Researching stuff on Romani ppl for writing reasons and literally everywhere I go they're throwing out the g-slur like SIR DO YOU KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT WHO YOU'RE WRITING ABOUT--
You know... it's okay to feel passionate about a particular group. It's okay to want to help a marginalised people. It's okay to support your marginalised groups. You can also be part of a marginalised group / minority group and support someone else from a marginalised/ minority group that faces discrimination.
But don't speak on behalf of them. Don't make decisions and announce yourself as if you have a right to speak /for/ those people. You don't. They can, each and every one of them, make their own choices and decisions. They have their /own/ voices.
You're causing them more harm than good by being a SJW trying to "defend" them. They are not defenseless. In doing so, you not only treat them as if they are helpless and cannot defend themselves... but you also rob them of their voice and their right to have a say.
You can support marginalised peoples. But stay in your lane and stop running them off the road. They don't need you as a hero. They need you as a supportive friend.
Someday, as a non-Romani white person, I would love to write a Romani character but do it right.
It just feels like all my reading and sources are mainly coming from articles written by WHITE (oftentimes English) historians sociologists.
Below the cut is some thought vomit regarding this and what not...feel free to comment below/reblog with your thoughts+comments+concerns+feedback because I would love to hear other people’s onions particularly from tumblr’s Romani community.
If you guys know of any good Romani-sourced articles, books, documentaries, journals or WHATEVER please let me know because it just feels like I keep getting the white narrative. Particularly, I’m mostly interested in their historic religious practices, folklore, and any truth to the idea that their ancestral religious practices are in any way related to the concept of “mysticism”.
For context, I wanna write a book about magic and urban fantasy stuff and my story revolves around a group of witches (or magic practitioners), humans, and other supernatural entities from different cultures coming together to defeat “a big bad”. They all make up a council sort of like a United Nations of witches/magical beings kind of a thing.
I know there are portrayals of characters who are Romani (such as Marvel's Scarlet Witch although that's probably a terrible example all things considered) but are also magic and have magical powers but, I also believe that writing a witch OC or these kinds of characters that practice "magic" as we see it in movies and TV (or in my case an ubran fantasy book) as Romani are just going to be considered derogatory and only feed into those harmful stereotypes.
I'm currently trying to learn more about Romani culture here and there by doing my own research where I can (which entails a LOT of reading, naturally) but MAINLY pertaining to what their religious practices entail, their folklore, how that feeds into the culture of what it means to be Romani, and how the stereotypes became down to the historical and factual context and so on.
Ironically enough, some sources say that many of the claims of mysticism regarding Romani individuals actually come from false narratives often perpetuated by non-Romani people.
Today, a lot of Romani people, seeing as how many of their ancestors were initially from India, actually follow the Hindu, Muslim, and even Christian religions. Specifically, Orthodox Christianity, Roman Catholic, or Muslim (also feel free to correct me if I’m way off base with this or any of this info).
I wish people knew more about Roma people in Europe, especially eastern Europe. I genuinely barely saw anyone bring the situation up in any human rights discussion. I feel a little uncomfortable talking about it because I'm not romani and I was extremely privileged growing up, raised by racists. I don't know that much about other countries, but in Romania it's absolutely horrid. These people have been ghettoised, genocided, ostracized, people use literal adjectives derived from slurs referring to them that mean "tacky, ugly , gaudy". There's people naming their dogs slurs. Many Romanian "leftists" talk about BLM and how you shouldn't say the n word while calling Romani people slurs, saying they're dangerous and subhuman, I heard multiple people in my life calling for their extermination, saying stuff so disgusting I don't even want to repeat. Again, people who are victims of the Holocaust. The racism in my country is so horrid I genuinely think it's the worst in the western world. White kids straight up kick, beat up and bully Romani children in school, call them slurs and throw things like them, and I personally know examples of this happening. The police won't protect them, politicians slur them on live TV. It doesn't matter that you have certain legal benefits(by this I mean special places in school etc) when you suffer the worst of the worst racial discrimination in institutions. If you're reading this and haven't heard about it I urge you to read and research about Romani people, their culture is so rich and wonderful, Romani language is very interesting, their clothes, music etc... Again I wish a Romani would be talking about this instead of me, but I've almost never heard any European say anything about this and many Americans have this weird impression that Europe is a safe haven for minorities compared to the US. They are victims of the Holocaust yet I barely see them ever being brought up, I learned about it for the first time when I visited Auschwitz, which is crazy to me.
This is like finding a stray journal page in a ruined city that talks of some grand festival and the date of the entry is the day before the city was destroyed
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