The black tea I sipped in the cafe seemed to curdle as I processed the words. An engaging conversation with an academic colleague had just turned bitter as I heard him repeat a slur and a biased narrative I’ve experienced far too often.
I was making an argument about the lack of recognition of the Romani victims of the Holocaust when he blurted it out. 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 ill-informed assertion has long been used in certain academic works that depict the Romani people as inferior victims of the Holocaust.
While some official statements and ceremonies that commemorate the Holocaust acknowledge its Roma and Sinti victims – such as during the recent 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz – many institutions still depict and distance them as part of a separate genocide or as “other victims” of Nazi regimes. In part, this stems from the racist myth of criminality that accompanied the campaign of mass extermination of Romani people and the telling of history afterwards.
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 common experiences of everyday racism reported by Romani Canadians we interviewed involved a suspicion of criminality stemming from the pervasive globally spread trope, associating thievery and deception with 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 narratives can instigate harmful actions. As a 76-year-old Romani Canadian woman told us, she had been episodically suspected of theft after disclosing her Romani identity to varied co-workers. 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. In the context of the Greater Toronto-Hamilton Area, such daily and repetitive use of criminality-related tropes in social interactions leaves Romani people feeling 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 in their interactions with fellow Canadians, particularly those of European descent, and especially in sharing information about their ethnic descent.
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.
Ethno-racial insults are also a prominent expression of everyday racism in the Greater Toronto-Hamilton Area. 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. Several Romani people shared experiencing ethno-racial insults or jokes related to G**** criminality originating from their non-Roma partners or members of partners’ families. A Romani interviewee shared that his non-Roma wife told him that Roma people are either “stupid or dirty”.
The expression “dirty G****”, rooted in racist ideas linked to either physical and societal attributes or inherent biological and cultural uncleanness, was frequently mentioned as an insult in our interviews. Intriguingly, many of the perpetrators of those ethno-racial insults were individuals of first-generation European or transcontinental descent. “Look at them. Look how dirty they are. Look how ridiculous they are. 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. Canadians in the Greater Toronto-Hamilton Area use the term G**** as a standalone insult against Romani people they see in the street or at cultural events. 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.
The equivalent slurs to G**** in different languages are also used, particularly by Canadians of European origin. Essentially, we noticed a nexus between immigration and the import to Canada of stereotypes from countries with significant Roma populations, 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. “Those experiences … stay with us,” one Romani Canadian study participant told 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.
It is crucial for our global community to stop weaponising racist tropes and racial slurs and using ethno-racial insults or jokes against Romani people and racialised groups. Allowing such harmful narratives to persist poses actual risks for real people.
In Norway, for example, the trope of criminality justified the recent creation of a Roma register, which was not different from the registers created in a number of European nations before the Holocaust.
In the US, similar tropes are leveraged to support policies of mass deportations and detention of migrants in detention camps like Guantanamo Bay, which, as Center for Constitutional Rights executive director Vince Warren noted, remains a global symbol of “lawlessness, torture, and racism”.
Persistent use of racist tropes and slurs not only contributes to the marginalisation of racialised communities, but it can also lead to dangerous normalisation of state and non-state violence against them.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
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