#antiromanyism
I think it’s interesting to see the reactions to today’s Dracula Daily that are like, “He did a racism! He used the g-slur!” and don’t go deeper than that. I was born in the early 80s and didn’t know the g-slur was a slur until like between 5 and 10 years ago. I mean, there was a whole Disney movie that used the word like it was no big deal when I was in middle school. I’m not saying Disney wouldn’t do a racism, I’m saying Disney wouldn’t have put language in a 90s kids’ movie that wasn’t considered “politically correct” in mainstream America at the time. Anyway, my point is that until sometime in the mid 2010s, I honestly thought G****** was just what that group of people were called, or was a term for nomadic people in general. I guarantee there are well-meaning Americans in the year 2022 who aren’t tuned into online antiracist discourse who still think that. Stoker could’ve easily used the word thinking it was no different than calling someone an Englishman or a cowboy.
The blatant racism here is how the Romani are portrayed. They are “without religion, save superstition,” i.e. Godless heathens, i.e. their religion isn’t a version of Christianity so it isn’t a legitimate religion. They’re ignorant for only speaking their own language, even though Jonathan doesn’t speak or understand it and doesn’t understand most of the foreign language he’s encountered on this trip. They act overtly deferential and subservient to Jonathan. They take his money and then sell him out to the Count.
If this narrative had only used the word Romani or the name that this particular group of Romani used for themselves (I’m seeing meta that Szgany is a slur, too, but I haven’t looked into it), this depiction would still be racist. While it is important to update our language as we gain better information, I think terminology is ultimately less important than whether a marginalized character or group is being portrayed as an offensive racial stereotype. I see all kinds of writing by modern writers, professional and amateur, that uses all the correct 2020s terminology but still portrays characters as the invulnerable black woman, the submissive Asian woman, the predatory brown man, the Jewish moneylender, etc. Again, I’m not saying terminology doesn’t matter and shouldn’t be critiqued in older writing, I’m just saying we shouldn’t let terminology distract from content.
calling use of the g slur “online discourse” is not your place as a gadjo. romani people telling you that the z slur is a slur shouldn’t be something you need to “look into”. this is not a bad post overall, and in fact i agree with you on almost every level, but the incredibly blasé approach you are taking to the use of antiromanist slurs here is super not cool.
you’re right that stoker’s depiction is antiromanist with or without the use of slurs, but both the g slur and z slur cause absolutely visceral reactions for myself and many romani people, especially when used by gadje. talking about the use of slurs doesn’t automatically mean that people are discounting the portrayal of rom as money obsessed superstitious scammers. i personally tend to expect that from any media with romani characters in it, but i don’t always anticipate the use of the g slur, so i was glad to see a post warning of the g slur prior to reading.
overall, you’re not wrong, but you’re making your points while also grossly overstepping.
Nothing much in the New Annotated Dracula for today, just a note that Sygany is usually spelled Tzigane, and some stuff about stereotypes of Roma people that just covers the stereotypes everyone knows.
It’s probably worth saying though that the word our friend Jonathan uses for these people, beginning with g, is generally considered a slur by American Romani people, but is nowhere near so widely considered a slur in the UK (it’s generally used these days as part of the acronym GRT, with the R being Romani/Roma/Rom and the T being Travellers).
I haven’t looked yet, but I can imagine there is a certain amount of Discourse around this word brewing on this site already as a result of this difference, so I thought I should point out it *is* a genuine cultural difference – many (not all) GRT people in the UK think of the word as an inoffensive term, while most (not all) in North America consider it a slur – so anyone arguing vehemently for the side that you think is very wrong is possibly not taking those differences into account.
(The relative loadedness of different terms in the UK and NA is a fascinating subject, and one that often causes problems).
I should note that this is just my understanding as someone who isn’t a member of the affected communities (and I avoid the term anyway to be on the safe side), and you should not listen to me over them…
i’ve seen several people reading dracula having jonathan’s letters as him having the romani under mind control or killing the rom jonathan gave his letters to in order to take them by force. while this is a valid reading and completely reasonable, i do feel it is important to mention that that was almost certainly not stoker’s intended take-away. the romani people in dracula were written by an antiromanist in an antiromanist manner, and the fact that the rom who receives the letters takes jonathan’s money and then immediately betrays him is a reflection of that.
Dick Grayson is Rromani. Making him into a genocidal fascist is not only an insult to his character but to the Rroma. This is in no way acceptable. It is antiziganist and incredibly disrespectful on so many levels.
He is one of, if not the most iconic Rromani characters and him being made a fascist follows the decision by marvel to have Wanda Maximoff join hydra, a nazi organization. These are blatantly antiziganist and follow a dangerous trend in recent media that threatens the safety of minorities. We are being demonized and being made to be the perpetrators of fascism, of genocide, of Nazism. I have had enough and it is time the creators knew this.
if you are gadje please reblog this. The Rroma will not stand for this. Neither should you.
I remember a while back there was this immensely popular post with a gif of Hitler flattering his wife, that had tons and tons of notes from all these people gushing about how they had no idea Hitler was human too. When I criticized it, this older blogger claimed all these tumblr teens were taught in school to “dehumanize” Hitler, and now they were learning more than the simplistic narrative they were taught in school. It was, according to them, mind-broadeningandimportant. The dehumanization of Hitler they claimed is a huge problem, and a bigger problem was young people thinking too simplistically about this complex person.
