group, Romani people are not White. In regards to Romani people, specifically, most are by no means White passing. Most Romani people are very much brown.
I am light skinned and Romani. I am one of the lightest people in my family, aside from my mother. On an individual level, yea, we benefit from that, but when we talk about the whole of our ethnicity.. we do not at all benefit from Whiteness. Romani people, as a people, have zero institutional or economic power over anyone.
We are a stateless nation that suffers from extreme oppression, segregation, and poverty regardless of where we live. “Gypsies” are loathed the world over, regardless of our skin color.
And, we’re not even getting into how conditional passing is for light skinned Romani persons, either. It’s not as if light skinned Romani people, even in the US, can just go about our lives as though we are White. It’s not as though people simply left their prejudices in Europe, or Turkey, or Armenia, or Iran, or Brazil.
I am in no way suggesting that light skinned Roma do not have privileges, but we spend our entire lives walking on glass. We are still othered and face xenophobia in a way that White people do not. For Romani people, “looking White” does not simply grant you access to Whiteness. Being *read* as Romani, as a Gypsy, most often has f*ck all to do with skin color.
“Don’t call Trump supporters nazis, it hurts their feelings.”
Yes, this is real (link to tweet). Yes, Tucker Carlson is literally repeating Nazi propaganda that aided the genocide of the Romani during the Holocaust. Yes, I am furious.
(Also, although there is a large population of Romani in Romania, they aren’t indigenous to Romania. They’re a diasporic group originally from northern India.)
Romani and Jewish have been screaming at the top of their lungs for years about neo-fascism in Europe, and Americans were totally aloof.
Then neo-fascism reared its head in America, but Roma and Jews were left out of the conversation in terms of people being impacted, because our oppression was “over.”
Now Tucker Carlson is on live TV using slurs and Nazi propaganda about Romani people, and I’m 90% most people on the left are just going to ignore it.
Naturally, Fox’s fearmongering story repeated unsubstantiated complaints from around 2% of the residents of
the small town of California, Pennsylvania,