(not a comic post bc apparently this is the blog where i talk about being roma)

so i volunteer in my local museum, right? and we do a lot of anti-racism stuff here, to the point where when i first mentioned i was roma, the volunteer coordinator came up to me and told me to tell her immediately if i felt anyone was being racist towards me.

so one day i'm doing my thing, talking to some kids about some bronze age jewelry, when i hear "GYPSY!!!"

and obviously i am. confused. shocked, scared i'm about to be assaulted, etc as anyone is when a slur that applies to you is screamed in the bg. i turn around, mainly to see if this is thrown at me as i'm pretty white passing.

i see this middle aged woman running after a toddler, and once again she yells "GYPSY!" and it occurs to me. in the year of our anarchy 2024 someone has named their child a slur and convinced me i'm about to get jumped in front of five seven-year-olds.

this doesn't have a moral or anything it was just really fucking weird

Yeah, you know what, let's do this. Welcome to witchblr! Here is a list of terms we want you to look into, which will help the witchblr experience for everyone. Some are appropriative, some have roots in racism and/or antisemitism, some are straight up slurs. In no particular order:

Magick (with a k) and therefore Aleister Crowley

Smudging

Kaballah/qaballah

Lilith

Starseeds/Indigo children/crystal children

G*psy

Folkish/Volkish

Odinism

Shaman/Shamanism

Chakras

Voodoo

W*ndig*

I'm sure I'm missing lot, so feel free to add. And I am white so if I overstepped or spoke out of turn, please let me know

Apparently there's a Struts knock-off! It's sold as "G*psy Queen Adventures in Unicorn Land," though, to avoid using a literal racial slur, I'll refer to it as Gigi Queen if I ever talk about it again, since the logo appeared with that name on this plushie:

They were discovered by Fakie Spaceman :)

i kind of feel like dick grayson is in a very weird place rn just from what ive seen when ive dared venture outside of my circles

like.

hes sexualised a lot, something i can trace back to devins run on him that sexualised him and his romani identity (which she introduced and then stopped wanting to research after a few issues) and how it's still prevalent in fandom spaces for people to characterise dick as some kind of hot blooded "gypsy" to objectify. and sometimes people are obvious about what stereotypes about us they're reducing us down to but sometimes its a lot more covert until it hits you in the face and you realise this person is racist and doesn't view your people as anything other than something "exotic" to fantasise about while ignoring us and our struggles irl.

but in those same spaces there are people saying he's white/gadjo/not romani at all, Actually, and his sexualisation Totally isn't linked to ideas introduced by a very racist writer. that No One is sexualising him because of his heritage and its purely because of his ass or something, or because he's good looking and implying that some of it just might be linked to racism is wrong and bad. that he's "bad romani rep" because writers refuse to give us anything Substantial about his heritage or DC doesnt hire romani editors or writers or sensitivity readers to make sure they're doing things okay. i dont even necessarily think he's bad rep like ive seen some people say i just think he needs an actual arc or a substory addressing how hes disconnected from his heritage but is working to find out more or something.

but it's just kind of. frustrating to exist in this fandom as a romani nightwing fan because there are some people who think he's also good rep! great rep that you aren't allowed allowed criticise At All when we're literally getting crumbs. "beautiful romani smile" .

i just think dc should do more in a respectful manner and fans should stop stereotyping him as some kind of seducer because its weird and as someone who's read comics the only place i can tell where you could possibly get that from is devins run or fanfics written by people who don't read comics and reduce the characters down into famously incorrect tropes.

CANNOT BELIEVE I HAVE TO SAY THIS BUT I DONT WANT PROSHIPPERS INTERACTING WITH THIS POST.

Since the page I linked in my original post about Lady Danger's original name containing a slur is gone, I'm gonna post this:

Again, it's true that neither Beacham nor del Toro were being intentionally malicious here. But a slur is a slur, and the fandom has a perfectly good replacement for it.

