#anti roma racism

[librastrai]

remembering when i saw a tweet that said "ireland should do the right of return, it would make more sense than israel" & like in what world does ireland do the right of return while actively culturally genociding & restricting movement of their own indigenous ethnic minority? of minceiri & roma & other nomadic subgroups under the grt label?

the audacity that the english gave youse by providing fodder for this victim complex is insane.

[fandomshatepeopleofcolor]

Jacob Elordi being cast as Heathcliffe reaffirms that Hollywood like to pick and choose when they decide a Roma character is white.

Honestly I'm so sick of Jacob Elordi. Like is it too early to boycott this version of wuthering heights? we need like a hashtag to talk about Roma characters getting whitewashed.

mod ali

[gloriousburden]

Hey, you don't have to apologize at all! <3 We all have our lives. Also, it is up to you to decide when you wish to answer or if you wish to answer some asks at all! This is supposed to be your space, so def take all the time you need!

I'm happy that I helped you put some thoughts into words, too! And like always, I agree w all you say!! Also, for the Sylvie shapeshifting part — there's a post on it (if I find it I'll send it to you), and sadly, it is true. I didn't connect the dots before, but now it makes further sense with how they use her character, too. It is stated multiple times in the series by Mobius, and in general they kept highlighting the fact that she's a female counterpart. I shouldn't be surprised, but I always am in the end 😔

And another point you made — for Ragnarok, I saw your rb and. Man. When I tell you my jaw DROPPED at that scene — like ... It's awful. I hope that we won't have that one day, even if that feels far away. None of you deserve this. Putting such lines is very harmful, because (other than the fact that it's just straight up disrespectful, racist and ignorant) while the film itself is fictional, it still has influence in real life and people could take that and think it would be fine, to belittle and mock others. I've learned about your culture and am still learning, and with everything that has transpired, things like this make everything worse. It's so widespread, too, the misinformation. Of course, the best weapon to this is to be respectful, open, informed, and curious about everything, but still, such lines should not be accepted at all. You have already stated it very well. Thank you for that.

Sorry you had to see that, Thor would never. Bruce either, that cannot be Bruce, I revoke him ... Oh, and I'm definitely up for listening to your points on this. I'm very curious about it. I'd also love to learn more about your culture!

(Including your other ask here as well)

Hey! I checked out a few of her posts about it. Is this it? [Link]

In all honesty, I’m not too sure about the shape-shifting thing. But… I assume her being able to shape-shift as well as the enchanting stuff would’ve made her too “OP” (not that they really care about that) and not “distinctive” enough from Loki lol. As for her being strictly female and not fluid… man, I don’t know. I guess they wanted to focus on female rep (which they’re not really good at either) instead. They already see Loki as male, so they treated both of them as only being female/male with the ‘Sex:Fluid’ thing being an afterthought to “please” fans. Basically:

‘OKAY SHUT UP YOU’VE GOT IT! WE THREW IN A FILE SAYING HIS SEX IS FLUID DURING THE CREDITS, BUT HE IS SHOCKED WHEN A FEMALE VARIATION OF HIM SHOWS UP! Uh… it totally wasn’t an afterthought or anything, haha…”

🤦🏻‍♀️ so stupid.

Female counterpart… the writing and handling of Sylvie being female felt misogynistic to me. Okay so Loki cannot call her out on her own flaws (because how dare a female character have flaws), but also she’s automatically stronger and is so “badass”, but also she has no depth and there was little thought put into her backstory. I can straight up say that as a female that I do not want to see robotic female characters with absolutely no depth, and no flaws! Instead of them correcting the misogynistic mistakes they’ve made in the past with making a strong female character, they make her robot like because I guess that’s easier than giving a female character depth.

I feel like a good example of a well written female character is Mikasa from Attack on Titan. She is strong, but also has depth. She loves Eren, but has a personality and motives outside of that. She has weaknesses, and is not immune to struggling. She’s one of my favorite female characters, and I think more should be written like her. Anime/Manga are notoriously BAD at handling female characters, but in Attack on Titan (though there are still flaws of course), they feel real. They aren’t just there for fan service, or just to shut up female audiences with no actual care put into any part of it.

Lol sorry I deleted the RB Because I felt no one saw it, but thank you so much for reading it!

[Link] for context.

I really do appreciate you taking the time to learn about my people, and our culture. Thank you for seeing us for who we are, outside of all the hatred. It truly does mean a lot, as I’ve been discriminated against throughout my life.

I also want to point out that the joke isn’t JUST beyond disrespectful to my OWN culture, but it is disrespectful to any other culture that’s cultural clothing includes headscarves. So many people who proudly wear their headscarves (and any other cultural clothing for that matter) are targeted in hate crimes and It’s just really gross to me that they chose to mock them. It fuels hatred and ignorance. It alienates people.

