rolling "Is This Racist?" thread

true

http://26.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l9rxafmE0W1qakobno1_500.jpg

Seems like a riff on this tbh.

xp why can't you just call yourself "nomadic"

no madd doggie

I mean, when people in North America are talking to other people in North America about "gypsies" and they have no idea it's a real people, and there's no ill intent, etc. then it's not really a big deal. I just kind of think the world is a little smaller than it used to be and stuff like this looks really glaring when brought to light.

Over lunch I mentioned this thread to my friend and she said that one of her coworkers, an acquaintance of mine, said "jewed" as a verb in front of her a while ago and then looked really anxious and sheepish. My friend is Jewish. It just like... didn't occur, and then it did. But if you lived in a small town and never knew anyone Jewish and Jews were kind of these people who lived in big cities and that you learn about in history class....

btw ENBB I bet you've seen bad "gypsy" stereotypes in film, especially if you've seen the Guy Ritchie film "Snatch"

although they were called "pikeys" which is just another slur for romani or irish travelers...

Holy hell this thread. It took me 10 minutes to fully skim it while eating my lunch.

I thought w/ the ton of new posts it would be a clusterfuck, but it seems like it's all pretty cool (w/ a notable exception....)

brad pitt's pretty great in snatch fwiw, tho yes everyone in that movie is a terrible criminally minded cliché, including, i'd point out, anyone from london and several orthodox jews

One of my college roommates went on a cross-country thing with her Hebrew school and they made several stops along the way. Some place (I can't remember where right now and I really really wish I could) someone she met, upon learning she was Jewish, asked her where her horns were. They really truly believed that Jewish people actually had horns and since Jen was the first Jewish person she had met she wanted to see them. ._.

that's the kind of story i daren't believe

MH - I've actually never seen Snatch. I heard Pikey a lot while living in England but I always thought it sort of meant something similar to "Chav". I didn't realize it was gypsy/traveller specific.

x-post - Dude, I swear that is real. They asked where her fucking horns were. O_O

holy shit, where was that??

i mean, geographically

xxp to ENBB, I believe it's true. my family has a few stories like that :/

pikey can be used as a 'chav' type slur, but only because you're comparing somebody to a traveller iykwim

I don't know about Darragh but I've personally had to yell at black kids

fwiw, on record, i've never had to yell at a black kid, though tbf i'm not exactly living in a hugely ethnically-diverse area of the world

jewhorns, ffs

i've had yanks ask me about leprechauns, i assumed they were all joking but yknow man, yanks, who can tell

Goole - I don't remember! Somewhere in the US on this cross-country trip.

when i was in ireland a dude asked me if i knew mike tyson

I don't know if I actually yelled but I definitely raised my voice to a group of kids who weren't paying attention or following directions when I volunteered at the Boys & Girls Club.

i guess that is objectively possible tho so point for ireland there.

xp

Some friends are pretty sure Ron Paul is a leprechaun due to some of his facial features and his strong interest in gold, but that's neither here nor there.

btw with the gypsy thing: probably important to remember that a big reason there aren't many gypsy/roma people around for this issue to be more prevalent is that a huge amount of their population was wiped out by the nazis. relevant: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porajmos

This is going way back but re:

Severance agreement review

Fuck. That's what's in my clipboard, not Dan's quote from way way back ;__;

ANYWAY: As an American, I really should have fucking known better than to call a black person a monkey.

wrt "pikey" : "In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, the definition became even looser and is sometimes used to refer to a wide section of the (generally urban) underclass of the country (in England generally known as chavs), or merely a person of any social class who "lives on the cheap" such as a bohemian". - Guess that's the gypsy link.

- Think that's mostly the context I have heard it in. Things (and not just people) can be Pikey too, right? Like Spar for instance - You could call Spar pikey?

and holy shit with the jew horns thing. i didn't even know about that thing until i was like 17 or 18, and i always thought it was a joke. if someone had said that to me when i was younger, i have no idea how i would've responded

I've seen a Jew's Harp, but never the horn.