POLLY AND MICHAEL GRAY PEAKY BLINDERS (2013-2022)

I’m so Mad right now why do they treat him like that

“Ah, my friends I would like to sing you a haunting folk song from my native country :) Transylwania :)���

and then everybody just goes: songs from your native country suck and are boring and sad.

This is Sesame Street! You can’t say these things! That’s a slur Luis.

there is a lot to unpack here but I don’t feel qualified to unpack any of it.

This is episode 0921 the first scene is everybody blaming the Count for a normal thunderstorm. And then this happens. Why are they doing this.

I don't know guys should I get it...

insane scene. insane show 

the thing with the word "gypsy" is that I didn't really used to care either; I'm not from an english-speaking country so "gypsy" had no connotation to me and I used to think "better to leave this to the Roma living in English-speaking countries, they know better." But you can't really be left alone on the internet and sooner or later you WILL interact with non-Roma who speak English and in these interacts whenever I was called "gypsy" they always meant it in a pejorative way. Once on here I was told "Roma are hard-working and can be good, yes, they want to work, I like them. They are different from Gypsies. Gypsies are thieves and will steal anything." Like, the distinction being made here is quite clear. Once I was at the club and I made the mistake of telling this white Canadian guy I was half Romani, he then proceded to make degrading comments at me, telling me "dance for me like a Gypsy", other stuff I won't go into details with, but you can see the sexual connotation that "dance for me like a Romni" doesn't carry.

People get the impression that Gypsy is called a slur because (1) it's an inacurrate term, it comes from "Egyptian" and Roma aren't Egyptians, (2) it's sometimes used in a negative way, but it can also be used in a neutral. A lot of people therefore think that it's really far-fetched to say Gypsy is a slur, and that it's just political correctness gone too far. And sure, I'd agree if "Gypsy" was indeed just a neutral-to-pejorative misnomer, but it's not just that. The "gypsy is a slur" line originates from the American Romani community; the vast majority of American Roma came to the USA after the abolition of slavery in Romania. And as they very rightfully point out, "Gypsy" in English is a rough translation of the word "Cigan", "Tsigan", etc. As scholar Ian Hancock pointed out in his book on Romani slavery in Romania, The Pariah Syndrom, "Cigan" wasn't just the name given to Roma in Eastern Europe, it was a legal term used in judicial texts. "Cigan" meant "Slave". "Cigan" was "slave". In the eyes of the law and for 500 centuries, the definition of "Cigan" was "slave". And those slaves were Roma. In Eastern Europe, Roma were called Cigan so that being Romani meant being born a slave, living as a slave, and dying as a slave.

Another word "Gypsy" roughly translates is "Zigeuner". "Zigeuner" is the German translation of "Cigan". Even though it wasn't associated with chattel slavery, it was still a legal term used in judicial texts. "Zigeuner" was a notion used by Nazis to refer to Romani people and people of Romani descent; being a Zigeuner meant being an "asocial" which meant being a criminal corrupting the German blood.

And when Eastern Europeans or Germans use "Gypsy" when speaking English, it's "Cigan"/"Zigeuner" they are translating, not "Roma", because if they meant to say "Roma" (a word that exists in Slavic languages and in German), they would say "Roma", not "Gypsy".

Some people will point out to some Romani communities or individuals who use "Gypsy" to refer to themselves and will use these people as an argument to say that "Gypsy" is not a slur and that saying otherwise is political correctness gone too far, but that's beyond the point, the thing is that a good chunk of the Romani diaspora is rightfully uncomfortable with the word and that pointing at a few Roma who call themselves Gypsy doesn't erase the fact that "Gypsy" carries a pejorative connotation reminiscing of genocide and slavery and is especially degrading when talking about Romani women. I do agree that focusing on "is Gypsy a slur or not?" is very annoying and kind of useless because there are so many other things we could talk about but at this point, the question is, "why do Gadje keep coming back to this particular discourse when they could just move on, accept that Gypsy is pejorative, and then try and do more meaningful things?"