A lot of people when talking about anti Roma racism mainly talk about the G word (Gypsy), but there are more important things to me than that. Like the fact that Roma children are ethnically targeted in hate crimes by non Roma ADULTS and AUTHORITY FIGURES throughout Europe, but primarily in the Balkans where a lot of us reside/have ties to.

Politicians openly spew hatred against us, with little to no repercussions. They want my people to assimilate, but when they attempt to, they are mocked and just overall treated like garbage. There’s no winning. They want them to strip themselves of our culture. Of our traditions.

I will not get into it on here a whole lot as it is absolutely vile, but my people were targeted during the Holocaust and experimented on in horrific ways. How were they targeted? Nazi scientists studied our features, and how we dressed.

That’s why jokes about how we look or how we present ourselves really are not funny. It reflects real life.

I believe I said this in so many words on the OG post, but the weirdest part to me of all of it is how little sense it makes for Bruce to make that joke to Thor. Like it was just Mark Ruffalo going out of his way to be hateful towards us once again. Thor doesn’t pay much mind to the joke if you watch the scene.

It’s funny because Thor (after his banishment), has almost always been respectful towards other groups of people from what I can remember at the top of my head.

He was respectful towards humans when he was casted out to Midgard, and he CLEARLY tolerates them to a certain extent if he’s willingly in a relationship with one, as well as willingly associate with them (The Avengers.)

‘You can’t kill an entire race..’

‘You think yourself above them?’

Thor is supposed to be open minded for an Asgardian, so.. this really was just Mark Ruffalo and his racism again. And I know he portrays himself as being aware of and deeply caring about social issues, but I guess that awareness and care excludes Roma. That’s what makes it worse. What also makes it worse is the MCU’s history of racism against us. A lot of people have talked about this on here, but the white washing of MCU Wanda/Pietro. As well as Joss Whedon’s racism towards us.

Thank you for the ask! Once again, feel more than welcome to send another any time 😁

[djuvlipen]

Romani women were assaulted by a man in front of their children in Czechia

(04/01/2024)

On the afternoon of 31 March in Teplice, Czech Republic, a Romani woman named Natalie was assaulted in the presence of her child by a non-Romani man who was unknown to her. Natalie says she, her sister and their children were aggressively targeted by the man, who started shouting at them in a local park.

Natalie described going to the park with her young daughter and several other young children from her family. Her sister accompanied them.

“The children were playing with pebbles, they weren’t doing anything to anybody, and he started shouting at my daughter, so I asked him what was bothering him,” Natalie described how the incident started to news server Romea.cz. The man started shouting very vulgar abuse and the women objected.

“We told him not to speak so crudely in front of the children and he walked right up to me and got in my face. I pushed him away more than once, but he assaulted me physically. He slapped me and then, when my sister came to my aid, he slapped her and it became a fight. The children were crying and in total shock,” Natalie described the situation.

“We shouted to the other people in the park to call the police. Eventually my sister called the police and the man started to run away. My sister ran after him for a moment, but her little boy began to cry terribly, so she came back,” Natalie described to Romea.cz.

Police arrived at the scene within 10 minutes. “They downloaded videos from people who had filmed it and I gave my statement to the police today,” Natalie said on 1 April.

“If the children had been white he wouldn’t have even noticed them, but he started shouting directly at my daughter,” Natalie told news server Romea.cz. Police spokesperson Kamil Marek confirmed to news server Romea.cz that police are investigating the incident.

“Police officers in Teplice are investigating an incident on suspicion of misdemeanor behavior. The operations officer immediately sent a police patrol to the scene. The officers immediately started searching for a male suspect meeting the women’s description, but he disappeared. They have requested camera footage and are continuing to identify the suspect,” Marek told Romea.cz.

A brief video clip capturing the incident was posted to social media. The footage shows a little girl weeping and a man assaulting her mother.

The video was available on Facebook during the evening of 31 March; while the original post was subsequently deleted, the video continues to be shared in various groups. News server Romea.cz has obtained the video.

Czech Government Commissioner for Roma Minority Affairs is in contact with the assaulted woman

On the afternoon of the assault, the Vice-Chair of the Czech Government Council for Roma Minority Affairs, Marián Dancso, got in touch with the assaulted woman and accompanied her to the police station the next day. “The woman who was attacked gave a statement to the police today, who were maximally helpful and offered both the woman and her young daughter psychological aid,” Dancso told news server Romea.cz, adding that he was told the police have issued a statewide arrest warrant for the suspect.

