rolling "Is This Racist?" thread

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

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

hie thee to ILF my man

did john terry say something?

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_pj2ghas2INo/THdIIK9ebVI/AAAAAAAAB1A/aqC8nE8g1JQ/s320/gypsy1962.bmp

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

yes, irish travellers are ethnically irish and classed as a social group here, not as a separate ethnic group- they are in the UK.

yeah, there are a lot of traveling groups that have been called gypsies, but it's the roma population that has traditionally been linked to it stereotypically and historically, right? especially with those silly appropriative costumes.

i don't know much about the history, it jsut seems in general that referring to yourself as "gypsy" without having an actual link to it beyond "nomadism" is bound to offend someone. i've seen plenty of drama about it on internet places at least (tumblr whites with 'gypsy' in their sn, mostly)

Gypsy portrays negative stereotypes of Romanies all being strippers

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

― I am that young sis, the beacon, a yardstick (dayo), Thursday, January 19, 2012 4:05 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

this is something i've been thinking about/encountering a lot

This movie was awesome (for a Bill Paxon/Mark Wahlberg movie.)

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51S0VHAG7PL._SL500_AA500_.jpg

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

― (govtname)mac (darraghmac), Thursday, January 19, 2012 4:06 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Interesting, D. The whole reason this is interesting to me is because I recently met an Irish Traveller ("Well, I'm Irish but I was born in Bristol so I'm English too and have lived all over so I'm kinda from everywhere") who was later refereed to as a gypsy (by an English person)and I was all sorts of confused. What do you mean a gypsy? You know, a gypsy, an Irish Traveller (using them interchangeably). Anyway that all led to me reading up on some of this and trying to get some clarification. Not all that cut and dry. I'm now reading (like literally have open in another tab) that there are Irish Traveller communities in the States - who knew?!

i work a lot with travellers, it's nice to be an ilxpert on something

kind of hoping people who are from and living in Japan start posting

(when it comes to bizarro racist caricature and stereotypes)

how close is this discussion to the subject of crust punks/street kids right now

still a ways off, I think. Although I have a friend who lived somewhat of that lifestyle and also was really into hopping trains for a few years

tbh the traveller community is pretty damn interesting - a lot of it, at least

Also re "My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding". They use Gypsy in the title but gypsy/traveller interchangeably in the show even though most of the ppl featured on the show are actually Irish travellers. I think that is pretty common in UK media and maybe why the distinction isn't all that clear?

I hear talk of Travelers around where I live (no, not the Arkansaw Traveler.)

Guys showing up with extra oil from another job and making a deal to seal it on your driveway.

Or painting address numbers on the curb that wash away with the first rain.

x-post - My best friend's little sister ran away from home at 16 to be a crust punks/street kids. I spent several nights out looking for her on the streets when I'd heard she might be in town. I know more than I'd like to about the subject tbh. She hopped trains too at one point.

there should be a sci-fi movie about time gypsies aka time travelers who venture back and forth through time conning people

they would call it TIME GYP

PP - yeah, most of the traveller communities in the states seem to be in the south and are descended from travellers who left during the Famine, I guess.

tarmacadam, kerblaying, painting are big traveller jobs in england so i'd guess the same over in the states

here, tbh, nobody would be likely to hire a known traveller workgang. the majority of known traveller community income comes from scrap metal deadling and welfare, the majority of assumed traveller income comes from illegal fighting and betting on same and criminal activity

timegyp awes

"they painted ID numbers on my starship and they washed off the first time i passed through a supernova."

'what do you mean the warpdrive is missing?'

ENBB how old is she now/she hasn't come back at all? that's the worst.