various Estradasphere posters & flyers

from “Muscles of the Mind” by Dorothy Allison, published in Trash (1988, reprinted 2002)

image description under the cut. content warning: anti-Romani racism (g slur) at the top of the 2nd image (first full page), ableist c slur at the top of the 4th image (third full page)

At the concert last week, I kept walking back to Cass and the little bottle of Jack Daniel’s she had in her coat pocket. “Have a drink, darling. It’ll open your eyes,” she’d say, her pupils hidden behind half-closed lids. I shook my head no and gave her a quick lick on the neck that made her cheeks flash pink and her eyes open wide. All the women near us, most of them Cass’s friends from work or the pool hall, had their own bottles. I tried to get Cass to keep her little bottle down in the shadows. The crowd kept pushing past, their eyes hooded with too much dope and skin sour with cigarettes—women in party clothes: loose trousers, velvet vests, hats, high-heeled boots, glittering necklaces, and elaborate hoops dangling from their ears. Most of them looked like they belonged to the same gypsy troupe, their tribe indicated by the slogan-bearing buttons pinned to their collars and jackets. I saw Anna go by with her new girlfriend, Gayle, and then three of the women from the house—Judy, Paula, and Lenore. But none of them seemed to have seen us, and they all quickly disappeared into the audience. I felt Cass slip her hands around my waist and turned my face into the shelter of her neck.

“Where do they all come from?” I was only half serious. There were more women in the audience than I’d seen at any demonstration up at the capitol building.

“Oh, these only come out for the music,” Cass laughed. “Just like me.”

“You know, culture, women’s culture.” Cass’s friend Billy leaned over us, her hand sliding past my butt on its way to the bottle in Cass’s pocket. “An’t you heard about women’s culture?” I looked down at the black ink tattoos standing out all over her forearms. Billy was wearing her usual uniform—jeans so old and worn they looked like gray sky over the ocean at dawn, and a denim vest buttoned up tight to flatten her breasts. Her arms were bare, and every time she stretched her hand out, I could see white flash under her armpit from skin that was never exposed to the sun.

“You mean to tell me we an’t here to listen to rock and roll?” Cass slapped Billy’s shoulder and giggled. It had taken two weeks of teasing and arguing before Cass had agreed to come to this event, and she’d insisted on getting Billy and her girlfriend Roxanne to come, too. “Got to have somebody to talk to,” she’d insisted.

Billy had thought the whole notion a hoot. “They don’t know how to dress,” she kept saying, “but some of these chicks an’t bad-looking.”

Roxanne just kept biting the lipstick off her lips and kicking her heels against the wall behind us. “I don’t see nothing here anybody’d want to take home with ’em.” She lit a cigarette and gave me a look of pure malevolence. I wondered if she had seen Billy’s hand on my ass. I leaned back into Cass’s embrace and tried to look happily innocent of any interest in Roxanne’s woman. That wasn’t too hard. Cass was just about the sexiest woman in the crowd, big and rough-looking in her worn denim jacket with her black hair cut close around her ears, but with soft brown eyes and a quick smile. She was a good-natured woman who liked me more than she was sure she wanted to. More important, she didn’t seem to feel the need to push her girlfriends around that Billy did. I loved having a woman in my life who prowled like a big old tiger, yet cuddled me close like a kitten licking mama’s ears. Billy talked about Roxanne as if the woman was a not quite bright child, and clearly had decided I had to have some special hidden sexual talent if Cass was so ready to put up with my sass. Part of what kept me seeing Cass was her casual acceptance of my temper and habits, and her grinning dismissal of Billy’s half-serious flirting with me. Cass was also nearly as tall as Billy and had told me frankly that they had become friends only after everybody they knew kept pushing them to fight each other.

“We was supposed to do the fight of the week or something, and let everybody know who was butcher than who, you know. But providing that kind of free entertainment just an’t my style. Billy and I put them all through some changes when we took up with each other, I’ll tell you.”

