Both groups elicit frothing hatred in bourgeois hateful anglos.
Now imagine how homeless roma people are treated here in evropa
I don’t know a ton about Roma, but it always seemed like they have their own culture and a mild support system with each other in some way. I feel like being American homeless has got to be lonely as fuck most of the time.
Really? I feel like the homeless people, at least in SF also try to support each other pretty well
I see them chatting and hanging out pretty often, and a lot of times when I’m talking to them while handing out stuff they’ll tell me to head over to where their friends’ tent is
Many homeless folks band together and form community, though it’s tough because it’s often ripped apart by the state.
One good point is that Roma people share an ethnic identity, whereas the homeless in the US are the poorest and most in need across a whole set of ethnicities - though disproportionately the marginalized, as the function of marginalization is to make these violences, like being unhoused, tolerable to the rest of society. So Roma face a fundamentally racist and genocidal attitude directed towards them (a decent amount of their tradition of traveling is due to being forced out by various Euros - forced to adapt to that status quo).
I worked with a bunch of Roma on the hop farm and they were honestly the best people I’ve ever worked with. There was a really strong culture of sharing food and Jan found me a banger of a VW Passat for only £500. Jan would disappear off into the woods every lunch and forage tons of cob nuts and apples and we’d all chow down together. Farm owner treated them like shit though which was fucking typical.
Roma are pretty cool and I’ve had the pleasure of calling some friends…but while they have a culture I’ve not seen the active hostility towards homeless people in the way even centrist Euros see the Roma.
Like talk to a balding French accountant and in the middle of a dinner he’ll say he saw a Roma family playing football in a nearby courtyard and suggest someone set their house on fire while they were distracted. And not as a joke, as a suggestion for a fun evening activity that had to be gently dissuaded.
Like shit you associate with straight up Nazis or the pre civil rights kkk coming from people you know vote centre left.
It’s not better or worse…but…there’s an aggressiveness there and I think with homelessnes it’s more “I don’t want to see them and don’t care how” instead of “I care how and it involves bullets”
The anti-Roma racism is so deeply ingrained in our society it’s basically background radiation. Children are misbehaving? Scare them into obedience by threatening to “send them away to the [slur]s”. Invite your normal looking centre left friends to the countryside for a barbecue? Casually get asked if the neighbors are colored. At family dinner with generic centrist parents? Random racist remark out of nowhere. Lunch break with white collar coworkers? Unprompted rant about how one of them saw a man who claimed to be [slur] say on the internet that he is okay with [slur] and this is why it’s settled that it’s okay to use [slur] instead of Roma and anything else is silly wokeness.
Sure, [slur] support each other, but they’re also generationally perpetuating their way of living
Wow what do you think culture is? You do know that eradicating culture is a form of genocide? Roma people keeping their culture is a good thing, not a bad thing. Being sedentary is not superior to being nomadic, and there’s a huge bias against the Roma and other traditionally nomadic peoples from people with sedentary-supremacist mindsets.
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Letting your children get educated, become literate, and have a chance to escape poverty is not genocide. If you can imagine shit like removing 13-14 year old girls from school to get married and bear children a nice cultural tradition, then you’ve got some serious issues. I’ve seen that happen to my peers, and it’s not good for anyone.
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In most Balkan countries Romani haven’t been nomadic since around the 19th century. Now they’re either just regular people or live in absolute poverty and have to fight to survive. In both cases they’re sedentary, the only difference is whether they’re living in a house made of bricks or out of cardboard.
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At least over here the bias is against the sort of people who literally drug their babies to have them fall asleep. Otherwise they get a lot more governmental aide than the local population, as they genuinely need it.
Sorry, my intention was to point that the comparison is silly because hate of the poor and racism are separated hatreds.
Clearly it sounded racist. I’m sorry.
CW: Dehumanization, violence
It’s disgusting how many qualifiers and conditions liberals attach to whether or not someone is considered human. Live outside ? Don’t speak English? Lost your job, can’t pay rent, and lost your home? Disabled? Don’t have a college degree? Have politics to the left of Bernie Sanders? You do not register as a person to them and there is no limit to how much torture, misery, and death they’ll accept for people like you.
I’ll add to the list. Being a working class person from anywhere rural or the south. These are the powerful people(?) that are dictating our politics.
I mean, I know Europeans who hate homeless too.
Definitely true but there’s a significant difference. Here in the UK for example it’s definitely frowned upon to hate the homeless, everyone understands they’re unlucky people. Dickens probably helped a lot there but also socialist movements the country has had.
As a result of this we have aproximately 5000-6000 rough sleepers. The US on the other hand has 550,000+ despite being only 5x larger in population they have 110x more people sleeping in the streets.
In my experience there are similar attitudes to homeless in other western-european countries. Whereas when I’ve visited the US it’s been as OP describes, very similar attitudes to how people discuss Roma here.
In my old town, a significant portion of the homeless population were homeless as a direct result of the municipal government closing a mental health facility in the early 00s. Besides the obvious moral implications of that, now you have the “upstanding” citizens reinforcing their prejudice of homelessness as a personal failing, something that happens to people because they deserve it or are wicked somehow. Not to even question the notion that a human’s right to not starve, in a society which has the means to feed everyone, need not depend on whether you want to be their friend.
I live in Europe now and while poverty still exists in my area, it does not have the same character, because there are still vestiges of social programs that will, in the last resort, keep people from the absolute destitution that exists in all major US cities, even and especially the wealthy ones.
