I'M DOING AN EXPERIMENT

I've never heard anyone say that the term "gypsy" is offensive before. I know it used to have a negative connotation, but it seems like it hasn't for a couple of centuries. Do people still identify as gypsies? I'm not arguing, but this is news to me and I would like to understand more.

Thanks for asking with the intention of understanding better! 

On my father’s side, my family is Romani, the ethnic group historically called gypsies by outsiders. The name came from the misperception than we originated in Egypt (we’re actually from India). Other names for us include words that literally mean unclean or untouchable (in a taboo and gross way). We have always called ourselves Roma or Romani, so it’s not that we identify as gypsies, it’s that others identify us as gypsies. This name or label was forced on us.

Like Native Americans, we are not a dead culture. We have become splintered, and many Romani have been pushed into inescapable poverty thanks to institutional racism. Many of us have assimilated into the dominant culture of the places we live (my family fits here).

But the negative connotation to the word is very much alive and well. Romani girls and women are among the most targeted by sex traffickers. In 2017, Fox “News” aired a scare-mongering “report” on Gypsy immigrants threatening the very fabric of the US.

Historically speaking, the Romani have been forcibly relocated, sterilized, and subjected to genocide. To address the “gypsy problem,” in the 1800’s, Switzerland rounded up Romani males and sent them to North America. This is how one branch of my family arrived in the US. It tends to not get mentioned in history classes, but twenty-five to fifty percent of the Romani population living in Europe in 1939 died at the hands of Nazis.

Taking a word that has been used to label and other an ethnic group, and romanticizing and using it to describe a free-spirited and mischievous nature does not erase the baggage or harm that has been done. Gypsy and its derivative gyp (to steal or swindle) are vulgar and hurtful words that need to be retired and relegated to history.

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Here are some sources and articles, should they be of interest:

The Problem with the Word ‘Gypsy’ (this whole site can be helpful)

The Harmful History of ‘Gypsy’ – discusses the modern myths and the current state

Romani Genocide – Romani specific Wikipedia article on the Nazi Holocaust

Remembering the Roma victims of the Holocaust – discusses how the Romani are often excluded from historical accounts of the Holocaust, and the impact on the people – less dry than the Wikipedia article

Persecution and Politicization: Roma (Gypsies) of Eastern Europe – nice summary of the history associated with the word from Cultural Survival Quarterly magazine

The “G” Word Isn’t for You: How “Gypsy” Erases Romani Women – from the National Organization for Women (NOW) this focuses a little more on how the long-standing stereotypes and racism hurt Romany, especially the women.

I saw a post saying that Boromir looked too scruffy in FotR for a Captain of Gondor, and I tried to move on, but I’m hyperfixating. Has anyone ever solo backpacked? I have. By the end, not only did I look like shit, but by day two I was talking to myself. On another occasion I did fourteen days’ backcountry as the lone woman in a group of twelve men, no showers, no deodorant, and brother, by the end of that we were all EXTREMELY feral. You think we looked like heirs to the throne of anywhere? We were thirteen wolverines in ripstop.

My boy Boromir? Spent FOUR MONTHS in the wilderness! Alone! No roads! High floods! His horse died! I’m amazed he showed up to Imladris wearing clothes, let alone with a decent haircut. I’m fully convinced that he left Gondor looking like Richard Sharpe being presented to the Prince Regent in 1813

*electric guitar riff*

And then rocked up to Imladris a hundred ten days later like

oh god are you one of those people who reads romeo and juliet as a romance rather than a tragedy

I thought I was gonna go to bed early tonight but I guess not

hey friend you just unleashed my nerdy wrath buckle up

short answer: no, I know r&j is a tragedy and I read it as such. Shakespeare didn’t write “romances”, at least not in the sense you mean (some people call his later stuff that’s harder to put into a genre ‘romances’, such as the winter’s tale and the tempest)

so no I’m not a moron thanks

here’s the long answer:

I presume you’re “one of those people” who likes to count themselves as the Specialest Snowflake In All The Land because they don’t buy into the fake cheesy idea of //romance// that everyone else so blindly believes

maybe you like to talk about how romeo and juliet were “just horny teenagers”, how they knew each other for three days, how romeo so loved rosaline thirty seconds before spotting juliet, so clearly he’s fickle and silly. they weren’t actually in love, they were just teenage idiots. because only stupid girls buy that stuff. you’re more mature than that. am I right?