Czech Government Commissioner for Roma Minority Affairs Lucie Fuková is also following the case. “I do not have detailed information about this matter yet. After watching the video that is circulating on social media I am outraged by this repulsive violence, especially in the presence of children,” she told Romea.cz, adding that she is in contact with the assaulted woman through Dancso.

“I will keep monitoring the situation,” Fuková said. The ROMEA organization has sent the assaulted woman contact information for the In IUSTITIA organization, which legally aids bias crime victims.

[sissa-arrows]

The anti roma racism that people are showing in France making jokes about Kendji Girac (he got shot and is between life and death) are disgusting,

Anyone saying this is not anti roma racism is a fucking idiot because had a white singer been shot they would never ever make jokes about it the way they do with Kendji Girac. Making jokes about how they “interviewed his family” (the didn’t) and then talking in gibberish to imitate said family… and you end up seeing a bunch of white people laughing as if it was funny when it’s just disgusting.

[hachama]

"If you see [fictional representation] and see [real marginalized people], then you're the one with the problem!"

This argument doesn't hold water with minstrelsy, it doesn't work with "g***y fortune tellers," and you shouldn't tolerate it with antisemitic caricatures either.

Trust people to be able to recognize tropes that harm them.

There's more at stake than some video game.

[ludiharambasha]

There is a special place in hell for the husband of Zumrita Nerda. He may not have gotten a life sentence, but he will feel unsafe wherever he sets foot.

[dyke-terra]

Obsessed with this type of guy who thinks that being polish is a defense against accusations of anti-roma racism. Like, I’m not an expert in Polish politics/history by any means, but uhhhhhhhhh, buddy...

[wettestwraith]

They're fucking putting up frog statues in stores apparently to "ward off romani people" like putting aside the whole dehumanization of it all why the fuck do you actually think that would work

[buxina]

One final historical note re: Nosferatu (2024) since I've seen this in the notes of my other post that's been going around and elsewhere. I've seen a few people share the sentiment that Eggers' decision to include a Romanian character very briefly expressing anti-Romani racism and use of the g-word was somehow "unnecessary," racist, or a bad directorial decision on his part. I find this incredibly baffling.

Like aside from the Media Literacy 101 point that depicting racism in media is *not* racism, there's the fact that one problem of Western media depictions of Romani people is the complete sanitization/erasure of their experiences of living under extreme oppression and racism. Instead, they're portrayed at best as these magical colorful but also shady people who just for some reason "chose" to be social outcasts.

Nosferatu takes place in 1838. The enslavement of Romani peoples lasted from the 14th century to the mid 1840s-ish, where they were treated as property of the state, church, or nobility. Most Western audiences have no clue about this history. I thought it was interesting and poignant that the movie showed the Romani people as knowing the threat posed by Count Orlok, especially considering as high nobility he would be quite literally a bloodsucking parasite to them, an undead persistence of their real enslavers. In contrast, in the original Bram Stoker's Dracula, the Romani people are depicted in an overtly racist manner as Dracula's henchmen.

And regarding the use of the g-word (or  ț*gan in Romanian) in dialogue: The word is an exonym, i.e. a word used by outsiders to refer to a people rather than the name the people themselves use. It's absolutely a slur because it became often used pejoratively by the oppressing majority (much like the word "Ind*an" to refer to Indigenous peoples in the Americas.) But in the film scene's context and time period, it's simply the only word for Romani people in the Romanian language, i.e. there didn't exist a "nicer" term that a non-Romani character would have used and that could've been swapped out in the script.

I'm not saying the film is perfect. There's elements of racism, anti-semitism, and xenophobia in the source material that are hard to root out and persist as undertones in pretty much all vampire media even if, like Eggers, you make changes to the storytelling. *That* is very much worth thinking deeply about. But I think taking issue with a brief and realistic portrayal of societal stigma that real people would have encountered in 1830s Transylvania is not the thing to critique here.

[icedsodapop]

I'd also say the only thing that saved the first gotg movie was Nicole Perlman's writing, or what was left of it 🤷🏻‍♀️ But yes, the erasure of two Asian women to uplift a mediocre White man.

Seeing men defend James Gunn's writing of female characters against women who are critical of him is really evident that Gunn writes "strong" women in a way that's still palatable for men. You don't usually see these losers go to bat for female characters often.

