sâmbătă, 31 ianuarie 2009

About gypsies in Romania

There is this well-known funny-kind of anecdote in the Romanian urban culture:
There was a gypsy kid and he had a white friend. One day the white kid complained to the gypsy kid that he got beaten by his parents because he hadn´t been as hard working in school activities as his gypsy friend had been.
This joke embodies the kind of racism explained by Frantz Fanon in Racism and Culture (1956). In this case, denigration and distrust.
-denigration: Romanians would assume that all or most of their gypsy neighbours lack competence in any activity. That´s why the white parents were so upset and used violence against their own son. They wouldn´t have expected from a gypsy kid to have better school results than a white kid.
-distrust: the white parents were so uneasy about hearing about a Gypsy kid´s good results. Because gypsy kids are not accepted in the society of the majoritarian Romanians, his case is a dangerous case for the stability of the racist system imposed by us, the white Romanians. The fact that one gypsy kid had good school results was not likely to be accepted as a frequent rule among all gypsy kids.

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