well, here’s the thing, sunshine- you aren’t special. I hear this same damn argument right down to the last word every time I mention my love of this play and it ENRAGES me every time because 99% of the time this is coming from /other teenagers/. other young people talking about how this isn’t a story to be taken SERIOUSLY. it’s silly and frivolous and unrealistic. they don’t realize that this play is dedicated to them.

and it’s criticizing people just like you.

while I do believe that these two young people were soul mates (I’ll get to that later), I don’t really think this is a story about love. it’s a story about /passion/- how love and hate are only a hair’s breadth apart and their overwhelming capacity for healing or for destroying. the emotion that drives mercutio to defend romeo from tybalt. what drives mercutio to be killed at his hand. what pushes formerly docile, dreamy romeo to slay his cousin in law: it all begins to seem like the same continuous passion, enflaming the same group of people on the hottest day of the year.

as a result, love isn’t a pretty thing in this play. it’s linked inextricably to death, to murder, to chaos. love is presented as the most dangerous force in the universe. it leaves five bodies in its wake, and then at the end (people forget this) it’s what finally brings the ancient feud to an end. it’s not silly. it’s not frivolous. o brawling love, o loving hate.

and who are the conductors of this unstoppable force? who sets verona burning and then rebuilds it better in under a week?

kids.

people with a shitty understanding of this play who love to dismiss it and downplay it like to call it a “cautionary tale”- why you shouldn’t think with your dick, why you should grow up and not be so rash, be sensible.

I agree with part of this. it is a cautionary tale. but it’s directed at YOU.

you, who devalue youth. you, who underestimate teenagers and what they’re capable of, who wave off their every thought or feeling with “just a kid”. who think that love is a pretty little silly thing and that no one under the age of 25 is capable of really experiencing it. that the kids don’t MATTER.

capulet thought it- he dismissed tybalt’s rage during the party as dumb kids throwing a hissy fit. he wrote juliet off as a child who should be seen and not heard, shuffled from her father to her husband, guided by the wisdom of those older and wiser than her.

in the world presented in the play, age has NOTHING to do with wisdom. the adults range from careless (montague) to helpless (lady capulet) to blithering (the nurse). the wisest character, the most eloquent and intelligent one with the most beautiful poetry, is fourteen year old juliet. (go back and read it. whose speeches are the most beautiful, sophisticated, complex? Juliet’s.)

okay, fine, you say. but they didn’t love each other, they just saw each other and got hot and bothered and wanted to jump the other’s bones! anyway, what about rosaline?!

I’ll address rosaline first:

shakespeare likes making fun of the poets of old (take for instance his “my mistress’ eyes” sonnet, a deliberate parody of the Petrarchan model of frilly love poetry). heres another example in romeo. when we first meet romeo he’s mooning over a girl in the frilliest, stalest, most formulaic verse imaginable. we get the feeling he’s enjoying himself, basking in his misery.

notice, though, that we never see rosaline on stage. she represents romeo’s vague infatuation with the //idea// of love, the pretty image he made up in his head from reading old poems. this not only creates an incredible arc in his character, but makes his love for juliet obviously the real deal by comparison. he meets juliet and his world goes into free fall; he’s rash and violent and impulsive, and the verse that was so stale and ingenuine before shifts into some of the most famous passionate poetry in the english language. in his first scene, he asks “is love a tender thing?” he falls in love with juliet- REAL love, not the kind in poems- and comes to answer his own question: no. no it fucking isn’t.

but, you say. but they CANT have loved each other! you don’t fall in love just by LOOKING at someone!

yeah, I know you don’t.

but here’s the thing. if you aren’t willing to suspend some modicum of disbelief, you won’t get anything from shakespeare. period.

we’re already assuming that these people just happen to walk around speaking in blank verse and rhyming couplet. the plot of hamlet relies on the existence of a ghost, a midsummer night’s dream on fairies, macbeth on witches, the tempest on magic, measure for measure on the friggin /bed trick/- is it SUCH A HORRIBLE STRETCH FOR YOUR CYNICAL POSTMODERN MIND TO MAKE that characters can identify their soulmates with a look? have we reached that level of lazy cynicism as a society that magical love flowers and vengeful ghosts are believable, where a woman can turn into a boy by shoving a hat over her hair and statues spring to life as deceased loved ones, but love at first sight (a very very common Elizabethan plot device; it’s /everywhere/ in shakespeare) is just too much of a stretch?

no one rolls their eyes at hamlet because “ghosts aren’t real. are you one of those people who believe in ghosts?” no- they take it for the plot device that it is in order to get to the message of the play as a whole, and the truths of the human conditions it reveals, with the help of some purely theatrical elements.

but kids in love. that’s far too silly.

it’s really fucking sad.

and questions like yours, anon? those make me really, really fucking sad.

