Shattering Ugly Roma Stereotypes

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/22/opinion/roma-stereotypes.html

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Historically shunned and disparaged, targeted for liquidation by the Nazis during World War II, Europe’s 12 million Roma, sometimes called Gypsies, still suffer from social exclusion, poor education, high unemployment and poverty. The ugly stereotypes used to stigmatize them as socially backward have proved tenacious, yet there are places in Europe where people are finding ways to end this historical ugliness.

As Rick Lyman reported in The Times this month, the village of Spissky Hrhov in Slovakia is showing what can be done. Two decades ago, jobs were drying up and the population shrinking, leaving a higher percentage of Roma. The village decided to embrace its Roma residents and created community companies to employ them and helped them build decent homes. At that time, Spissky Hrhov’s Roma were living in shacks, and many of their children were sent to separate schools.

Today, they have jobs and live in brick houses with running water and electricity. Children are no longer separated at school, and three Roma from the village are in college.

France is providing another story of discrimination against Roma being overcome. In elections on Sunday, Anina Ciuciu, a 27-year-old Roma, is running for a Senate seat. When she was 7, her parents fled discrimination in Romania and moved to France, where 67 percent of Roma children do not regularly attend school, often because of bureaucratic requirements. Luckily for Ms. Ciuciu, a teacher provided the required permanent address. She went on to study law at the Sorbonne.

If elected, Ms. Ciuciu would be the first Roma to serve in France’s Senate, “a strong symbol,” she told France 24 news, “historic even.” Providing Roma in France with decent housing, or at least waiving the fixed address requirement for school, would help Roma children get the education they need to improve their lives.

In 2013, Manuel Valls, who was interior minister at the time and went on to become prime minister, justified deporting Roma from France by saying that they “have lifestyles that are very different from ours, and are clearly in confrontation” with French society. As the examples of Spissky Hrhov and Ms. Ciuciu show, the only thing preventing Roma from being productive European citizens is prejudice like Mr. Valls’s.