[positively--speculative]

Out of curiosity, I googled "Roma actors" and found Paul Eryk Atlas, and I have to tell you, my ass would much more likely be in that movie theater seat with an actor who looks like this over a "big name" white actor who got to play Iron Man already for 100 years:

[moontheoretist]

This moment when you learn that Adventurine is Romani and that his entire planet is named with a word that in both english and slavic are considered slurs against Romani people... I guess the galaxy at large is anti-Roma if they called that planet Sigonia-IV. If Hoyo doesn't give us info that this planet was actually named differently by the people living on it that wasn't named a giant slur, then I'll have to assume that Hoyo is ok with naming a whole ass planet full of Romani-based people with a slur used against those people. And it's bad. At least Adventurine's clan is named somewhat nicely, but what does it change when every single one of them was killed and Adventurine is the only survivor?

I can't shake the feeling it's a very racist portrayal, because the meta message basically assumes that a Roma-based character can't have anything akin to a normal life. That they have to suffer, lose everybody, and become a tragic character "working" for a huge space corporation that couldn't care less about people. Only to ultimately "die" for the sake of said corporation and possibly never be able to come back from the state of spiritual death. And even if he managed, he knows that all his achievements were monopolized by that corporation and that he has virtually nothing to his name and nobody to come back to. The only positive is that he is supposedly blessed with luck by Gaiathra.

Don't take me wrong disgussing the tragedy that happens to minority groups is important and should be done in media, but there is also a point often brought up that if your group is constantly represented as struggling to get by and opressed and nothing else then people start to internalize the idea that this is the only way those characters and people they're based on can live. That there is no normalcy that they have in life, so no normalcy is expected from their portrayals. This happened to queer people. We all grew tired of being constantly only represented as a group whose only point in the story is to be visibly opressed and that we never got a chance to have normal lives as well.

If he comes back, will Hoyo give him a better life? We will see.

Still... the implications are so ugh. I can't speak more about it as I'm not Roma and I definitely don't understand the stuff enough to say anything substancial, but this just looks kind of bad as it is now.

Fortunately there are Roma creators I can direct you to for better insight in regard to Adventurine and his roma-based heritage:

In addition to the video: When I learned that Adventurine (Kakavasha) is supposed to be Romani his design stopped being ok to me. Because it means Hoyo appropriated a real life oppression of a group so they could then stick it to a white guy in a video game. It says a lot about Hoyo, who already had similar issues in Genshin Impact before. It feels like Hoyo fears melanin, because there are other Chinese video game studios who don't stray from using dark skintone on their characters and those characters are selling pretty well, so what's the issue?

[quillandrapier]

Tw in images for anti romani slur /////

I still find it insane that marvel STILL has a slur in pietro's bio on their website and they probably think that's okay. It's disgusting how they keep getting away with this

[djuvlipen]

11.11.2023, Christos Michalopoulos, a 17yo Greek Romani teenager, was shot dead by the police.

09.19.2023, a Molotov cocktail is thrown at a Sinti encampment in Prato, Italy.

08.07.2023, Muszunye Mircea Vișan, a 33yo Romanian Romani man, is beaten by the Romanian police until he went into cardiac arrest and died.

04.13.2023, Jani Rustemaj, a 27yo Albanian Romani man, is beaten to death by cops while in police custody.

12.05.2022, Kostas Frigoulis, a 16yo Greek Romani teenager, was shot dead by the police. They fired 30 times.

07.25.2022, Hasib Omerovic, a 36yo Italian Romani, disabled man was beat up by the police and pushed out of his bedroom window, falling from a height of nine meters. He has been in a coma ever since.

07.2021, Brasilian military police murders the Romani families living in Vitória da Conquista. At least six Romani people were shot dead and another 15 wounded on the 13th of July. The following day, a 14-year-old Romani boy was shot dead by the police.

10.23.2021, Nikos Sabanis, an 18yo Greek Romani teenager, is shot dead by the police.

06.19.2021, Czech police officers kneel on the neck of Stanislav Tomas, a Czech Romani man, until he stopped breathing.

05.2021, Pîtea Constantin Daniel (22) and Constantin Dănuț Aurel (45), two Romanian Romani men, were beaten up by the police and threatened with execution: "Wait and see for yourself. We will take you to the field and there you will see that we will kill you

05.25.2020, Gabriel Djordjevic, a 14yo French Romani boy had to undergo surgery and almost lost his eyesight after being beaten by the police. He suffered PTSD following the attack.

09.27.2018, Henri Lenfant, a 23yo French Romani man, was shot dead by the police.

04.13.2017, a Romani man and his son were beaten by Bulgarian police.

09.26.2014, Raymond Gurême, an 89yo French Romani man, Holocaust survivor, and former Resistance fighter who helped liberate France from the Nazis, was beaten up by French cops in his own trailer.

[boeing747]

ive had a few like situations where ive been cut off/had to cut someone off and i always figured after a few years id regret it no matter what but it turns out actually the only thing at this point i want to say to those people is "hey so what the actual fuck was your problem there" lmfao