Roma Rights and Civil Rights

Abstract

To properly contextualize Roma rights and explore the parallels with civil rights, we must first trace the history of Romani peoples in CSEE, a history that stretches back over a millennium. Scholars have studied the origins of the Roma as well as their paths into CSEE for centuries. For nearly as long, this scholarship has objectified, exoticized, and marginalized its very subjects-in short, replicating society's exclusion of the Roma. To highlight and avoid these perils, we begin this Chapter by surveying how Romani studies as a field has evolved to a juncture that now facilitates broader structural comparisons with other minority groups. Since the nineteenth century, scholarship on European Roma has been dominated by the ethnographic approach of "Gypsiology," or Gypsy lore, which is preoccupied with Roma culture, folklore, and origins. 1 This approach rests on a proposition, often attributed to the German historian Heinrich Mortiz Gottlieb Grellmann (1753-1804), that the itinerant groups scattered across Europe, frequently (and pejoratively) called Gypsies, constitute an ethnic group bound by a common language and land of origin, India. 2 Under the spell of this thesis, successive generations of Gypsiologists attempted to uncover the paths that the first Roma had traveled into Europe, using historical and linguistic evidence to prove or disprove the links to India. 3 Along the way, they classified Roma into intricate categories based on culture, dialect, and geography. Rather than seeing that all the variations challenged a unifying ethnic categorization of "Gypsy," Gypsiologists bemoaned the imminent extinction of the "true Gypsy," an archetype that hewed close to the central features of the ethnicity. 4 1

Engaging with the claim of Roma people through twitter: who is behind the hashtags?

“…Despite the extensive scholarly attention that the #BlackLivesMatter movement has received, with thousands of scholars analyzing social movements and minority rights, both within and beyond the United States (Ince et al, 2017), there remains an absence of comparable analysis regarding the issue represented by "RomaLivesMatter." While parallels can be drawn between the Roma people in Europe and Black Americans in the U.S. (Chang and Rucker-Chang, 2020), the political influence of the Black Lives Matter movement and its prominence on social media are undeniable, whereas the manifestation of the Roma movement in the social media space appears to be more limited. Moreover, while the Black Lives Matter movement has organized hundreds of disruptive protests in American cities since 2013, gaining considerable attention from the U.S. media (For instance, the killing of George Floyd in 2020 and its worldwide impact) (Bonilla and Tillery, 2020), situations of abuse against Roma people, like the episode of the 8-year-old Roma girl in Greece mentioned at the beginning of the study, although often reported, are far from receiving mainstream attention.…”

‘It’s still them’: concealed racism against Roma in Romanian television news

“…Scholars have suggested that hostility to the Roma has been growing in particular since the end of communism in 1989, period that recorded a surge in ethno-nationalism and racism (Chang & Rucker-Chang, 2020;Sardelić , 2021). Such attitudes have also been fueled through scapegoating of the Roma by politicians where many were experiencing frustrations through shortages of jobs, declining economic prosperity, poverty and instability (Schneeweis, 2009).…”