The word #Gypsy is a racial slur — a very important thread

Instagram has witnessed the hashtag being used over 7 million times and still counting by the second.

This term has casually been mentioned in various walks of life, while many brands are using it as a selling point there are others who often talk about their wanderlust and hunger for travel as the embodiment of living life like a ‘gypsy’.

Gypsy a word that is used to describe vagabonds and their lifestyle is, in fact, a racial slur. It is a word that has dark history and horrific abuse attached to it for the Romani.

The Romani people have experienced unimaginable torture through the centuries. They were subjected to slavery in Romania, chained as war prisoners in Turkey in the 11th century and have faced the horror of Holocaust in the hands of the Nazis and the much feared dictator, Hitler.

For 500 years, the long travelled guests were forced in to slavery in Romania. When they were set free in 1860, many remained enslaved, mentally, walking around in phantom-shackles because they had neither the knowledge nor the means to create a life outside the world they knew

When one reads about the Holocaust it is often associated with the killing of Jews, but the fact remains that the Romani were equally ill-treated by the dreadful dictator Adolf Hitler and his battalion of Nazis.

Dr Mengele ,who worked in the Auschwitz concentration camp. His experiments included placing subjects in pressure chambers, testing drugs on them, freezing them, trying to change their eye color by injecting chemicals into children's eyes and various amputations & other brutal sg

Anna Maria ‘Stella’ Steinbach was photographed being sent to a nazi camp in 1944 and was unfortunately gassed to death along with her family.

Historians estimate that nearly 70 per cent to 80 per cent of Romani were murdered during the Holocaust

When Romani people entered Europe way before the nazi through the middle east, Europeans with little to no knowledge about their origin labelled them ‘gypsies’ given the colour of their skin, and their features. They assumed the Romani people came from Egypt.