(Unless we're talking about Artie Shaw.)

hell no i wouldn't call spar pikey spar is the fuckin business

it comes from here:

http://www.truthcontrol.com/files/truthcontrol/images/3717.jpg

x-post yeah my first real experience learning about the Romani people was when I ended up picking this book for a book report in middle school:
http://www.amazon.com/Violins-Stopped-Playing-Story-Holocaust/dp/0531150283

x-post lol :)

Not advocating calling things (or people!) pikey or chavy btw just checking.

biblical mistranslation of the word 'keren' on michelangelo's part

I honestly didn't know about the jew horns thing until she told me that story!!

And I must have been about 20 at the time. I think the incident happened to her when she was in HS. :/

Huh. A friend just made us reservations for this

http://ih.constantcontact.com/fs057/1102741444543/img/20.jpg

and holy shit with the jew horns thing. i didn't even know about that thing until i was like 17 or 18, and i always thought it was a joke.

I literally learned that just this minute. And I hadn't heard the slur "jewed down" until I was 18.

and now i'm reading all this stuff about gypsies, and i find this bullshit: http://www.retronaut.co/2011/10/the-new-gypsies/

useful words in the comments section from a roma perspective (Germaine de Pibrac James): Dressing up and calling yourself Gypsy is just as offensive, most especially in light of the the thousands who died in the camps and the many who continue to suffer from human rights abuses such as forced sterilization, false imprisonment, denial of education and access to housing and work and the most basic necessities of life.

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_zKDjcLXZBTI/SkiZpO77LOI/AAAAAAAACvE/ueapIHpB8BE/s400/041i_Auricularia_cornea_Jelly_ear_fungus.jpg

auricularia cornea aka jews ears

I enjoy this thread in a way, but it always reminds me how crazy fucked-up and racist parts of my growing up were.

hell no i wouldn't call spar pikey spar is the fuckin business

speaks a country boy

Law & Order SVU had an episode with a Roma family just this season!

x-post - The comments section on there is pretty interesting.

"It’s simple. Not all gypsies are Roma, not all Roma are gypsies. trying to earn some PC brownie points by insisting on Roma as the ‘correct’ term ends up discriminating against all gypsies who have no Roma heritage. In the UK the Irish travellers would be a good example of non-Roma gypsies."

while we're on the subject, how did a region in the middle of europe come to mean "sophisticated and deracinated people"

x-post someone else in there says that Gypsy with a capital G signifies Romany people whereas gypsy can still be used to describe a nomadic lifestyle. I would personally just stick with, you know, "nomadic" but I guess it's just not all that simple in the end at all.

also gipsy, c.1600, alteration of gypcian, a worn-down M.E. dialectal form of egypcien "Egyptian," from the supposed origin of these people. As an adjective, from 1620s.

Cognate with Sp. Gitano and close in sense to Turkish and Arabic Kipti "gypsy," lit. "Coptic;" but in M.Fr. they were Bohémien (see bohemian), and in Sp. also Flamenco "from Flanders." "The gipsies seem doomed to be associated with countries with which they have nothing to do" [Weekley]. Zingari, the Italian and German name, is of unknown origin. Romany is from the people's own language, a plural adjective form of rom "man." Gipsy is the prefered spelling in England.

(seems like the word was used first w/r/t the romani and not as a word that could also include irish travellers)

I kind of want to start a thread spinning off from this one - how accountable should people from another culture be towards standards of racism in your own culture

obv (at least on this board) we are all part of the larger the_west but this "gyp shouldn't be considered offensive in america" argument seems like a flip of the "well I'm British!" argument that's been shot down before

and real hilarity/facepalming ensues whenever east asians bring their conceptions of race to the table ^_^

http://popartmachine.com/artwork/D10024-SAAM.1982.88.1_1A/0/Man-Ray-Allume-tes-Gitanes-ca-1964-1966-painting-artwork-print.jpg

"Smoke Your Gypsies" - Man Ray

kinda feel like gypsy is a legitimately meant and understood description of that hippie nomadic lifestyle these days, for better or worse

In the UK the Irish travellers would be a good example of non-Roma gypsies."

― ENBB,

interesting, i'd personally never refer to a traveller as a gypsy- it's not up there with knacker or tinker as a derogatory term but i'd have considered it the type of word my grandparents would have used. in fact, tinker/knacker itself is a term that wasn't ever used in a perjorative manner historically- both words refer to common livelihoods in travellers up to maybe the 60's- but they're both considered poor form (knacker a lot worse than poor form) to use today