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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 25, 2025

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Saying they have a "mixture of European and non-European ancestry" is about as useful as saying that English people have a "mixture of English and non-English" ancestry because of that dirty Norman blood.

No, it’s not, because Anglo-Saxons and Normans were extremely genetically-similar populations even before intermixing. Whereas gypsies originate in the Indian subcontinent. They have also practiced a large degree of endogamy, meaning that they have maintained a very large non-European component to their ancestry despite their long existence living alongside Europeans.

Yes, they have inhabited the European geographical area for a long time, but surely you can understand that that’s not what people are referring to when they call them “non-European”. There is a genetic/ancestral cluster from which the peoples of Europe collectively descend, since many thousands of years ago. Gypsies are highly peripheral to this, as their arrival into Europe is comparatively very recent and they maintain significant genetic difference — manifested in their obvious phenotypic differences from the surrounding populations — from that genetic cluster.