#gypsy roma traveller

[librastrai]

anyways one day grt folk will be able to travel freely on our own lands without the irish government criminalizing us for it & portraying us as dirty thieves & vagrants. all while claiming a moral superiority they never earned.

[dragynkeep]

seeing a bunch of radfems in the grt tag like pls. terfs don't even see us as women, get the boot off your neck.

[bea-lele-carmen]

[dreamweaverai]

Fun tarot girl

[alenasbdesign]

Ceramic Ball Ornament

Dimensions: 3" h x 2.5" w x 2" d Back Design: Bell

[contentking24]

"I think there’s an element for those of us amongst the trans and gender non-conforming community - and this goes for me as a transmasc as well - where the way we interact with gender and perform gender is very much linked to our experiences with Gypsy and Traveler gender roles. So again, a big example of this would be how some of Cherry Valentine's drag performances were explicitly inspired by the visual coding of Gypsy and Traveller women. And so I've noticed that when I want to present more feminine, the way that I visually code that isn't a gorger (a word used to describe people who aren’t Romany) feminine, it's a Gypsy feminine.

I think a lot of my transness might be linked to my disconnect from the gender roles that are expected of me and I've joked to members of Traveller Pride that I'm trans in a very specifically gypsy way. Yes, I'm trans masculine, and that means trans masculine in the way that if I had longer hair, it would be slicked back with hair gel and I'd have boxing glove charms hanging on the front of my van."

[camphorfreya]

I love how genuinely happy and excited she is. Full of optimism despite the challenges of living as a traveler. This girl got ripped off by her dressmaker and handled it like an absolute champ because ultimately she’s happy with where her life is going and doesn’t give a fuck about the details.

[onbreakreadlastpost]

Learn more about the oppression, discrimination, and racism that Gypsy, Roma, and Traveller people go through in Europe in the 21st century.

Some organisations have donation links. I encourage those who can to donate to any or all of the organisations that accept donations.

Please share and reblog this post.

You don't have to be in the country the group is from to donate. Use a currency conversion tool online to get the exchange rate.

[paulinecordiner]

For Gypsy Roma Traveller History Month, I'd just like to thank all the storytellers, ballad singers and good friends of traiveller, gypsy roma, new age and showman heritage who have shared their wonderful stories and culture with this toonser over the years. Thankyou!

[whitetrashwarriorprincess]

[dykepuffs]

How Do I Make My Fictional Gypsies Not Racist?

(Or, "You can't, sorry, but…")

You want to include some Gypsies in your fantasy setting. Or, you need someone for your main characters to meet, who is an outsider in the eyes of the locals, but who already lives here. Or you need a culture in conflict with your settled people, or who have just arrived out of nowhere. Or, you just like the idea of campfires in the forest and voices raised in song. And you’re about to step straight into a muckpile of cliches and, accidentally, write something racist.

(In this, I am mostly using Gypsy as an endonym of Romany people, who are a subset of the Romani people, alongside Roma, Sinti, Gitano, Romanisael, Kale, etc, but also in the theory of "Gypsying" as proposed by Lex and Percy H, where Romani people are treated with a particular mix of orientalism, criminalisation, racialisation, and othering, that creates "The Gypsy" out of both nomadic peoples as a whole and people with Romani heritage and racialised physical features, languages, and cultural markers)

Enough of my friends play TTRPGs or write fantasy stories that this question comes up a lot - They mention Dungeons and Dragons’ Curse Of Strahd, World Of Darkness’s Gypsies, World Of Darkness’s Ravnos, World of Darkness’s Silent Striders… And they roll their eyes and say “These are all terrible! But how can I do it, you know, without it being racist?”

And their eyes are big and sad and ever so hopeful that I will tell them the secret of how to take the Roma of the real world and place them in a fictional one, whilst both appealing to gorjer stereotypes of Gypsies and not adding to the weight of stereotyping that already crushes us. So, disappointingly, there is no secret.

Gypsies, like every other real-world culture, exist as we do today because of interactions with cultures and geography around us: The living waggon, probably the archetypal thing which gorjer writers want to include in their portrayals of nomads, is a relatively modern invention - Most likely French, and adopted from French Showmen by Romanies, who brought it to Britain. So already, that’s a tradition that only spans a small amount of the time that Gypsies have existed, and only a small number of the full breadth of Romani ways of living. But the reasons that the waggon is what it is are based on the real world - The wheels are tall and iron-rimmed, because although you expect to travel on cobbled, tarmac, or packed-earth roads and for comparatively short distances, it wasn’t rare to have to ford a river in Britain in the late nineteenth century, on country roads. They were drawn by a single horse, and the shape of that horse was determined by a mixture of local breeds - Welsh cobs, fell ponies, various draft breeds - as well as by the aesthetic tastes of the breeders. The stove inside is on the left, so that as you move down a British road, the chimney sticks up into the part where there will be the least overhanging branches, to reduce the chance of hitting it.

