Last year brought a dramatic and belated national reckoning with racism in the United States. But with conversations focused on the major targets of American racism – African American, indigenous and Latino populations – many have overlooked discrimination against a much smaller minority in the US: American Roma.
Many Romani people arrived in the US between the late 19th and early 20th centuries, amid a wave of immigration from southern and eastern Europe. The prominent Romani scholar, Ian Hancock, argues that many Romani Americans are descendants of Romania’s enslaved Romani people, who were freed in 1856. But there is evidence that Romani people had been in the US for centuries beforehand, with early records documenting Roma people being shipped to British plantations in Virginia in the 17th century, following a 1661 act of parliament permitting their deportation.
Today, there are close to a million Romani people in the US, with the largest clusters in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Chicago, Boston, Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, Seattle and Portland. The community continues to experience acute prejudice today, as it has done for decades.
A racial slur
For the past 106 years, Northern State University (NSU) in Aberdeen, South Dakota, has organised an annual week-long event that ends with a ‘G*psy Days Parade’, reportedly the largest annual parade in South Dakota. The term “G*psy” can be used as a racial slur referring to Romani people.
As a result of the parade’s name and its history of racist mockery of Roma – satirised customs, blackfaces, performing skits of child abduction – Romani American activists, scholars and their allies have been sharply critical of the event, demanding an apology and a name change through email and online petitions. Since starting their email campaign on 4 August 2020, their concerns have not dignified with an answer. Yet the NSU website seems to have acknowledged the critique in part, having to some extent replaced the word ‘G*psy’ with ‘Homecoming’.
