The black tea that I sipped in the cafe seemed to crump while I treated the words. A engaging conversation with a university colleague had just become bitter by hearing him repeat an insult and a biased story that I experienced far too often.
I was making an argument on the lack of recognition of the Romanesque victims of the Holocaust when he launched it. He said that “G ******”, a repulsive term for the Roma in my and its part of the world, were targeted by the Nazis due to “crime”. This ill -informed affirmation has long been used in certain academic works which describe the Romanesque people as lower victims of the holocaust.
While certain official declarations and ceremonies which commemorate the Holocaust recognize its Roma and Sinti victims – as during the recent 80th anniversary of the Liberation of Auschwitz – many institutions represent them and always distance them as part of a distinct genocide or as “other victims” of Nazi regimes. This follows in part from the racist myth of crime which accompanied the campaign of massive extermination of the Roman people and told the story afterwards.
However, this myth, strongly linked to biological racism, is still well alive today, and it affects policies, behaviors and attitudes towards Roma, even in allegedly progressive places like Canada.
In my research, I saw that in the daily life of Canadians, anti-Roma racism is rarely revealed through explicit acts of violence, unlike the incidents I have known or assisted in Europe. Instead, he often takes the form of daily racism – involved in and perpetuated by words, insults, jokes, interrogations based on stereotypes, passive or active distancing and incidents where the Romani are misunderstood, Subseed, ignored or ignored -Sudden and day -day that not only irritate and hurt but also are injured in oneself and well -being.
In recent years, I have worked with a research team from the FXB Center at Harvard University and the Canadian Romani alliance to identify and examine such indignities, described as “assault paths” by the sociologist Michele Lamont. We interviewed Roma and non-Romanian individuals in the Grand Toronto-Hamilton region (GTHA), which houses the largest Roman community in Canada, and developed our conclusions in a study Entitled to confront major and daily discrimination: Romance experiences in the Grand Toronto-Hamilton region in Canada.
One of the most common experiences of daily racism reported by the Romance Canadians that we interviewed involved a hint of crime from the omnipresent trope on a global scale, combining theft and deception with Roma identity and culture .
A typical experience of Romance individuals is saying with casualness: “Oh, if you are a G ****, you have to fly, or you move a lot and all that.” These stories can cause harmful actions. As a 76 -year -old Romanesque Canadian woman told us, she was suspected episodic theft after having disclosed her Romani identity to various colleagues. Feeling humiliated and injured, she felt forced to “open my backpack several times and say:” Here, look at my things “.
The old crime trope, as well as others, are repeatedly amplified in pop culture, films, television shows and even the academic world. In the context of the Grand Toronto-Hamilton region, such daily and repetitive use of tropes linked to crime in social interactions leaves that the people of the Romani feel misunderstood and discriminated.
A 25 -year -old Roman woman to whom we spoke estimated that the Canadians considered her “just another G ****, another G **** thief”. Other Canadians Romani are cautious in their interactions with other Canadians, in particular those of European origin, and in particular to share information on their ethnic descent.
The concealment or reproduction of the Romani identity extends beyond personal interactions, affecting official demographic data and, consequently, policies. While the Canadian census of 2021 said 6,545 Canadian Roma, unofficial estimates, including a United Nations report in 2016, suggest that the figure could be closer to 110,000.
Ethno-racial insults are also an important expression of daily racism in the great region of Toronto-Hamilton. In fact, on a global scale, ethno-racial insults are distinguished as a widespread expression of assault against value, documented in all continents in countries like Brazil, Israel and the United States.
Surprisingly for some, such incidents have also occurred in family circles. Several Romani shared insults or ethno-racial jokes linked to G **** crime from their non-Roma partners or members of families of partners. A person interviewed Romani shared that his non-Roma wife had told him that the Roma were either “stupid or dirty”.
The expression “dirty g ****”, rooted in racist ideas linked to physical and societal attributes or to an inherent biological and cultural impurity, was frequently mentioned as an insult in our interviews. Curiously, many authors of these ethno-racial insults were individuals of first generation European or transcontinental. “Look at them. Look how dirty they are. Look how ridiculous they are. Look how coarse they are, “said a taxi driver born abroad to a romanal woman.
Our research has also revealed a persistent use of racial insults to hurt, insult, humiliate and discriminate the Romanesque people or simply to address Roma individuals. Canadians in the Grand Toronto-Hamilton region use the term G **** as an autonomous insult against the Romanis they see in the street or during cultural events. The exonym G **** is generally considered a racial insult in romantic circles, although it is adopted by certain Romanesque groups, such as the British Romanesque people.
The equivalent insults of G **** in different languages are also used, in particular by Canadians of European origin. Essentially, we have noticed a link between immigration and importation in Canada of country stereotypes with important Roma populations, which we documented In the United States in 2020.
The study shows that faced with ethno-racial insults, Canadians novels feel sad, shameful, traumatized, dangerous, wounded, avoided or outdated; They also share that such experiences cause nausea, anxiety, panic, numbness or feeling of threat. “These experiences … stay with us,” said a participant in the Canadian Romani study.
While for many, the suspicion of crime, the term G ****, and related insults could be automatic words or thoughts, for Canadians Romans and the global community of Romani, they represent weapons of rejection, D ‘Humiliation and discrimination that have endured for centuries.
It is crucial for our global community to stop the armament of racist tropes and racial insults and to use ethno-racial insults or jokes against the Romanesque people and racialized groups. Allowing these harmful stories to persist presents real risks for real people.
In Norway, for example, the crime trope justified the recent creation of a Roma register, which was no different from the registers created in a certain number of European nations before the Holocaust.
In the United States, similar tropes are used to support mass expulsion and detention policies of migrants in detention camps such as Guantanamo Bay, who, as executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, Vince Warren, There remains a global symbol of “anarchy, torture and racism”.
The persistent use of tropes and racist insults contributes not only to the marginalization of racialized communities, but it can also lead to a dangerous normalization of state and non -state violence against them.
The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Al Jazeera.