So taking a fictional setting that looks like (for example) thirteenth century China (with dragons), and placing a nineteenth century Romanichal family in it will inevitably result in some racist assumptions being made, as the answer to “Why does this culture do this?” becomes “They just do it because I want them to” rather than having a consistent internal logic.

Some stereotypes will always follow nomads - They appear in different forms in different cultures, but they always arise from the settled people's same fears: That the nomads don't share their values, and are fundamentally strangers. Common ones are that we have a secret language to fool outsiders with, that we steal children and disguise them as our own, that our sexual morals are shocking (This one has flipped in the last half century - From the Gypsy Lore Society's talk of the lascivious Romni seductress who will lie with a strange man for a night after a 'gypsy wedding', to today's frenzied talk of 'grabbing' and sexually-conservative early marriages to ensure virginity), that we are supernatural in some way, and that we are more like animals than humans. These are tropes where if you want to address them, you will have to address them as libels - there is no way to casually write a baby-stealing, magical succubus nomad without it backfiring onto real life Roma. (The kind of person who has the skills to write these tropes well, is not the kind of person who is reading this guide.)

It’s too easy to say a list of prescriptive “Do nots”, which might stop you from making the most common pitfalls, but which can end up with your nomads being slightly flat as you dance around the topics that you’re trying to avoid, rather than being a rich culture that feels real in your world.

So, here are some questions to ask, to create your nomadic people, so that they will have a distinctive culture of their own that may (or may not) look anything like real-world Romani people: These aren't the only questions, but they're good starting points to think about before you make anything concrete, and they will hopefully inspire you to ask MORE questions.

First - Why are they nomadic? Nobody moves just to feel the wind in their hair and see a new horizon every morning, no matter what the inspirational poster says. Are they transhumant herders who pay a small rent to graze their flock on the local lord’s land? Are they following migratory herds across common land, being moved on by the cycle of the seasons and the movement of their animals? Are they seasonal workers who follow man-made cycles of labour: Harvests, fairs, religious festivals? Are they refugees fleeing a recent conflict, who will pass through this area and never return? Are they on a regular pilgrimage? Do they travel within the same area predictably, or is their movement governed by something that is hard to predict? How do they see their own movements - Do they think of themselves as being pushed along by some external force, or as choosing to travel? Will they work for and with outsiders, either as employees or as partners, or do they aim to be fully self-sufficient? What other jobs do they do - Their whole society won’t all be involved in one industry, what do their children, elderly, disabled people do with their time, and is it “work”?

If they are totally isolationist - How do they produce the things which need a complex supply chain or large facilities to make? How do they view artefacts from outsiders which come into their possession - Things which have been made with technology that they can’t produce for themselves? (This doesn’t need to be anything about quality of goods, only about complexity - A violin can be made by one artisan working with hand tools, wood, gut and shellac, but an accordion needs presses to make reeds, metal lathes to make screws, complex organic chemistry to make celluloid lacquer, vulcanised rubber, and a thousand other components)

How do they feel about outsiders? How do they buy and sell to outsiders? If it’s seen as taboo, do they do it anyway? Do they speak the same language as the nearby settled people (With what kind of fluency, or bilingualism, or dialect)? Do they intermarry, and how is that viewed when it happens? What stories does this culture tell about why they are a separate people to the nearby settled people? Are those stories true? Do they have a notional “homeland” and do they intend to go there? If so, is it a real place?

What gorjers think of as classic "Gipsy music" is a product of our real-world situation. Guitar from Spain, accordions from the Soviet Union (Which needed modern machining and factories to produce and make accessible to people who weren't rich- and which were in turn encouraged by Soviet authorities preferring the standardised and modern accordion to the folk traditions of the indigenous peoples within the bloc), brass from Western classical traditions, via Balkan folk music, influences from klezmer and jazz and bhangra and polka and our own music traditions (And we influence them too). What are your people's musical influences? Do they make their own instruments or buy them from settled people? How many musical traditions do they have, and what are they all for (Weddings, funerals, storytelling, campfire songs, entertainment...)? Do they have professional musicians, and if so, how do those musicians earn money? Are instrument makers professionals, or do they use improvised and easy-to-make instruments like willow whistles, spoons, washtubs, etc? (Of course the answer can be "A bit of both")

If you're thinking about jobs - How do they work? Are they employed by settled people (How do they feel about them?) Are they self employed but providing services/goods to the settled people? Are they mostly avoidant of settled people other than to buy things that they can't produce themselves? Are they totally isolationist? Is their work mostly subsistence, or do they create a surplus to sell to outsiders? How do they interact with other workers nearby? Who works, and how- Are there 'family businesses', apprentices, children with part time work? Is it considered 'a job' or just part of their way of life? How do they educate their children, and is that considered 'work'? How old are children when they are considered adult, and what markers confer adulthood? What is considered a rite of passage?

When they travel, how do they do it? Do they share ownership of beasts of burden, or each individually have "their horse"? Do families stick together or try to spread out? How does a child begin to live apart from their family, or start their own family? Are their dwellings something that they take with them, or do they find places to stay or build temporary shelter with disposable material? Who shares a dwelling and why? What do they do for privacy, and what do they think privacy is for?

