The aim of this paper is to identify a few reasons for the intensifying of "anti-Gypsyism" and scapegoating of the Roma in Romania during the COVID pandemic.Reasons are both economic and social. The need for free movement (essential for economic subsistence of many isolated Roma communities) as well as poor access to basic services are but two reasons, which lead to circulation of prejudices, which depict Roma as "lacking discipline and a sense of self control." Focusing on the case of Țăndărei, this study intends to show that media representations are equally responsible for discourses of scapegoating and culture blame. Reports and articles which name Țăndărei as an "ecological bomb" fail to depict internal differences in the local Roma groups. Such representations (together with the process of scapegoating) may well illustrate Brubaker's theory on groupism: in that media discourse on "the Roma" indiscriminately merges people with different social backgrounds into a homogeneous ethno-racial group.

This article is part of the special cluster titled Social practices of remembering and forgetting of the communist past in Central and Eastern Europe, guest edited by Malgorzata Glowacka-Grajper This study deals with the liquidation of a Roma colony from the Romanian town of Oradea during the 1970s. Colony life, as well as the process of removal, demolition of the houses, and relocation of the inhabitants into blocks of flats, is mainly grasped through Roma narratives collected from 2011 onwards. But here we do not narrow down remembering communism to a mere collection of untold stories from the past. Based on the framework developed by Maria Todorova for the study of remembering communism, the following questions are addressed: How is the pre-1989 condition of the Roma revealed through their narratives? What do these say about the condition of the Roma during state socialism? How do past events influence the present-day marginalization of the group? A comparison of the socialist and post-socialist conditions of the Roma could be considered an important issue in forming an account of this ethno-racial group in Eastern Europe. It is so, as—despite the current research, which is small in number, various interpretations exist, raising the demand for scholars to address this issue.

Based on a long-term ethnographic fieldwork, this study applies the cultural-ecological theory to understand reasons for making and maintaining a segregated school in a Romanian town, and those community forces which track and maintain Roma children there. As findings indicate, creating and sustaining such an institution reflects the flipsides of Romanian national policies, which due to the financing strategies and centralized curricula—involuntarily—block the chances to provide quality education to marginal groups. Tracking and staying of Roma children into such schools is a result of their parents’ ambivalent experiences with formal economic activities and formal education. Experiences with work and schooling shared by this urban group of Roma reveal that parents have clear expectations towards school: transmission of practical knowledge, good treatment and isolation of the school problems from family life, which not always can be fulfilled by the educational units.

The aim of the present research is to analyse how some Roma in Romania become educationally mobile. Based on the cultural wealth model and the constructivist approaches to ethnicity and scholarship in relation to cultural racism, I intended to take stock of the forms of capital Roma persons make use of when ascending. I considered that the narrative type of interviews could be a successful means of generating a better understanding of the meaning and functioning of capitals. Narratives inform us that the same type of capital may appear in different forms: family capital may denote not ‘just’ the transmission of the importance of education to children but protection from racial insults, too. Institutional agents (as sources of social capital acquisition) – despite their good will – may equally facilitate the inclusion of and reproduce unequal racial categorization. Behaving differently, in opposition to the stereotypes associated with the Roma (low educational attainment, early marriage, poverty), is a conscious choice that may help many of the Roma to resist racial attacks.