Romaphobia

Why every available word carries a mistake

The English terms antiziganism and ziganophobia come from zigan, a root that appears in many European languages: Hungarian cigany, German Zigeuner, French tzigane. That root most likely descends from the Medieval Greek athinganos, meaning no touch, or roughly untouchable.

The commonest English word is worse. It evolved from the Middle English Egipcien, out of a misconception that the arriving migrants came from Egypt. The first World Romani Congress rejected it as an exonym in 1971. Some Romani people embrace it, but it is largely disliked for its association with the stereotype of nomads who roam and commit crimes, a link preserved in the English verb meaning to swindle.

Romani organisations and advocates now press for Roma, Romani, or the names of specific subgroups instead, alongside work to make authentic Romani history and culture better known.

Which accusations arrived with the people

The Romani are believed to have migrated from India to Europe during the Middle Ages, and one wave is thought to have been an attempt to escape the consequences of the invasions of Mahmud of Ghazni. Arriving Romani were treated as suspect, in part because they moved, and were accused of theft, fraud, pickpocketing, black magic, prostitution and stealing children.

The supernatural charge is as old as the rest. Theodore Balsamon warned the Greeks against dealing with them, calling them ventriloquists and wizards associated with the Devil, and noted that they were seen carrying snakes wrapped around their bodies and claiming to predict the future.

Many countries then passed laws restricting where Romani people could live and work. For centuries they were persecuted, enslaved, hanged and burned. Two facts from that history are among the least widely known: centuries of enslavement in the Danubian Principalities, and the genocide during the Holocaust. The lack of public knowledge about both is named as one of the key reasons the discrimination persists, alongside the lack of institutional recognition.

What the discrimination consists of now

The present-day record is mostly about access. Romani communities in Europe face a stacked set of exclusions:

• restricted access to good education
• obstacles to entering the labour market
• poverty and social exclusion following from both
• inadequate healthcare
• substandard housing Romani children are placed in segregated special schools whose restricted curricula limit what they can do afterwards. Roma children and women are named as particularly vulnerable to human trafficking.

Hate speech against Roma in Europe increased during the COVID-19 pandemic, and a United States Department of State report in 2024 raised concerns about anti-Romani sentiment across the continent.

The stereotype has an unusual internal contradiction. Romani people are held to be musically gifted and simultaneously malicious, violent and inclined to theft and deception, and the travelling artisan communities have been portrayed since their arrival as mythical and exotic while being criminalised at the same time.

Why the aesthetic travels without the people

That contradiction is why the appropriation is possible. What is sometimes called the gypsy aesthetic is borrowed freely in fashion and at music festivals, commercialising an idealised version of Roma culture without reference to its history or to the systemic racism the communities still meet. The same media that supplies the aesthetic depicts Roma as criminals, beggars or primitives.

The construction is doing work for the people who maintain it. The figure of the gypsy in Western culture is a mixture of romanticism and racism, an identity assembled by outsiders that has let non-Roma society define itself against something, and that has been used to justify centuries of violence against the actual people it claims to describe.

Mistrust runs in both directions as a result. Many Roma distrust non-Roma, some avoid them on grounds of ritual pollution, and Romani people often conceal their ethnicity to escape discrimination. Some hold that a curse was laid on Cen, the forebear of all Romani people, which is offered as an explanation for enduring poverty and exclusion. Contemporary Roma artists and activists are producing their own work to reclaim the account and put forward a self-representation instead.