Racist Removal: The Ongoing Hate of ROMA Peoples in Europe

p I was sitting on a train in Moravia, the eastern province of The Czech Republic, when I heard a woman calling out from the stairway in the middle of the platform. I didn#39;tnbsp; know what she was asking but she was trying to haul a huge suitcase up the station stairs. There were several people gathered on the platform including a conductor, but no one responded to the woman#39;s query, or offered to help her with her bag. My friend said to me, ldquo;that gypsy woman is trying to find the right train to get on,rdquo; which struck me as being a strange observation. I have struggled with that same train locating issue more than once, so I was immediately sympathetic./p p Out the window, I saw her going back down the stairs for what looked like a second bag, and I realized the train I was on wasn#39;t gong to leave for another few minutes, so I hopped off and helped the woman up the stairs with her second bag. The woman seemed grateful for a hand, but she was clearly in need of some information, which I as a foreigner didn#39;t have. Moreover, I didn#39;t know what she was saying beyond our interaction. It was about that moment that the train she was trying to get on pulled away from the platform. This became clear to me after the conductor--who had watched this whole exchange between myself and the woman--indicated that the train she had been asking about was pulling away. I could see its tail lights off to my right, and I wondered why this man had just stood there while this woman missed her train... and indeed, it turned out to be the last train of the evening./p p She indicated to me that she had to get her bags back out of the station, so I took them down the stairs and then back up and deposited them in front of the station for her. I couldn#39;t do more at that moment and ran back to get on the train I was waiting for, where my friend was sitting. This incident led to an argument, because I didn#39;t understand what I had just seen. There was a single woman who needed help and no one who could have helped her find what she needed did anything about it. I, in my ignorance, simply responded to what looked like needed to happen. And I will never know if that woman waited out front of that station until the next morning or what./p p I didn#39;t understand this, but the little I knew about the view of #39;gypsies#39; in Europe led me to see this as a racist event. After all, there are stories of state sponsored sterilization of gypsy women, or Francersquo;s policy of expelling the Roma people from the country as of last year. In my experience, Gypsies are publicly looked down upon. They are openly discussed at dinner as a #39;problem group#39; and any young person has a story of a time a gypsy stole something from them. I myself had an encounter with a fellow who would always ask me for money, or ask me to buy him things, and the one time I saw him with money in his hand he ran the other way./p p But this criminalizing and narrow part of the story leaves out a big piece of the events that have brought us to where we are.. The gypsies aren#39;t exactly interested in assimilating into the dominant culture, of fixed houses, and economic rules and domination. Though they have faced legal discrimination, oppression and harassment from before the Nazirsquo;s to 2011, they have a heritage of traveling, and of trade, and of movement, and they are resisting the colonization of theirnbsp;way of lifenbsp;by any means necessary./p p I had to admire the story I heard of a family of gypsies getting into public housing and stripping the place down of every removable aspect to the house. You can call that many things, but it is surely a method of resistance. It#39;s a way of saying #39;we are not going to bow to the dominant culture.... ever. In a world like this one, where we seek to conform and buy the latest models of the span class="scayt-misspell" data-scayt_word="ipad" data-scaytid="1"ipad/span, a group of people who will defend their culture like this and refuse to assimilate in any way are warriors./p p And it#39;s far beyond the places in which they live, or the way they provide for themselves. The incident on the train was just one of the ways I saw the public ignore and degrade these traveling people, and treat them like trash./p