Today is International Roma Day! Not many people know about us, but we’re an european ethnic minority that have been persecuted and enslaved for centuries. We were murdered in the Holocaust and many of us still struggle with lack of human rights, extreme poverty and exclusion.

Gypsy is a slur. Please refer to us as Roma or Romani, and stop stereotyping us as thieves and criminals. Every day we face discrimination and modern day slavery. Eastern european Roma are brought to the west to work for half of the minimum wage on fields and sleep in buses.

White europeans keep excusing the way they’ve been treating us, denying us housing, jobs, education, all because we are nomads that didn’t know how to cope when slavery-laws were abolished. We are not bad people, we are misunderstood, and when you are born on the street you +

have no choice but to steal. Building yourself a life when you are born in a situation like that is difficult.

We’ve always been secretive about our culture, but somehow people have started portraying us as fortune tellers that live in caravans and even though it was true to a certain extent, white people still keep using our clothes and accessories as a trend. Although they despise us.

Many of us live normal lives because they were lucky enough, but that doesnt mean they dont face colorist and racist remarks on a daily basis. And that doesn’t make them any less of a Roma because they don’t live in romani communities or travel around like this (how the media +

portrays us ALL to be).

Breaking down anti-gypsy stereotypes means not splitting them into subtypes because you’ve met a Roma person that doesn’t live in a box and steals. Stop avoiding us. Support us, stand up for us when your gadje (non-roma) friends are being discriminatory.

Educate yourself and have a little empathy. Stop believing everything white europeans say to target us. We’ve worked for them in salt mines for centuries and then when slavery laws were abolished they suddenly gave us homes and made fun of us for not knowing how to act like human

beings because we’ve never been treated like one. Now many of us aren’t even allowed to own a property and our job or education applications get turned down.

Please pray for all the homeless Roma during this pandemic. They are at risk of police brutality for not staying home and being denied healthcare (in case of actually getting infected) sanitation and even fresh water in. They deserve to be protected just as everyone else.

If you want to read more about Roma related issues, I’ve read these through and even though some arent written by us they are accurate and worth reading:

1. Identifying and changing stereotypes between Roma and non-Roma, from theory to practice: https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/27223953.pdf