Hiii I keep seeing this one person on tiktok saying nightwing being romani is inherently racist (and it seems like maybe you’ve seen them too 😭). I understand the arguments I see over how it’s written or if he’s white/POC or any other kind of nuanced stuff like that, but they’re not even saying that, they’re saying that at its core the retcon is racist bc it’s a stereotype. I’ve seen and enjoyed a lot of your posts about this topic but I was curious if you think this person’s opinion is valid/how you would counter it. Sorry if you’ve answered this kind of question before and I havent seen it!
Yeah, I’ve definitely seen them…
Spoiler: this is gonna be a vent/rant post lol
Part of me really wants to just reply to their videos with one of my own* and just stand there like 🧍♀️‘hi.’ Because, surprise, I am a Showman — my entire cultural identity is literally just defined as being a gypsy/traveller from the fairground/circus. Please, oh omniscient Tiktoker who isn’t even part of our closed culture, tell me all about how my very existence and the existence of the 20,000 other Showmen in the UK alone is nothing but a racist stereotype.
Maybe that sounds harsh, but it is something which does really annoy me. Our culture is closed, and as such, this information is not freely available, so it does make me question why people with no real tangible connection to our culture feel qualified to comment so definitively on the issue.
I’m not saying that the representation of Dick’s heritage in canon or in fandom has been perfect. There definitely are times in which certain writers fall back or rely on racist tropes or caricatures in their writing (I hesitate to say ‘especially Grayson’, since Dick’s heritage is a lot more central to her storytelling than subsequent runs, so there’s gonna be more opportunity to slip up. Generally, I enjoy her run). Similarly, as I’ve posted about before, there are also many in the fandom who have, even if well intentioned, fallen back on racist stereotypes, ironically, in an attempt to undo racist stereotypes. And, yeah, these examples can and should be called out and discussed (especially with the input of someone who is GRT, ideally), but as someone who is ethnically Romani, who grew up speaking the language and part of the culture, on the fairgrounds myself with my family in the circus, the idea that Dick’s heritage, even if it is a retcon, is racist is, simply, absolutely ludicrous to me because it is my lived experience! You can’t ’sounds fake but ok’ my literal life story, lol.
Also: something I find really common in those types of TikTok posts is discussion of what % Romani heritage Dick has… which 1) is a very American perception of race which really weirds out my European mind, and 2) seems WAY more racist than the supposed racism they claim to be against. So many of these posts/comments try to claim that Dick is ‘only 1/4 Romani’ and therefore it doesn’t matter at all, which feels very much like they’re trying to preserve their perfect WASPy gorja boy, which feels dodgy to me lol. My response here would be that I truly don’t know where they’re getting that information from in current canon. I presume it comes from a mix of pre-Flashpoint John Grayson being Romani, uses of phrases like ‘Romani heritage’ in canon, the idea that Mary was a dental assistant (and thus could never be Romani because we all know that Romani people can’t have any job other than *checks notes* circus performer, fortune teller, Esmerelda, or thief), and William Cobb as Dick’s great-grandfather. And whilst I could argue that, since Rebirth, we could argue that Dick could be 7/8 Romani (if we consider ‘everything’s canon’ and thus John’s dad could be a diddakoi, since who is to say if Cobb is Romani or not, and Mary is commonly presented as Romani across multiple runs), I won’t bother to argue that, because I’d much rather say that unless you’re a real fan of the Nuremberg Laws, it doesn’t even fucking matter what % Romani he is. I’ve got a cousin who is, ethnically, 3/4 Romani and who grew up on the fairgrounds and is fully in the culture — her mum remarried a gorja man, and so my cousin’s half-siblings are only ethnically 1/4 Romani, and guess what — it doesn’t fucking matter; they are, in the eyes of everyone in the culture, Romani kids who grew up in the culture, speak the language, grew up on fairgrounds, etc etc. So if it’s good enough for us, why is it not good enough for random gorjas on the internet?
I also want to point out that I also don’t view the fact that it’s a retcon as being a bad thing. Even if you’re somehow a continuity purist and think this came out of nowhere, I think it’s totally possible to read a Romani/Showman background into Dick’s character, pre-Grayson. Many of Dick’s core personality traits are the type of beliefs which parents in our culture set out to instil into their kids, and the fact that it’s never brought up before also isn’t a big deal, because, tbh, I don’t really have much reason to talk about my ethnicity in such explicit terms in my real life, either. I personally love the fact that Grayson retconned this in, and that it’s gradually become more accepted in subsequent runs, because 1) I don’t think it’s too stereotypical, I think it’s believable, 2) rep is rep, and it’s not something we get a lot of (especially in a positive light), 3) even if she didn’t always get it right, Grayson tried! (Honestly, I think a lot of the fandom’s handling of Dick’s ethnicity is a lot more problematic than what we see in Grayson’s writing).
This ended up being way longer (and perhaps passive-aggressive lol) than I intended, but TLDR: even if Dick being a gypsy from the circus is stereotypical, that doesn’t mean it’s wrong, because there are plenty of us for whom that is our exact experience (such as myself!). In fact, I would even argue that the hoops in which these people go through in order to argue that Dick being Romani is racist is often even more racist than the thing they’re arguing against itself! Anyway, you can pry Romani Dick Grayson from my cold, dead hands lol
*I won’t, because I don’t like being on camera anyway, but especially not since I work with kids.
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