The Evolution of Anti Gypsyism in Poland: From Ritual Scapegoat to Surrogate Victims to Racial Hate Speech?
Anti GypsyismThe term "anti gypsyism" has recently gained currency in scholarship and human right activism as an expression of belief that discrimination against Roma is a well established social phenomenon that has similar historical background and cultural features as antisemitism. Following Markus End (2014: 30) we may understand anti gypsyism as:(1) a homogenizing and essentializing employment of a stigma "Gypsy" (or similar concepts) in the approach to or representation of particular social groups and individuals;(2) an attachment of specific deviant characteristics to such stigmatized groups and individuals;(3) a development of discriminatory social structures and practices on that cognitive and cultural basis.As such, anti gypsyism operates with a fundamental distinction into "Us" and "Them" and those classifies as "Gypsies" are perceived as essentially different and thus denied membership of a We group. This exclusion often takes the form of racially motivated denial of the human features of those excluded, as in the definition of Clough Marinaro and Sigona (2011: 585) who understand anti gypsyism as "the phenomenon of dehumanizing Roma, reducing them to a set of negative stereotypes and acting on these in the private and public domains."This is achieved through the process of "naturalization" of the psychological and cultural features attributed to Roma that leads to "pathologizing their actions and character and, on the other hand, to presenting them as 'abject, as out of place, as something that invites contempt and rejection" (Tileaga 2006: 37).Anti gypsyism is a product of European modernity with its emphasis on control and self discipline, rationality and productivity (End 2014: 42) In the course of the process of modernization of the Western society, the Roma have been depicted as the opposite of modern values, and thus excluded from the modern concept of a civilized human being. They have been presentedas a carefree, defiant, disruptive alternative to a Western culture..Moving through civil society, the Gypsies apparently remain beyond reach of everything that constitutes Western identity..outside of historical record and historical time, outside of Western law, the Western nation state, and Western economic orders, outside of writing and discursivity itself. (Trumpener 1992: 860).In this paper I intend to present the mechanisms that contributed to the evolution of this phenomenon on the Polish ground.Roma in PolandThe exact number of Roma in Poland is unknown (partly due to the unreliable data provided by the last censuses) and can only be estimated for ca. 40,000 people, which in a country of 38.5 million means less than 0.2 percent of the total population: the lowest percentage in East Central Europe. We may therefore expect that many non Roma Poles very seldom have any contacts with the Roma people and their attitudes towards Roma are not formed on the basis of their own experiences. Similarly to other societies in the region, however, antigypsyism is quite widespread among non Roma Poles which makes Poland an interesting field for a studying this phenomenon as a process of social construction or imagination, largely independent from the real encounters in everyday life.The situation of Roma in communist Poland has been marked by relative (in comparison to other communist countries) lack of strictly implemented controlling measures on the part of the authorities. Nevertheless, the Law of 24 May 1952 (On the Assistance to Gypsy People in the Transfer to Settled Life) set up the guidelines for the forcible sedentarization, including police inspections of the encampments, registration and fingerprinting. It took twelve years, however, to turn this law into a set of concrete administrative measures which eventually lead to the gradual settlement of the nomadic or semi nomadic Roma groups. This process commenced in March 1964 and involved registration of nomadic Roma, issuing of "permanent residence certificates" (in Polish: "zameldowanie na pobyt staly" and penalization of travelling Roma groups that employed the existing legal regulations such as the law on public gatherings, the law on combating contagious diseases, the law on fire prevention and firefighting, and the law on security and traffic organization on public roads.