Overwhelmed by Anti-Gypsyism
There is a new word sneaking into the terminology of Czech public administration, government, media - ANTI-GYPSYISM.
We are constantly being convinced from different directions that the current nationwide anti-Romani sentiments are not racism, but a separate kind of hostility aimed at only some Romani, i.e. at those inadaptable, disrespectful, at those because of whom the term GYPSY was coined, with all its negative connotations.
In fact, the word is not that new again but it was first emptied and then filled with a completely new sense. It was Roma activist Rudka Kawczinsky, Director of the European Roma and Travellers Forum, who originally advocated the use of the new word. In his conception, anticikánismus (eng. Anti-gypsyism, also anti-ciganism) is a specific manifestation of racism aimed at Roma people. The use of the term was advocated in the Czech Republic by the Government Council for Roma Community Affairs and some of the Roma activists (Václav Miko: Anticikánismus in Bohemia). The basic idea behind the effort to conceptualize anticikánismus was to emphasize the specific nature of racism directed against Roma.
The most fundamental shift in meaning took place as a result of a research carried out by the STEM organization on the request of the Czech Ministry of Interior, whose aim was to analyze public attitude toward right-wing extremist, racist and xenophobic ideas published in 2010. Research report says that the Czech anti-gypsy attitude (...) is primarily socially grounded and connected with the fact that the Czech society associates the Romani with maladjustment, criminality and abuse of benefits. Research even concludes that anti-gypsyism has nothing to do with racism. In that sense, the term anti-gypsyism is from now on used in state administration.
Thus, while the term was originally used as a specific form of racism in order to find new and effective tools to remove it, the current semantic shift, on the contrary, denies racist nature of it.
It should not be this way. I would like to mention in the first place that I am convinced that the only term we need is racism. But if we proceed to use the term anti-gypsyism, we cannot deny its racist component. The angry mob from Varnsdorf does not want to send to a gas chamber only the inadaptable, asocial gypsies, but the Romani as an entire social group. According to our experience, most of the Romani victims of hate violence are not socially excluded, but integrated. They are not attacked because they are misfits or criminals, but because they are being considered as such on the basis of an external sign – their skin color. As long as the state continues promoting the second of the abovementioned meanings of the term anti-gypsism in order to justify the racist manifestations of a part of the society, it will in fact adopt the far right wing argumentation and will pave the way for many more serious problems than the current disturbances in Sluknov.
Author: Klára Kalibová
Translation: Grzegorz Fraś
Datum: 24.10.2011
Zdroj: In IUSTITIA
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