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Isnt it weird how you never hear about the gypsies? They sure look like they count as a capital-M Minority: Very poor, very uneducated, very bad relations to the police, they even were in the Nazi camps. But in political discourse they might as well not exist. Im vaguely aware that our eastern neighbors have more of them and its more of a topic there, but this doesnt make it to me either. I just searched for it and best I found is this, from 2020. Theres sightly more in german, but compared to the media volume dedicated to telling me that Orban is mean to the gays, it might as well not exist. While I was at it I also looked for the "list of gypsies that made important contributions to science", and that actually doesnt exist. The only thing that remotely looks like a hit is this, which has three people on it: one with a possible nth-generation ancestor, and two that google isnt even sure exist.
I find this interesting as a point of comparison. Theres lots of people out there of even opposing ideologies giving mechanistic explanations of how the shared characteristics of Minorities lead to the political discourse around them, and then heres a case where it just didnt.
They exist in America in a "you can't use that term anymore" way, but America really doesn't have an alternate term for them (since "Romani" or similar is imprecise), so there's not really much to work with. There was a recent D&D dust-up where a group of fantasy knock-offs (the Vistani, I believe) were referred to as drunkards and a few other negative terms, which apparently are negative gypsy stereotypes, and therefore had to be removed.
I personally had no idea that "drunkard" was a stereotype associated with gypsies prior to the kerfluffle, but you learn something every day, I suppose.
"No, you see, every time you say 'monkey' I immediately think of black people, so you need to stop using such racist language."
The Vistani wagons are called Vardos. This was an intentional pastiche, not pareidolia or hypersensitivity.
No, wait. Looking up older sources, it wasn't even a pastiche. The first module with them just calls them "Gypsies", and the main "Realm of Terror" introduction labels their chapter as "Gypsies: Startling revelations about Ravenloft's Vistani, who are unlike the vagabonds of any other world". I suppose that "unlike" phrase gives some room for plausible deniability, "No, we're just saying that Ravenloft's gypsies are drunkards, not our own world's", but at least they're very specific about who it is they'd have to deny insulting.
I withdraw my snark
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