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Argument reference · Roma

The Roma, and the racism Europe does not count as racism.

A clean argument map: five centuries of heritable slavery, a genocide unacknowledged for thirty-seven years, a European court ruling that changed almost nothing, and sterilisations that ran until 2012.

My position: Roma are Europe's largest ethnic minority and its most consistently persecuted one, and what has been done to them is racism by every definition on this site — including the legal one, which covers descent.

I use this case for a specific reason. Every argument I make elsewhere gets answered with some version of "racism requires a white perpetrator". Here the perpetrators are European states, the victims are white, and the record includes chattel slavery, genocide, court-proven school segregation and forced sterilisation inside my own lifetime. If that is not racism, the word means nothing at all.

Precision

Roma, Sinti, Kale and Travellers are not one people. I use "Roma" because it is the term most communities chose, not because they are interchangeable.

Honesty

Poverty and crime get raised in every discussion of Roma. I deal with that in section six rather than pretending nobody says it.

Consistency

Sterilising a minority to reduce its births is the charge I make against China. It happened in Europe until 2012.