Plight of Roma in EU 'one of the greatest human rights scandals on the continent'
Plight of Roma in EU 'one of the greatest human rights scandals on the continent'
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/50214232
I grew up in a country with a large Roma minority. Before WW2 they were travellers. They roamed the country in search of odd jobs. My grandma told me that they always paid them to cut their grass into hay bales, or to fix their pots and crockery.
Then communism came, and they were forced to settle dowwn and hold jobs. The vast majority never adjusted, and they treated their housing as temporary camp sites, devastating everything and then demanding new housing. This, naturally, created discontent that was aimed against the Roma, instead the authorities who forced them to change their way of life.
I now live in Ireland, which sees the same kind of "racism", even though they are white: the Travellers. As the name suggests, they also come from the roaming background. They are also forced to settle, and they are treating their halting sites as temporary camp sites. I have one nearby. I pay some people from there to clean my driveway or gutters. They do a better and cheaper job than professional contractors. I know that it's impossible to live a nomadic life in a civilised society, but sometimes I think how nice it would have been to let them roam again, and not care about them anymore.
I wouldn't say it's impossible
Kids that are legally mandated to be in school shouldn't be used for begging in the streets instead. Oops apparently I'm "racist" now for not "respecting" a beautiful "culture".
Actually, you weren't. Up until that last sentence.
Yeah, Europeans say some INSANELY xenophobic shit about Roma.
I dated a guy from Hungary that would go on and on about the "gypsies" and made racist jokes about them. It was quite uncomfortable.
There’s one in this thread and they’re completely unhinged
I saw. Really bad. Over 80% of Italians have negative opinions on them (I think it was Italians, can't remember rn), and even as an American, a place known for bigotry and hatred (as it should be), I could never imagine 80% of our modern population being that discriminatory. Maybe I've just been mostly interacting with the minority, but still.
You hear a lot of racist shit in Europe. It's not as bad in the big cities with large non-white populations but during times of xenophobia/super anti-immigration, the racism goes wild. Outside the big cities, it's as bad or worse than country USA racism just without the global public microscope
Right. Ten hour old account come to spew weird racism and bigotry.
I used to do homework help, a good chunk of the kids were Romani. They were just regular kids, and the parents were just regular parents. Hell, they cared more than my own mother did.
You can fuck off, you racist weirdo.
Evil is not hereditary. There is no ethnic group of people who are evil.
It's the so called travellers that are evil. Pretty much all travellers in some places are roma, but it seems increasingly few roma are travellers because I haven't really heard much of them recently in my country.
Generally, travellers raise their children to be thieves at a young age. Once they break out of that isolated crime community cycle, they're just people and blend into society.
Unfortunately in a lot of people's eyes, roma people are still a travellers. Seems in my country they've mostly gotten jobs instead of stealing and telling fortunes though, so nobody really cares about them anymore.
Edit: A lot of people are not getting this apparently (and also many are). Travellers are pretty much equivalent to gangs, but in a way even worse (yet also significantly less violent, luckily). They don't want their children to get educated, because they don't want better lives for their children. So yes, the original (and generally still ongoing) cause is poverty and discrimination, but there's an element of "we don't even WANT to be part of society" here. They have entirely different values from most other people as such. As such, just treating Roma as equals isn't enough. There's a need for outreach programs to try to get them to even WANT to integrate in larger numbers. It used to be that basically all Roma were travellers, and a huge problem is that people are still so prejudiced that in at least some European languages, the word for traveller and Roma is the same (it being essentially a slur, such as gypsy). Also through no fault of their own, knowledge of the word "roma" or "romani" is not as widespread as it should be... And the word itself sounds a lot like we're talking about someone from Rome or Romania.
Reminder: Hungary got Orbán, partly because alt media inflated "Roma crimes".