Anti Gypsy, Roma and Traveller racism has got to stop!
JVL Introduction
Racism towards the Gypsy, Roma and Traveller (GRT) community is rife; well over 20 years ago, Comic Relief also found that this community was the most hated in the UK and newer research shows that little has changed with over 50% of people holding hostile views towards this community.
This is the shameful context in which we find another disgraceful example of a so-called “comedian” punching down to the most vulnerable. Jimmy Carr has been widely and rightly criticised for the appalling comment he made about Romani and Sinti people under the Nazi Holocaust; something which we find unbelievable that anyone could consider a joke.
We urge people to sign and share this petition (The Holocaust is Not a Laughing Matter). The link takes you to the petition site, where there is a summary of what Carr said on a Netflix programme. It makes the very reasonable demand that Carr issues an apology and that Netflix removes this segment from the programme.
For further information and background, we are sharing this piece written shortly before the 2019 General Election, which highlights some of the appalling, current racism experienced by members of the GRT community across Europe in the 21st century as well as under the Nazis. Prompted by the Wiener Holocaust Library’s excellent exhibition “Forgotten Victims”. This piece also refers to a 2018 ECHR report that found that 44 per cent of people feel comfortable expressing openly negative prejudice towards gypsy communities…and that, in 2019, a UN special rapporteur condemned the British government for its failure to tackle systemic racism against Gypsy, Roma and Traveller people.
This 2019 piece, outlines some of the community’s fears about a Conservative win in 2019, fears which have been shown to be fully justified. As we have covered previously, the threats to the GRT community in the UK are extremely serious with the plans to criminalise their way of life enshrined in the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, that is currently working its way through Parliament; it is an Act that, for example, raises the possibility of imprisonment and then having children removed from their families.
For those who want to learn more about the GRT community and also the problems that confront them, it will be instructive to watch “60 Days with the Gypsies” a two part documentary produced by Romany journalist Jake Bowers when “Ed Stafford spent two months with Gypsy and Traveller communities across the country, delving beneath the stereotypes and revealing the challenges of living in modern-day Britain” 9pm on Channel 4 on 7th and 14th February (and then on All4).
This article was originally published by Huckmag on Thu 5 Dec 2019. Read the original here.
We need to talk about anti-gypsy racism
Forgotten Victims: For centuries, Romani people have faced violent oppression – so when will we start talking about the racism they face?
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One positive can be taken from Jimmy Carr’s crass ‘joke’. It has got people talking about GRT Rights. Still a long way to go, as ‘celebrities’ jump in, trying to defend their friend.
There is no defence!
It only goes to point up their own ignorance, on the subject, and there is no excuse, for that ignorance. There is plenty of easily accessible information, to be found online.
Just two, to start with :
https://www.auschwitz.org/en/history/categories-of-prisoners/sinti-and-roma-gypsies-in-auschwitz/
https://www.hmd.org.uk/resource/gypsy-roma-and-sinti-history-bock-family/
So, yes, all of you ‘celebrities and comedians’, educate yourselves – and your audiences. Thank you, for raising the subject.
It is strategic and surely correct to target the monster Priti Patel as she leads the UK towards the pole position for explicitly genocidal policies towards GRT people. But let us never forget John, Lord Mann who as a Labour MP showed her the way to wards embedding this ideology in PARLIAMENTARY practice. The path from collectivism through sectionalism towards racism is guided by opportunism and electoralism, overseen by philistine opposition to theory (‘dogma’)..
A deconstructed joke won’t end well and is never funny. But in Jimmy Carr’s routine, when the provocative shock-value from a clip – edited to remove context – drowns out the irony, we don’t get it. Both his counts are true. The GRT genocide has been called ‘The Forgotten Holocaust’. The introduction above says over 50% are hostile to GRT. Carr says: that’s us, audience. That’s our culture, held up to the light (and that hostility is busily being written into our law today). But we dutifully pile onto the one who points out the hypocrisy, not those who propagandise the forgetting or legislate the hostility. And don’t Jehovah’s Witnesses matter? In the same gag, Carr mocks a Nazi exterminating them because they knocked on the wrong door … but silence. Whose narrative don’t they fit?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qVUYIkdlHB8
For context, which I understand is missing from most social media clips, here is a transcript. “Now this should be a career-ender. Strap in everybody. You ready? When people talk about the Holocaust, they talk about the tragedy and horror of six million Jewish lives being lost to the Nazi war machine. But they never mention the thousands of Gypsies that were killed by the Nazis. No one ever wants to talk about that, because no one ever wants to talk about the positives. [Pause – laughter, applause]. That’s a very good joke for the following three reasons. Firstly, f***ing funny – well done mate. Secondly, edgy as hell, it’s a joke about the worst thing that’s ever happened in human history, and people say ‘never forget’, well this is how I remember – I keep bringing it up. And thirdly, there is an educational quality. Like everyone in the room knows six million Jewish people lost their lives to the Nazis during the second world war. But a lot of people don’t know, because it’s not really taught in our schools, that the Nazis also killed – in their thousands – Gypsies, homosexuals, disabled people and Jehovah’s Witnesses. [aside: No-one knows what happened with the Jehovah’s Witnesses].” Carr goes on to mock a Nazi guard answering the door of a death camp to Jehovah’s Witnesses.