Sunday 29 January 2012

Gypsies speak out against racism | Workers' Liberty

We’re private people, we like to keep our business to ourselves. But we’ve had camera crews at the door, filming us going about our day to day lives, taking our kids to school, walking our dogs, walking our horses, taking out our rubbish. They film our day to day life and we’re fed up of it.

We’re fed up of being called travellers when we’ve explained that we’re not travellers, we’re Romany Gypsies. Gypsies have been around for centuries, heritage that goes back to India, our own beliefs and our own language, and travellers have come up over the last hundred or so years especially the Irish traveller community that came about after the Irish potato famine. Then there’s English travelers, and others – New Age travelers from the early 1980s came along later too.

We are not travellers. We are Romany Gypsies. That’s our identity and our people paid for it in the Holocaust. And they keep peering into our privacy and we’re crying out for help and support.