As I processed the words, the black tea that I drank in the cafe started to sag. I overheard a slur and biased narrative from an academic colleague, who had just had an engaging conversation.
When he mentioned the fact that the Romani victims of the Holocaust were not acknowledged, I was arguing. He said that “G******”, a repellent term for the Roma people in my and his part of the world, were targeted by the Nazis due to “criminality”. This misguided claim has long been used in academic works that portray the Romani as less than the Holocaust’s victims.
While some official commemorations of the Holocaust acknowledge the Roma and Sinti victims, such as those commemorating the recent 80th anniversary of Auschwitz’s liberation, many institutions still view them as separate victims of a Holocaust or as “other victims” of Nazi regimes. This comes in part from the racist myth of impunity that predominated the Romani people’s massacres and the subsequent telling of history.
Still, this myth, strongly tied to biological racism, is still alive and well today, and it affects policies, behaviours, and attitudes towards Roma people even in allegedly progressive places like Canada.
In my research, I have seen that in the daily lives of Canadians, anti-Roma racism seldom reveals itself through explicit acts of violence, unlike the incidents I have experienced or witnessed in Europe. Instead, it often takes the form of everyday racism – implied in and perpetuated by words, insults, jokes, stereotype-based questioning, passive or active distancing, and incidents where Romani people are misunderstood, underestimated, overlooked, or ignored—sudden and day-to-day stings that not only irritate and hurt but also wound one’s self-worth and wellbeing.
Over the past few years, I worked with a research team from , Harvard University’s FXB Center , and the , Canadian Romani Alliance to identify and examine such indignities, labelled as “assault on worth” by sociologist Michele Lamont. We interviewed Romani and non-Romani individuals in the Greater Toronto-Hamilton Area (GTHA), home to Canada’s largest Romani community, and put together our findings in a study titled , Confronting Major and Everyday Discrimination: Romani Experiences in Canada’s Greater Toronto-Hamilton Area.
One of the most frequent instances of everyday racism reported by Romani Canadians was when they were questioned about a suspicion of criminality brought on by the pervasive global-spread trope, which linked thievery and deception to Romani identity and culture.
A typical experience of Romani individuals is being casually told, “Oh, if you’re a G****, you must steal, or you move around a lot and stuff”. These stories can lead to bad behavior. After disclosing her Romani identity to various coworkers, a 76-year-old Romani Canadian woman claimed to have been repeatedly suspect of theft. Feeling humiliated and wronged, she felt compelled “to open my backpack several times and say, ‘ Here, look through my things. ‘”
The old trope of criminality, along with others, gets amplified over and over again in pop culture, movies, television shows, and even academia. Such frequent and consistent use of criminality-related tropes in social interactions in the Greater Toronto-Hamilton Area makes Romani people feel misunderstood and discriminated against.
A 25-year-old Romani woman we spoke to felt that Canadians saw her as “just another G****, another thieving G****”. Other Romani Canadians are cautious when speaking with other Canadians, especially those who are of European descent, and when sharing information about their ethnicity.
Concealing or repressing Romani identity extends beyond personal interactions, affecting official demographic data and, consequently, policies. While the 2021 Canadian census reported 6, 545 Canadian , Roma, unofficial estimates, including , a 2016 UN report, suggest the figure may be closer to 110, 000.
In the Greater Toronto-Hamilton Area, ethno-racial insults are also a common form of racism. In fact, globally, ethno-racial insults stand out as a prevalent expression of assault on worth, documented across continents in countries like , Brazil, Israel, and the US.
Surprisingly to some, such incidents also occurred in family circles. Numerous Romani people shared stories about being the victim of G**** criminality from their non-Roma partners or members of their families. A Romani interviewee said his non-Roma wife had told him Roma people are either “stupid or dirty.”
In our interviews, the phrase “dirty G****,” which is rooted in racist ideas that are based on physical and societal characteristics or biological and cultural uncleanness, was frequently used as an insult. Intriguingly, many of the perpetrators of those ethno-racial insults were individuals of first-generation European or transcontinental descent. “Look at them. Look at their filth. Look at their ridiculous behavior. Look at how gross they are”, a foreign-born cab driver told a Romani woman.
Our research also revealed a persistent use of racial slurs to hurt, insult, humiliate, and discriminate against Romani people or simply to address Romani individuals. G**** is a standalone insult made against Romani people by Canadians in the Greater Toronto-Hamilton Area at cultural events and on the streets. The exonym G**** , is generally considered a racial slur within Romani circles, although it is embraced by some Romani groups, such as British Romani people.
Canadians of European descent, in particular, use the G**** equivalent slurs in other languages. In essence, we identified a link between immigration and the import of stereotypes from nations with significant Roma populations in Canada, which we also documented in the US in 2020.
The study shows that confronted with ethno-racial insults, Romani Canadians feel sad, ashamed, traumatised, unsafe, hurt, shunned, or overwhelmed, they also share that such experiences cause nausea, anxiety, panic, numbness, or feeling threatened. One Romani Canadian student told us, “Those experiences stay with us.”
While to many, the suspicion of criminality, the term G****, and the related insults might be just words or automatic thoughts, for Romani Canadians and the global Romani community, they represent weapons of rejection, humiliation, and discrimination that we have endured for centuries.
Our global community must stop using ethno-racial insults or jokes against Romani people and racialized groups. These are essential. Real people are actually at risk if they are allowed to continue to hear such harmful stories.
For instance, the trope of criminality in Norway justified the development of a Roma register, which was similar to the registers created in a number of European countries prior to the Holocaust.
Similar tropes are used in the US to support policies involving mass deportations and immigrant detention at detention facilities like Guantanamo Bay, which, according to Vince Warren, remains a global example of “lawlessness, torture, and racism”?
Racist tropes and slurs are frequently used, which contribute to the marginalization of racialized communities as well as dangerous normalization of state and non-state violence against them.
