one day we were hanging out, when somehow the topic of the Roma people came up and he referred to them by the derogatory term that starts with a G. I figured he was just ignorant of it, so I told him that it's really not cool to say that and that he went on a whole rant about how romani were "bums" and that "all they did was steal" and that "you would agree with me if i met one." He gave a few anecdotes about how he saw a romani person in line at a grocery store and said they stank, giving this as justification that they are all "bums." When I kept calling him out on saying the G slur he told me to grow a pair, because "people are gonna say stuff you don't like." I was really confused and shocked as he had shown me nothing of this and I was pretty sad. I feel so angry that this kind of discrimination is so god damned common among americans. I cant wait to get out of this hellhole
Anti-Roma discrimination is extremely virulent in Europe, and generally accepted among even the social liberals
I wouldn’t call it a w but in the united states Roma are unironically white passing, elvis is the biggest example of this. The european brand of racism didn’t translate to the american kind 1:1. american racism is more centered on anti-blackness while european racism is more religious/nationalist. I do think the american version is becoming the more dominant form thanks to amerikkka’s unparalleled cultural dominance but Roma people suffer worse under the european kind, the same could be said for Jewish people.
we had g-slur fortune tellers in carnivals for a while but even within that context nobody here knows shit about stateless european ethnic minorities. if you're really lucky maybe somebody knows enough about the holocaust
Race has basically nothing to do with the discrimination these people face here in the UK. It is culture formed around anyone following traveller lifestyles and all of them face near identical discrimination for it as if they're all one and the same, regardless of ethnicity.
I got tons of shit for the country I was born in. I don't even have much if anything to do with it culturally and I'm only partially it ethnically. Euros love to be xenophobic. Germans are really fucked up when it comes to xenophobia. They're so open and smug about it. :/
I am so sorry you experienced that POS. I'm manifesting better friends in your life. 🫂
Germans are objectively the worst because they can’t shut up about how committing the Holocaust made them enlightened and special
"we're actually less racist than anyone else because we got all of that racism out of our system by killing 12 million minorities" -
I'd like to introduce Poland in contention for being the worst.
In Poland it's a jailable offense to say Poland participated in the holocaust in any way. They loved it more than the Germans.
Poland might be the country with the most fragile historical ego out of everyone in the Northern Chihuahua Belt
yeah, thanks for the kind words. it's just frusturating that so many people are like this
As soon as he starts doing empty rhetorical shit like "people are gonna say stuff you don't like" you know they're a manipulative asshole.
Yeah “people”. Not my friends. Friends don’t say racist shit. If you don’t knock it off then it’s bye bye
Is your new friend European? If so generally safe to assume they're racist against Roma people until proven otherwise.
You can tell a European is starting to trust you if they tell you "Hitler was right about Roma people" in a slightly hushed tone.
Exactly, case in point Jimmy Carr's Holocaust apologia joke (cw: racism, Nazism)
Pretty sure I know which special this is without even looking, and I generally liked seagull man for a few, if often, crude jokes, but that kinda put me off entirely...
The most liberal European when asked about the Romani:
Show
I would guess 99% of Americans have no idea who the Romani even are, you found a very rare kind of guy
Sorry dude that fuckin sucks. I don't know whether it's just because I'm older or better at sussing stuff out but it's really hard to meet new people that aren't fucking racist. Hell half the friends I had from my 20s developed racist and/or transphobic beliefs.
This happened to me too. Met up with a friend from college days (20+ years) for lunch the other day. We were really close while studying, spent holidays together, etc. Then life happened and while messaging each other from time to time, we had not had the chance to meet up again. Midway through our meal, he started telling me he was suspended that same week from his job (teacher at a preppy college) for calling a student by their dead name on multiple ocassions. I told him that yeah, that is rude, cruel and uncalled for and he should get a lawyer because what he did is fucked up... he then started rambling about forced inclusion and men's rights and chromosomes blah blah.
It broke my heart in a way because we were such good friends but now he is just too far gone for me to be able to have a relationship with him.
Had pretty much this exact experience with a friend of mine. Only I had some clients that were Roma who were wonderful people. A little extra but very nice and always brought me food and stuff and when I would bring that up she would just be like “ok well they’re nice but that’s not how most of them are!”
ugghghg it was literally this. i asked him how he could possibly claim that they were ALL "bums" and he kept justifying it
embarrassed to admit that I was close friends with a guy for many years who would say shit like this since we were teenagers. american who visited his family in europe once or twice as a kid and came back racist against romani people. and frankly had a lot of other bigoted and generally misanthropic views, which I would regularly call out and push back on, which became incredibly exhausting. fuck, I wish I could have found more friends who were cool and chill instead of this racist reddit gamer debatelord dipshit
americans. I cant wait to get out of this hellhole
I hope you’re not going to Europe because it’s much worse over there
love when people are like "um how can a word be racist it's just a word" and "these people are subhuman btw and i hate them" in the very same breath
I've gotten this exact speech a couple of times.
If I only knew what they were really like I would understand why they are so widely reviled.
Had an ex who constantly described their preferred aesthetic using that word; never really got through to them that it was problematic.
"If you said that about a black person you'd be a social pariah" usually works for me but I don't know if it's different over there in america. Pointing out that what they're saying is literally identical to anti-black racism is usually a shock to the system but tends to sink in at least a little bit.
i said that, and he said "no i love black people" and continued spewing the most vile, nasty shit
honestly witnessing the frictionlessness of this kind of socially acceptable racism really makes me wonder just how thin the taboos against overt racism actually are. like white americans used to just say that shit about black people all the time what, 50 years ago? and now supposedly we're post-racism because they learned that you can't say the N-word?
How can he hate the Romani? Has he not seen the Hunchback of Notre Dame?!