Two women I had met at the Women’s Center wiggled past us. One of them looked me in the eye and then up over my head into Cass’s face. I could feel Cass’s grin in the way her hands wiggled on me. The woman looked away quickly.

“Did you hear about Angie?” her friend asked.

“Yeah, I heard.” The woman pushed away from us hurriedly. “Don’t talk about her here.”

“Did you see her face?” Roxanne spoke with her cigarette held between her teeth. “That woman needs to reconsider going without makeup.”

I felt the heat come up in my face and didn’t know for a moment if I was angry or ashamed. I watched the expressions on the faces of the women who filed past us, then felt the skin at the back of my neck pull tight. We could have been animals in a cage from the way they looked at us. I kept going from indignant anger to shame with no pause between. The anger felt healthy but wouldn’t stay with me, while the shame was continuous and crippling. I wanted to be proud of Cass’s hands on my hips, to glare back coldly at the women who frowned at her. I was proud of her, but my pride wasn’t holding any better than my anger. I wished I didn’t care what anybody thought, but I did. Beside me Roxanne kept getting her mirror out and pulling a few curls forward down over her eyes. Her hands were shaking, her makeup streaking on her neck where sweat was trailing down. For a moment, she looked like my little sister looking up at me, wanting my help but unable to ask. I could have cried. Instead, I took deep breaths trying to calm myself and finally just gave it up and took a couple of pulls from Cass’s bottle.

Cass hugged me again, her eyes watching me closely. “We can always leave.” She didn’t look as if the idea bothered her at all.

“The music hasn’t even started.” I drank again, concentrating on feeling angry rather than self-conscious or ashamed. The last of the audience was milling past us while a piano chord sounded from the front of the hall. A little group of men and women passed us, the women defiant in silky skirts and the men holding the women close to them. One of the women stared at Billy and giggled when Billy grinned at her. The man with her looked nervous and impatient, but the woman didn’t seem to want to head for her seat. Like a pigeon transfixed by a snake, she was pinned to the far wall by Billy’s green-eyed stare. I almost laughed out loud.

“I don’t care who they sleep with,” I whispered to Cass, “I just wish they wouldn’t tell so many lies about it.”

“Mean bitch,” Cass quipped, not meaning it at all.

Roxanne looked over at me strangely, her face working as if she were making up her mind about something. She looked up at Billy, who was still watching the woman against the far wall. “Hell,” Roxanne said, “these days I can’t tell who’s lying and who is just passing time.”

“Passing time,” I repeated. I ignored Cass’s offer of another drink. Instead I turned and put my arm around Roxanne’s shoulders, watching with her as the audience settled down and Cass and Billy whispered behind us. I watched the way the women moved, the muscles that stood out in their necks, the way their eyes went from dark to light in the changing light. My teeth clenched, but I just held on to Roxanne, and kept my hip pressed close to Cass’s long legs.

Friendly reminder that the reason we call her Lady Danger is because the g-word is a slur.

Yes, Lady Danger was originally named after an engine, nobody was being deliberately malicious toward the Romani people, but that doesn't change the fact that it's a slur.

Elizabeth Olsen playing a Romani character and yet saying the g slur to describe her as well as listening to an antisemitic podcast is exactly why she should’ve never been cast as Wanda. She and Marvel are both at fault cuz Wanda’s heritage is very clear in the comics. Even if marvel wanted to go a different direction and use a different universe, there is no universe where Wanda would be white. They messed up in AOU, knew it, and decided to keep going. Elizabeth is probably apart of the “I should be able to play a tree” brigade. Also, Wanda’s supposed to be a teenager in AOU. Did Marvel really think we were gonna buy that Elizabeth was a teenager???

what's the g slur?

It's an anti-Romani slur. You're probably aware of it but might not know it's a slur: G*psy. Don't say it. It's a slur.