Like if I was jewish and I made a joke about how cheap I am and someone at work didnt get the joke because they had never heard the “covetous jew” stereotype.
Oof, I accidentally used the phase “gyped” at work because sadly that word is still stuck in my lexicon and I immediately caught myself as soon as the word left my lips and backtracked to fix my sentence to “ripped off”. My co-worker, who’s father is Romani, looked confused and told me “I know what gyped means” to which I said “I know, I’m sorry” and after a bit of back and forward - me thinking I had offended my co-worker with a racial slur, my co-worker feeling mostly confused and condescended to, as to why I backtracked on my sentence to replace it with a synonym… Turns out my co-worker had no idea that the term “gyped” comes from gypsy and is rooted in racial stereotypes.
She’s always openly and proudly self identifed as a gypsy, and the whole time I was thinking “fuck yeah, reclaim that phrase!” the same way I proudly identify as queer despite it being used as a slurr against me when I was younger.
But no, turns out she genuinely had no idea that in our country, gypsy is a slur, because her experience within her community and the places she’s lived were totally different, it was an innocent term to her.
It blew my mind that an almost 80 year old Romani woman had been hearing people throw racial slurs at her for 40 years in this country, and she was fine with it because that word had no weight as a slurr for her… But now it does, because I told her that most of the time, here, it’s a slur.
Not dissimilar from when my British partner met my friends and they’re all joking about who’s the woggiest wog and the fobbiest fob, and my partner is sitting there horrified because in the UK wog and fob are slurs, but in Australia they’re self used labels of pride, and I had to make a mental note to remove that from my vocabulary if I’m outside Aus because otherwise I would have found myself walking around England offending people by complete accident.
A lot of people don’t realize that the word gypsy has negative connotations or was ever used as a slur. For a lot of people, it’s the only word they’ve ever heard to describe Romani people.
I’m not sure if that’s a bad thing. The negative association being forgotten seems like a good thing, but the actual origin is bad.
I dunno, we can just sort of, never escape the long arm of history, I guess. I suppose that’s maybe a good thing, lest history just repeat itself, but, you know, barring like, more strict material, economic, or discriminatory concerns about racism, it can certainly kind of give a more major weight to what otherwise might be seen as innocent things or just kind of, historical oddities, or holdovers. I think probably, though, for every “gypped”, which is maybe a term that has lost racial connotation over time, there’s like, 30 or 40 n-words and racial tropes that are much more overtly offensive, and I think it’s probably more important that those are called out as racist than that we sort of, become too overzealous and lament the death of innocence that comes with knowing “gypped” originates from a racial slur.
I also don’t think that more information is really a bad thing, in any case. I don’t think that an 80 year old woman who has maybe been hearing the term her whole life and has never heard the racial connotation, is going to meaningfully be depressed by like, hearing the frequency of that word, or something. That might be the case, but I mean, if she went 80 years without really making the correlation, it’s probably not the case that most people were using it against her in a negative way, and if even she only knew the history recently, it’s pretty easy for her to just go “oh, well, they don’t know the history of the term, really they mean cheap, they don’t mean anything by it”. I mean, ideally, right. People are more complicated than that, obviously, but I still don’t think the information itself is a bad thing.
Oof, I accidentally used the phase “gyped” at work because sadly that word is still stuck in my lexicon and I immediately caught myself as soon as the word left my lips and backtracked to fix my sentence to “ripped off”. My co-worker, who’s father is Romani, looked confused and told me “I know what gyped means” to which I said “I know, I’m sorry” and after a bit of back and forward - me thinking I had offended my co-worker with a racial slur, my co-worker feeling mostly confused and condescended to, as to why I backtracked on my sentence to replace it with a synonym… Turns out my co-worker had no idea that the term “gyped” comes from gypsy and is rooted in racial stereotypes.
She’s always openly and proudly self identifed as a gypsy, and the whole time I was thinking “fuck yeah, reclaim that phrase!” the same way I proudly identify as queer despite it being used as a slurr against me when I was younger.
But no, turns out she genuinely had no idea that in our country, gypsy is a slur, because her experience within her community and the places she’s lived were totally different, it was an innocent term to her.
It blew my mind that an almost 80 year old Romani woman had been hearing people throw racial slurs at her for 40 years in this country, and she was fine with it because that word had no weight as a slurr for her… But now it does, because I told her that most of the time, here, it’s a slur.
Not dissimilar from when my British partner met my friends and they’re all joking about who’s the woggiest wog and the fobbiest fob, and my partner is sitting there horrified because in the UK wog and fob are slurs, but in Australia they’re self used labels of pride, and I had to make a mental note to remove that from my vocabulary if I’m outside Aus because otherwise I would have found myself walking around England offending people by complete accident.
A lot of people don’t realize that the word gypsy has negative connotations or was ever used as a slur. For a lot of people, it’s the only word they’ve ever heard to describe Romani people.
I’m not sure if that’s a bad thing. The negative association being forgotten seems like a good thing, but the actual origin is bad.
I dunno, we can just sort of, never escape the long arm of history, I guess. I suppose that’s maybe a good thing, lest history just repeat itself, but, you know, barring like, more strict material, economic, or discriminatory concerns about racism, it can certainly kind of give a more major weight to what otherwise might be seen as innocent things or just kind of, historical oddities, or holdovers. I think probably, though, for every “gypped”, which is maybe a term that has lost racial connotation over time, there’s like, 30 or 40 n-words and racial tropes that are much more overtly offensive, and I think it’s probably more important that those are called out as racist than that we sort of, become too overzealous and lament the death of innocence that comes with knowing “gypped” originates from a racial slur.
I also don’t think that more information is really a bad thing, in any case. I don’t think that an 80 year old woman who has maybe been hearing the term her whole life and has never heard the racial connotation, is going to meaningfully be depressed by like, hearing the frequency of that word, or something. That might be the case, but I mean, if she went 80 years without really making the correlation, it’s probably not the case that most people were using it against her in a negative way, and if even she only knew the history recently, it’s pretty easy for her to just go “oh, well, they don’t know the history of the term, really they mean cheap, they don’t mean anything by it”. I mean, ideally, right. People are more complicated than that, obviously, but I still don’t think the information itself is a bad thing.