The Romani

I know I don't usually post political statement in my blog; I try to just stick to travel and photography. But the issue of the Romani in Europe hits a soft spot as someone whose masters dissertation (UK speak for thesis) focused on indigenous people (who were largely nomadic still in the mid-1900s) and how their state governments dealt with them as a culture.

This article (found here) in the Economist addresses the issue of (probably illegal) deportation of gypsies from France. It insists that this whole process is a disgrace to the European Union and only serves to further isolate a people that has been marginalized since, well, forever. It charges that the only way to deal with the economic and social divides among the Romani is to actually deal with the problem instead of just making them someone else's problem. To France's credit, this isn't just a policy for the Romani; this is how they treat anyone who isn't a honky Frenchman (or who isn't at least willing to pretend he's a honky Frenchman).

The Economist goes on to suggest that the only viable situation is to educate them. Force them to attend school and enforce all those silly little rules France has about non-discrimination in the educational system that have, up to this point, been taken as merely suggestions.

"Education" has, unfortunately, become a cure all for the world's problems, which is where I believe the Economist has it wrong. In the 1800s, the US thought that the best way to deal with Native Americans (largely nomadic, much like the Romani) is to put all their children in school. In the early 1900s, Egypt thought that the best way to deal with the Bedouin was to put all their children in school. In the mid-1900s, Algeria thought that the best way to deal with their nomadic Berber populations was to put all their children in school. In the later 1900s, Australia thought that the best way to completely stamp out Aborigine culture was to strip Aboriginal parents of their children and put them into boarding schools so we could educate-out any trace of Aborigine. Sounds great, right?

Except how immense was the disaster with the Native Americans? We stripped them of any cultural identity, stole them away from their parents (who largely wanted to remain at least semi-nomadic, which didn't jive with the concept of "school years" in one place, so we simply put the children into boarding schools under horrendous and often torturous conditions), attempted to make them as white as possible, and then left them nothing but the burnt embers of a razed identity, soul-consuming poverty, and a great deal of confusion. These steps were repeated with the Bedouin, the Tuareg Berbers, the Aborigine. In each case, the ethnic minorities in question fought the system and the education they considered to be irrelevant to their cultures and needs by attempting to take back their children, simply refusing to send their children and trying to evade the law, resorting to acts of violence in protest, or any number of foot-dragging and largely illegal acts in order to retain any shred of honor and identity that they had left. All with the same catastrophic results that leaves us all with a new set of problems: Now that we've virtually destroyed the ethnic identities of previously self-contained and sufficient peoples, how do we now deal with identity-less minorities that are vastly uneducated (despite our ill-conceived attempts), isolated, and at the bottom of the economic and social food chain? These people remain poverty stricken, illiterate and itinerant and are called by governments violent criminals, drunks, and harborers of terrorists.

But the Economist is suggesting that Europe do just that: force an at least semi-nomadic group of people to submit to a "modern" model of education that, at best, simply doesn't fit their lifestyle and, at worst, would attempt to completely undermine and erase all unique cultural identity in order to assimilate them into mainstream European culture (which, as I have demonstrated with Native Americans, Bedouin, Tuareg, and Aborigine, never backfires, right?). It seems the Economist has ignored history, and the lessons-and ghosts-of American, Egyptian, Algerian and Australian pasts remain unlearned and forgotten. If Europe attempts to force Romani children to attend schools in static locations with curricula that are not tuned to Romani cultural and social needs, history will once again repeat itself, and instead of creating productive and integrated members of society, Europe will have yet another abandoned, impoverished division of society full of anger and hate. There must be another solution to this cultural intolerance. France is well on its way to segregating Muslims and black Africans within its borders; do they really need any more bad press?