I guess it’s an individual thing, similar to Jewish or Armenian people.

I’d really appreciate it if non-Romani people stopped debating our race. 

Like, yea, on an *individual* basis, some Romani people consider themselves White, but most Romani people do not. Most Romani people do not look White, and are most certainly not treated as White in Europe, or the Americas. 

I don’t know where people are getting this idea that the majority of Romani people are White-passing or light-skinned because that has absolutely no basis in fact. 

I get that race is a construct, but that is no excuse for trying to define our race for us. Trying to claim that Romani people in any way benefit from Whiteness erases our entire history of slavery, genocide, and oppression based on the fact that we are not White. It also completely erases our own ancestry, which has roots in South Asia for f*ck’s sake. 

Also, White people do not currently nor have they ever considered us White, which is how Whiteness is defined. 

Most Romani people look like this:

But, yea.. sure.. go ahead and tell the Romani folks who have had Molotov cocktails thrown into their homes by White supremacists that it’s all well and good because anon said they’re White, now.. 

There is this gross and almost evil trend of non-members of a group arguing over the race of a minority group.

It happened to the Sami, to Jewish people (esp. Us evil racist ~White~ jews) and Romani. Imagine that, nobody on this website knew of Sami or Romani and these people think that have the right to argue what race they are.

This, is something that we, gaje, need to stop doing. We need to start recognizing Romani and stop with awful stereotyping and excluding from anti-racial protests and social justice.

Also, for clarification note, Armenians are not White and no White person considers them White unless the Armenian person is like a generation American. Don’t lump Armenians in with their oppressors.

Considering OP is an extremely disgusting racist …

OP is definitely racist and reblogs from right-libertarians and fascists all the time because OP is a piece of shit

TMK OP is also Jewish - a disgusting shame of a person and a shame upon Israel.

Here is the thing any Romani, Sami, Jewish, or Armenian individual(s) can buy into the idea that they are white, but the reality that as a whole none of those groups are White.   

^^^ Yes @fromchaostocosmos 

The thing is that it’s not just unabashed racists doing this. There are a lot of people in Tumblr SJ circles who have repeated this very same line, especially about Romani and Jewish people. 

“Roma are White passing in the US” and “White Jews” are commonly used as a means to both silence Romani and Jewish persons, and excuse anti-Romani and anti-Semitic rhetoric by people who claim to be avidly against racism. 

On an individual level, Romani people might claim that they are White and many mixed Romani/White persons are more comfortable with that label. However, as an ethnic group, Romani people are not White. In regards to Romani people, specifically, most are by no means White passing. Most Romani people are very much brown. 

Like @fromchaostocosmos said, as a whole, we are not viewed as White. 

I am light skinned and Romani. I am one of the lightest people in my family, aside from my mother. On an individual level, yea, we benefit from that, but when we talk about the whole of our ethnicity.. we do not at all benefit from Whiteness. Romani people, as a people, have zero institutional or economic power over anyone. 

We are a stateless nation that suffers from extreme oppression, segregation, and poverty regardless of where we live. “Gypsies” are loathed the world over, regardless of our skin color.  

And, we’re not even getting into how conditional passing is for light skinned Romani persons, either. It’s not as if light skinned Romani people, even in the US, can just go about our lives as though we are White. It’s not as though people simply left their prejudices in Europe, or Turkey, or Armenia, or Iran, or Brazil. 

I am in no way suggesting that light skinned Roma do not have privileges, but we spend our entire lives walking on glass. We are still othered and face xenophobia in a way that White people do not. For Romani people, “looking White” does not simply grant you access to Whiteness. Being *read* as Romani, as a Gypsy, most often has f*ck all to do with skin color. 

this is fascinating

some things that stand out

the editors were largely middle class, and at some point they went to talk to a sex worker in the Yoshiwara red light district to, in atlasobscura’s words “open their eyes to the problems faced by women of different circumstances”. this apparently led to a big division:

The newspaper reporters weren’t the only ones who thought Otake and Raichō had gone too far, though. The Yoshiwara trip in particular caused divisions among Seitō’s members. The magazine’s subscriber base had been growing, but after this incident, teachers, worried for their jobs, canceled their subscriptions so they couldn’t be associated with this group of wayward women. Mozume’s father forced her to resign (though she kept writing under a pen name). Yasumochi, who had been so important in the founding of the magazine, wrote to Raichō that, “In the earlier stage Seitō was indeed a heartfelt, trustworthy and distinguished magazine, but it has lost these good qualities …. Because of your thoughtless conduct, all these women have gained a bad reputation for doing away with past conventions and attempting things women have never done before.”

obviously a very different circumstance to the conflicts over sex work in modern feminism since the 70s, but still.

another really interesting bit:

They increasingly began to confront controversial questions about the rights of women and the control they should have over their bodies. In a special 1913 issue on women’s rights, Seitō commissioned an essay from Hideko Fukuda, a feminist known as a radical activist, on “The Solution to the Woman Question,” in which she advocated not just for equal rights between genders, but also for a communal system to create equality among classes as well.

“Only under such circumstances will real women’s liberation come about,” she wrote. “Unless this first step is taken, even if women get voting rights, and even if courts, universities, and government offices in general are opened to women, those who enter these, will, of course, only be women from the influential class; the majority of ordinary women will necessarily be excluded from these circles. Thus, just as class warfare breaks out among men, so class warfare will occur among women.”

This was of course heavily censored. So was abortion advocacy:

Censors returned for a 1914 issue containing a fictional story about a woman leaving her husband, and one in 1915 for a fictional story about a woman who did not regret having an abortion. That story, “To My Lover From a Woman in Prison,” was inspired by real-life events, and the main character offers a pro-choice argument that must have seemed incendiary at the time. “As long as a fetus has not matured, it is still just one part of the mother’s body,” she writes to her lover. “There, I believe it is well within the mother’s rights to decide the future of the fetus, based on her own assessment of its best interests.” The government called the story “injurious to public morals.”

It’s striking (and kind of depressing in a way, not that things haven’t changed) how many of these conflicts are familiar a century later.

A lot of yall “allies” gonna act like yall never seen this post and keep scrolling cus yall see a shirt that has something you’ve said and still believe

FOR MY FOLLOWERS THAT HAVE DIFFICULTY CARING FOR PLANTS AND ASK WHAT THEY SHOULD BUY, THIS IS REALLY GREAT!! 

As a former florist this is hella helpful