Small fantasy worldbuilding elements you might want to think about:

A currency that isn’t gold-standard/having gold be as valuable as tin

A currency that runs entirely on a perishable resource, like cocoa beans

A clock that isn’t 24-hours

More or less than four seasons/seasons other than the ones we know

Fantastical weather patterns like irregular cloud formations, iridescent rain

Multiple moons/no moon

Planetary rings

A northern lights effect, but near the equator

Roads that aren’t brown or grey/black, like San Juan’s blue bricks

Jewelry beyond precious gems and metals

Marriage signifiers other than wedding bands

The husband taking the wife's name / newlyweds inventing a new surname upon marriage

No concept of virginity or bastardry

More than 2 genders/no concept of gender

Monotheism, but not creationism

Gods that don’t look like people

Domesticated pets that aren’t re-skinned dogs and cats

Some normalized supernatural element that has nothing to do with the plot

Magical communication that isn’t Fantasy Zoom

“Books” that aren’t bound or scrolls

A nonverbal means of communicating, like sign language

A race of people who are obligate carnivores/ vegetarians/ vegans/ pescatarians (not religious, biological imperative)

I’ve done about half of these myself in one WIP or another and a little detail here or there goes a long way in reminding the audience that this isn’t Kansas anymore.

There’s probably a thesis of some kind in this that I haven’t quite nailed down yet, but off the cuff, I’ve seen a repeating pattern in a lot of otherwise unrelated fandom and media criticism that I think comes down to two fundamentally different philosophies on how to read the source material itself.

The first philosophy is that when a narrative tells you something about its setting, you take it at its word, and shape your fannish interaction with it around the idea that the claim is true.

The second philosophy is that… you don’t. The narrative must prove itself to you, essentially, and if it fails to do so, you are under no obligation to respect it.

At first blush this would seem to just fall under the aegis of Death of the Author: do you care what the writer says about what his book is about, or about what’s actually in the book? But it’s not that, exactly, because either way, you’re dealing only with the text itself, and in both cases, you accurately assess and agree on any contradictions between the worldbuilding and the action. The difference lies not in your understanding of the text, but in your reaction to those contradictions.

For example, it is a core premise of Star Trek that the Federation is an enlightened and just society. Fans centered in the first philosophy accept that premise. When they see something like TOS “Turnabout Intruder,” they say, “forbidding women to be captains is incompatible with a genuinely enlightened and just society, so the Federation must not actually forbid women to be captains.” They understand this inconsistency as the consequence of out-of-universe pressures, and when they write meta or create fanworks, they’ll leave that incompatible concept out of their worldbuilding, or try to find ways to reinterpret or work around that episode to keep the universe more consistent with the established premise.

Fans centered in the second philosophy, on the other hand, give the premise no inherent value or primacy over what the media presents. When shown “Turnabout Intruder,” they’ll respond with “forbidding women to be captains is incompatible with a genuinely enlightened and just society, so the Federation must not actually be a genuinely enlightened and just society.” They integrate this inconsistency into their understanding of the in-universe worldbuilding, and when they write meta or create fanworks, they’ll explore ideas of hypocrisy and inconsistency and the idea of a dark underbelly to the surface paradise the canon tries to present.

Obviously there aren’t just two clear camps of people wrt this; fundamentally it’s about the quality of the writing, about how well an author actually achieved what they were attempting to get across, and fans will take one tack toward some works and the other tack toward others, contingent on their own fuzzy line of tolerance for just how contradictory a story has to be before they reject it, how emotionally connected they are to any given premise, and any other number of random human foibles of perspective. But at the very least, it seems useful to be able to notice that you’re doing it, or to figure out which side other people are standing on when they open discussion.

sooooo can yall help me determine if this is a fireable offense

Hot take, but cis people have gender identities. They aren't the gender they identify as because of their genitalia or what their birth certificate says. They're only cis because they identify with a gender and it happens to match their government documentation. Cis men aren't men because they're "obviously" men for having a penis. They're men because they identify as men. It's the self-identification that dictates this, not any other factor, even for cis folks. And we should be framing it this way. A cis man identifies as a man and a cis woman identifies as a woman. There is no automatic or inherent gender.

the adventures of tintin (1991) + slice of life