But this is the thing:
It’s true you are taught a simplistic and misleading narrative about World War II and the Nazis in school. But the problem isn’t that you’re taught to think badly of Hitler and Nazis, who committed mass murder, torture, enslavement, and other human rights abuses. The problem is you are taught that the US was the good guy and the Nazis were the antithesis to everything the US represented and now represents. You’re taught that the US came in and saved everyone in the name of freedom and democracy and crushed those Nazi fascists! And everyone lived happily ever after.
When in reality, the US invented eugenics which inspired the Nazis’ Aryan racial ideals in the first place. The Nazis modeled their treatment of Jews, Romani and other minorities after how the US treated Black people. Not only that, but the US refused the entry of many European Jews fleeing the Holocaust into this country. The US refused to help the Jews and other minorities targeted by Nazis. The US ignored pleasbeggingthem to destroy gas chambers when they were so close within striking distance in Europe that they hit one accidentally.
What happened was after Pearl Harbor put the US at risk, they got involved and then they made up a story about why they were the good guys and why the Germans were the bad guys, about how they were now all about saving the world and the poor Jews. And the truth about antisemitism in the US (there were literal signs saying NO JEWS and shit, which you never learn about in school), about eugenics in the US, about the US’s deadly passivity for much of WWII, is actively erased, glossed over or explained away. And meanwhile, irony of ironies, the US sent thousands of Japanese Americans to internment camps–which of course were not the same as Nazi Germany’s extermination and concentration camps, but weren’t exactly the kind of thing someone who was ideologically opposed to Nazis would do. (You’re taught about the internment of Japanese Americans in school, but you aren’t encouraged to think about it as compromising the US’s alleged position as ideologically opposing Nazi Germany).
The US has used WWII to its advantage to create a particular narrative. It’s arguably a big reason antisemitism in the US changed and Jews started to achieve much greater access to whiteness. Associating Jews with whiteness dissociates Nazis from American racism and eugenics, despite how much mental gymnastics you have to do to ignore the fact white supremacy was at the core of Nazi ideology (people continually allege Jews were white in Nazi Germany despite the fact Nazis killed them, literally, to purify the white race). It takes the conversation away from the end result of white supremacy: genocide and brutality. Think about how important that would have been in the 1930s and 40s when the US was even more overtly racist than it is now. How would the US look: a nation where PoC, and Black people especially, were constantly exposed to violence and oppression? When what allowed the concentration camps in Nazi Germany to exist was a change to their constitution that allowed the deprivation of human rights in particular spaces, and all Roosevelt had to do was write an executive order depriving Japanese Americans of rights just as easily. Criticisms of white supremacy and human rights violations in Nazi Germany open up the same criticisms toward the US. I’m not the first to have that idea. Harper Lee tackles it in To Kill a Mockingbird.
Tumblr SJ who complain the Holocaust gets “too much attention” compared to other social injustices also seem to miss this point–they suggest it’s ~Jewish privilege~ or white privilege that explains why everyone cares more about the Holocaust, ignoring the fact that the mainstream narrative in the US about the Holocaust and WWII also often erases the long history of antisemitism in Europe and the history of it in the US. The narrative suggests Nazis arbitrarily decided on Jews as a scapegoat and ignores the racialization of Jews in Europe. There’s also an implication that with the end of the Holocaust came the end of antisemitism. Many aspects of the mainstream narrative around the Holocaust is hurtful to Jews. Ignoring the role of white supremacy in the Holocaust does no marginalized people any favors: as well as making it too easy to let the US off the hook for creating eugenics in the first place, it also erases Romani, who were targeted in the genocide, and are still definitely not racialized as white to this day.
The US is a racist empire (and I say empire because we currently live on colonized land and also exert worldwide control) and while I don’t like comparing Nazi Germany to anything, we’re not the opposite of Nazi Germany by any means–we certainly were not in the 1940s when we fought them. I don’t think the US is the same or even similar to Nazi Germany (as I said, I don’t like making lazy comparisons like that), but I think both the US and Nazi Germany have two terrible things in common: white supremacy and a government that has the power to deprive citizens of their basic rights at a moment’s notice.
That’s the story you’re not taught in school. That’s the mind blowing epiphany that actually matters.
Hitler being human is a fact of course. But he was a horrible, horrible human being, probably one of the worst in history. And making excuses for him being primarily responsible for wiping out one third of population of a people (Jews; edit: see here), 90% of the population of another (Romani), as well as countless other atrocities doesn’t make you interesting, edgy or counter-culture. It makes you downright despicable.
Sadly, it seems tumblr’s teens find the idea of Hitler flirting with his wife more interesting and mind-blowing than the idea that everything they were taught about the US’s role in WWII is slanted to mislead them.
everything WV did with “””wanda’s””’ costume is incredibly anti romani and i don’t know what’s so hard to understand about the fact that romani people are literally persecuted every day and you all think it’s? what? not your problem? elizabeth “cunt” olsen literally called it the “[anti-romani slur] costume” and you think it’s okay that she’s wearing it? that she called herself a “fortune teller” while wearing it? romani people literally cannot have homes or children in peace i feel like some kind of stupidity switch flipped and i’m one of 6 people who noticed
