We Need To Talk About The "G" Word

This essay talks about the prevalence of a common slur for Romani people used self-referentially in the Pagan community; it names the slur one time for clarity before obscuring it. There is also a photograph in which it is not obscured, and it is not censored in a quote from a Romani person.  A note that actual Romani people are empowered to use this term for themselves, although I would argue if they use it in the same way this essay describes it is still harmful.

"G-- World Cuisine," also called "Phils Grille"

I would be a full-on adult before I ever learned that the word "gypsy" was a slur.  As non-Romani people, when we think of a "g--," we are hands-down thinking about a set of impressions or lifestyle habits rather than a seriously persecuted ethnic group.  We may use it to refer to a free wanderer, a nomad, an eccentric, perhaps New Agey person.  In short, we use it to refer to an aesthetic.  Since this is an aesthetic that a lot of Pagans (and several other groups I'm in) romanticize, you get scores of us using this term self-referentially.

This shows up at pretty much every Pagan gathering I go to.  At Pagan Spirit Gathering there has been a food vendor with the word in its title, run by a woman who calls herself the word, selling foods named things like "g-- rice.".  I've seen many a Pagan merchant use the term in their business title or in the names of their products, I hear it added to songs (especially by traveling musicians), and when I was still a teeny-bop trying to learn Witchcraft in my tweens, looking up things like "g-- magic" was one of the more reliable ways to find material to appropriate.  And who knows how many people use it as a nickname for themselves?

This is also common in the queer communities I navigate.  I've heard songs described as "queer anthems" that have the word in it.  I've even literally had to deal with the massively-ridiculous trans people whose "preferred name" includes the word "G--," creating a fucked-up position in which I need to choose between using a slur and using a non-preferred name for a trans person.

And... we need to stop.  Preferably yesterday.  Because that word does not actually mean what we mean it as.  The Romani people aren't as a whole living the romantic lifestyle we envision.

The nomadic lifestyle we associate with the Romani isn't usually out of choice, but because they are constantly fleeing persecution and so many places will not accept a Romani settlement.  They experience a very high unemployment rate and extreme financial distress, contributing to the need for begging and in fact a lot of the mystical stuff we associate with them, like fortune telling (which is generally done for money for non-Romani people).  And the Romani people are severely dehumanized; this didn't hit home to me until ten years ago when news broke that a couple of dead Romani children drowned in Italy and people not only left them on the beach for an hour, but behaved with complete indifference, continuing to play and sunbathe like nothing had happened.  And that's not to talk of the extreme historical persecution; the Romani were some of the first targeted by the Nazis in World War II, who eradicated half of their population, and put them in concentration camps marked with a black or brown inverted triangle.

This is not something those of us who are not Romani people own.  We do not use "g--" to mean somebody who is forced into a migratory lifestyle to flee persecution, we use it to refer to a romantic hippie lifestyle that isn't anything like what the Romani actually experience.  That's not just appropriative, it's antagonistic.  It takes centuries of oppression and turns it into a hip thing for white people.

While doing some research for this essay I came across a quote that really gets to the heart of this issue.  It is from this article on Romani cuisine and is talking about a soup that a non-Romani restaurant serves, named "G-- Soup:"

It’s frustrating for me to read that the people who concocted this version of our staple, and “daydreamed of life as a gypsy [sic],” don’t realize that “Gypsy life” is not just a bohemian version of their white privilege, and that portraying and appropriating our culture and the very word “Gypsy” as such seriously diminishes the seriousness of the current Romani human rights crisis.

Which really describes it much better than I ever could.  As Pagans we talk about appropriation quite a bit these days, for better or worse, but somehow the rampant use of this terminology always seems to escape those discussions, and we just let people go on with their days after referring to themselves as Lady G-- Moon Princess or whatever.

So if you use this term self-referentially, please, unless you yourself are Romani, stop using this term.  Don't cherry-pick the few Romani folks who are OK with you using it.  And learn about what is actually happening to the Romani people before idolizing a lifestyle that really doesn't describe them.

Happy Trails,
-- Setkheni