The black tea I sipped in the cafe seemed to curdle as I processed the words. An engaging conversation with an academic colleague had just turned bitter as I heard him repeat a slur and a biased narrative I’ve experienced far too often.I was making an argument about the lack of recognition of the Romani victims of the Holocaust when he blurted it out. He said that “G******”, a repellent term for the Roma people in my and his part of the world, were targeted by the Nazis due to “criminality”. This ill-informed assertion has long been used in certain academic works that depict the Romani people as inferior victims of the Holocaust.
While some official statements and ceremonies that commemorate the Holocaust acknowledge its Roma and Sinti victims – such as during the recent 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz – many institutions still depict and distance them as part of a separate genocide or as “other victims” of Nazi regimes. In part, this stems from the racist myth of criminality that accompanied the campaign of mass extermination of Romani people and the telling of history afterwards. Advertisement
Still, this myth, strongly tied to biological racism, is still alive and well today, and it affects policies, behaviours, and attit …
