Margareta Matache
Instructor and director of the Roma Program at Harvard University
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Responding to the wave of protests following the murder of George Floyd in the United States, Margaritis Schinas, the vice president of the European Commission, stated that Europe is “doing better” on issues of race than the U.S. because it has “better systems for social inclusion, protection, and universal health care.”
This is simply not true for Roma and other groups. And yet, it is a widely shared belief among European leaders that there is no systemic racism on the Continent and that it did not engage in slavery at home.
I am a descendent of enslaved Roma people in Romania. My great-great-grandparents were slaves in the same village where I grew up. For 500 years, Romanian Roma, included children, were sold, separated from other members of families, raped and beaten.
And it’s damn painful to witness Europeans ignore, deny and erase the memory of five centuries of economic, cultural and physical exploitation.
Hatred and discrimination against Roma are still rampant, and Europe can’t claim the moral high ground as long as racism goes unaddressed.
Europe has yet to confront its history, embrace truth-telling and repair injustices — not only when it comes to its history of enslavement, but also other instances of collective harm, including the genocide of 12,000 Roma in Spain, “Gypsy hunts” in the Netherlands, the Holocaust, the forced sterilization of Roma women, and many other state-sponsored injustices.
This is not just about the past. Structural racism, including against Roma, is still rampant today.
Racialized poverty in Roma families remains extremely high. In Romania and elsewhere, some Roma families struggle with environmental racism and forced eviction. More than 1,500 Roma, including children, live in toxic and dangerous conditions in settlements around Pata Rât, a landfill in western Romania known as “Europe’s largest waste-related ghetto.”
The COVID-19 pandemic has worsened the problem of structural inequality for many Roma, with politicians and media in some countries portraying them as transmitters of the virus. There has also been a spike in anti-Roma racism, including physical attacks.
In April, in Krompachy, Slovakia, a police officer beat five children (aged between 7 and 11) with a truncheon and threatened to shoot them. Roma were also victims of police attacks in several neighborhoods of Bucharest, Romania. In the Spanish town of Rociana del Condad, a vigilante citizen murdered a Roma man in front of his 7-year-old son.
Thus, once again, even during a pandemic, Roma children and their families become targets of scapegoating abuse. This behavior — of blaming and beating, instead of protecting — is completely contrary to Schinas’ illusion of a non-racist Europe.
Europeans may not like to talk about racism in their own backyard. But the truth is that Europe, too, has to reckon with its past and address anti-Roma racism. Hatred and discrimination against Roma are still rampant, and Europe can’t claim the moral high ground as long as racism goes unaddressed.
As European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen recently stated, this “starts with examining ourselves, our unconscious biases and the privileges that we take for granted.”