If you're thinking about food - Do they hunt? Herd? Forage? Buy or trade from settled people? Do they travel between places where they've sown crops or managed wildstock in previous years, so that when they arrive there is food already seeded in the landscape? How do they feel about buying food from settled people, and is that common? If it's frowned upon - How much do people do it anyway? How do they preserve food for winter? How much food do they carry with them, compared to how much they plan to buy or forage at their destinations? How is food shared- Communal stores, personal ownership?

Why are they a "separate people" to the settled people? What is their creation myth? Why do they believe that they are nomadic and the other people are settled, and is it correct? Do they look different? Are there legal restrictions on them settling? Are there legal restrictions on them intermixing? Are there cultural reasons why they are a separate people? Where did those reasons come from? How long have they been travelling? How long do they think they've been travelling? Where did they come from? Do they travel mostly within one area and return to the same sites predictably, or are they going to move on again soon and never come back?

And then within that - What about the members of their society who are "unusual" in some way: How does their society treat disabled people? (are they considered disabled, do they have that distinction and how is it applied?) How does their society treat LGBT+ people? What happens to someone who doesn't get married and has no children? What happens to someone who 'leaves'? What happens to young widows and widowers? What happens if someone just 'can't fit in'? What happens to someone who is adopted or married in? What happens to people who are mixed race, and in a fantasy setting to people who are mixed species? What is taboo to them and what will they find shocking if they leave? What is society's attitude to 'difference' of various kinds?

Basically, if you build your nomads from the ground-up, rather than starting from the idea of "I want Gypsies/Buryats/Berbers/Minceiri but with the numbers filed off and not offensive" you can end up with a rich, unique nomadic culture who make sense in your world and don't end up making a rod for the back of real-world cultures.

[romanationmovement]

GYPSY, ROMA AND TRAVELLER ORGANISATIONS CONDEMN DIANE ABBOTT LETTER

[thethirdromana]

There's a lot of anti-Romani racism in Dracula, and today's entry marks the start of it.

So I thought it might be a good opportunity to highlight some organisations that are working to promote Roma rights, and some ways, alongside donating, that you might be able to support them.

The European Roma Rights Centre carries out strategic litigation to support Roma rights, as well as doing advocacy and research. You can sign up to volunteer for them here; one volunteer-run project currently live is called Challenging Digital Antigypsyism, and focuses on identifying and reporting hate speech on social media platforms.

On a similar theme, Minority Rights Group International has a campaign toolkit on countering cyberhate against Roma. The focus of the campaign is Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovakia.

In the UK, Friends, Families and Travellers works to end racism and discrimination against Gypsy, Roma and Traveller people and to protect the right to pursue a nomadic way of life. If you're in the UK, you can ask your MP to sign their pledge card. And if you witness discriminatory comments in politics, you can report that here.

The Roma Support Group, based in London, works with Eastern European Roma refugees and migrants. They have a number of volunteer roles for people with regular time to offer.

[ayeforscotland]

what do you think of the reveal that nicola sturgeon deleted all her covid whatsapp messages?

I honestly don’t care, and not for the reason you think.

I’m exhausted. I saw this on twitter two days ago and I quote tweeted it.

My utilities bill is higher than ever, my weekly shop is more expensive than ever, I have no savings after giving it all to my boiler and even then I had to ask people for help.

I do not give a fuck about covid what’s app messages, which aren’t important anyway because What’s App wasn’t used as an official communication channel throughout the pandemic.

I do not give a shit when the worst people in Scottish politics try to hype up a scandal.

‘Dame’ thick-as-shit Jackie Baillie who lied to elderly voters about their pensions during the independence referendum.

Misogynist Alex Cole-Hamilton who still ducks media scrutiny over everything the former Scottish LibDem CEO, Emma Walker, has came public with.

And racist little cunt Douglas Ross who’s ‘if he was prime minister for the day’ fantasy was harsh restrictions on the Gypsy, Roma, Traveller community.

I do not care what these pile of arseholes think is a huge scandal when me and all my friends are struggling with basic needs. Friends who were managing fine a few months ago and are now aggressively budgeting to make ends meet.

[hairtusk]

had a really interesting morning at work that has made me think a lot about the discourse r.e. wuthering heights lol. i had a meeting with a student who is soon to be homeschooled, his parents, a liaison officer, and a representative from the traveller network (a group that supports GRT families in dealing with government stuff) - before the parents arrived, the rep advised us that the family were english gypsies, and wanted to be referred to as such. he made it very clear that there are distinct difference between the different groups within the umbrella term of the gypsy, roma, and traveller community (<- the official name for it), though his group represent all three. i can talk about those if anyone cares. they would have been offended if we had called them travellers, because they're not - they're romanichal english gypsies.

anyway, i know that in a lot of places, and to some groups, gypsy is definitely considered a slur, and that should be respected - but i do find it a bit weird that we automatically censor a term that an actual group identify themselves with - they are proud of it and it is the only label they use. i feel like we should probably be more culturally sensitive to this rather than just blanket banning the term.