roger wrote:I didn't know that, Walter. Are we all racists for not knowing all this?
No ... not really ;-).
"Gypsies" is a name from the generation "Indians", "Eskimos", "Lapps". Names invented by outsiders, who used it to label and lump together those they didn't know much about and didn't think very highly of.
The process of these native peoples' emancipation has meant that they have demanded the right back to be called by their 'real' names - the names they call themselves by. Thus nowadays it's "Inuit" instead of "Eskimo" and "Saami" instead of "Lapp". The Indians of old turned out to be in fact many different peoples, and thus the new catch-all term "native Americans" was introduced. The Gypsy vs Roma debate fits in the same category.
"Gypsy" was in fact a container name for people in many different countries, who tended to organise and define themselves by their (family) clan and/or by the country they live in. Some speak a dialect of their own language - Romanes; others speak the language of the country they live in. Some still trek around, others have been settled for generations. "Ethnic" identity has meant little to most of them, apart from the way they were othered and marginalised by the majority nationalities as "Gypsies". Some even have internalised that term and still use it for themselves.
The last decade (after the fall of communism), in particular, something of a national awareness movement has blossomed. A burgeoing Roma rights movement has started monitoring and protesting discrimination, racist violence, political exclusion. Ever more of them have demanded the right for their national identity to be recognized, as the carrier of a valuable transnational culture, and by its own name: Roma. In Western Europe the Sinti have gone through some of the same process in the last few decades.
So it's a combination of a process of emancipation, in which the racist labels and definitions have been thrown off and the 'own' name and cultural pride has been reclaimed - and of nation-building, as of course in
practice, this ethnic Roma awareness is unevenly present at best.
For example, in censuses around Eastern Europe, Roma are still extremely underrepresented, as they prefer to register as Bulgarian, Slovak, Czech, etc. Out of fear, or an internalised shame of who they are, or simply an opportunistic choice, taken easily in absence of deeply-rooted national awareness, to "be with the winners". Or out of a degree of assimilation - Hungarian Roma, for example, often speak only Hungarian and thus do not communicate or identify themselves with Roma elsewhere. In either Macedonia or Kosovo (I forget) one of the 1990s censuses suddenly showed up a substantial "Egyptian" minority, as - as anthropologists later found out - a new myth of origin was circulating among Roma that allowed them to self-identify in a way that seemed less stigmatising than Tzigane/Roma.
Roma are extremely weakly organised, and Roma political parties usually mobilise only a fraction of the estimated Roma population. And their political divisions are all caught up in the question of self-identification: thus in Bulgaria, Romas will take part in (ex-)Communist-oriented associations with the "Tzigane" (Gypsy) label, or in clubs and parties associated with the anti-Communists under the label of "Roma".
But the process of emancipation is definitely underway. In the last Slovak census, for example, more Roma had identified themselves as such than before. In Hungary, Roma have come to organise through the new system of local and regional self-government. Individual Roma have been elected into parliament on the lists of various national parties. There's a vibrant and transnationally organised Roma civil society (see
www.errc.org for an example). In Budapest, the first-ever all-Roma radio station in Eastern Europe was launched (
Radio C). And - ever more Roma take offense at being called "Gypsy".
