The scent of burnt human flesh is Gelu Duminică’s most vivid memory from his research while studying sociology in Romania. After communism fell, there were terrible days back then, in the 1990s and the early 2000s, he claims. ” People were igniting one another with fire.” figuratively. Some people perished in interethnic issues, whether it was as a result of hostilities between Romanians and Hungarians, Roma and Romania, or both.
Duminică, 46, is one of Romania’s most vocal proponents of the Roma movement. He is a man of hot words and beautiful, deep respect for the area, which he is so intimately familiar with.
His father, who was fighting for Romania on the Eastern Front during World War II, serves as the starting point of much of his voyage. His state was occupied deporting his Roma relatives during the Romani Holocaust while he was putting his life in danger to support it. Just two of the 40 community members who were expelled went back home; one was Duminică’s father.
25, 000 Roman people were forcibly relocated to Transnistria during the Holocaust, a country then under Romanian rule. According to records, almost half of them were children, and painfully, more than 11, 000 people died as a result of intense hunger, severe cold, or the lethal typhus epidemic.
Duminică was born in Galaţi, an eastern Romanian area, in the latter part of the 1970s into abject poverty and irregular home violence. At the age of three, his father turned to crying after losing his own kids to the Romani Holocaust. Duminică frequently claims that when two states of poverty—his mother and father’s—came along, the outcome was even greater hardship for all. A steady served as the family’s primary residence.
Without providing them with some knowledge and understanding so they can face their own demons, you don’t ask someone to change their behavior.
Duminică, one of the five brothers, was born nine months and ten days after his older brother passed away from leukemia. His parents had demolished their home and sold the bricks to pay for medical care in a last-ditch effort to keep their child.
At his mother’s emphasis, no one in the Duminică neighborhood had attended high school before he did. The most common goal was to gather bird feathers for a nearby linen and pillow company. This job was regarded as clear and simple in comparison to other jobs like sewage function, street cleaning, digging ditches, and construction site work.
Little has changed for the Roma group since then. According to research, 20 % of Roma children do not attend elementary school. Eight out of ten students leave school first.
3.4 percent of Romania’s population ( 570,000 ) is of Roma descent, according to the 2022 census. Illegal estimates, however, reveal a different reality: Romania is actually home to between 1.2 and 1.5 million Roma, many of whom are reluctant to identify for fear of embarrassment.
Researchers concur that since 2001, when the Italian state released its first” approach” to improve conditions for Roma areas during its arrival to the European Union, conditions have not improved, from segregation and discrimination to bullying in schools.
Duminică pursued sociology and social work at the University of Bucharest after great institution. He later rose to the positions of associate professor and executive producer of the Roma-focused NGO Agenția Împreună. He has taken part in more than 50 initiatives to enhance career in Romania’s underprivileged areas over the past 20 years.
He successfully fought for a change to the dictionary’s definitions of the terms “gypsy” ( țigan ) and” Roma” in 2011. He claimed that by failing to recognize the insulting use of the term “gypsy,” the current explanations sustained negative stereotypes.
Do you see improvements in Romanian society for Roma communities, despite the fact that you frequently claim that social change does n’t happen overnight?
There were significant transnational issues in the 1990s and the early 2000s, the second ten and a half years following the collapse of communism. The Hădăreni protests, which took place in 1993, are probably the most well-known example of this issue.
You may look at job advertisements during that time and see phrases like:” We’re hiring.” Roma was n’t included. Yet romantic hotlines would say, “8989, I am warm.” No Roma.
Things that presently jolt people were once thought to be normal. You were frequently prohibited from entering clubs or open areas as a Roma people. In areas of Roma, there were officers stabbings. More than 700 out of the roughly 1,300 captives taken by Jiu Valley workers on purchases from the new chairman] in Bucharest between June 13 and 15, 1990, were Roma. This is because during the Mineriad, which began as peaceful demonstrations by kids and opposition to the recently elected government in 1990 and quickly turned violent after the fall of communism.
If one only considers these problems, there are noticeable changes. It is important to note that civil and political societies supported all of these biased behaviors and attitudes at the time. These days, a business or organization will be in trouble if someone is denied entry to open area on the basis of their race. At the time, this was not the situation. If you examine all types of abuse or prejudice, you will notice a significant evolution. Yes, we are far from where we could be, but we also have a long way to go.
What are some instances of successful initiatives that have been made in this direction so much?
I recall the struggle to change the term” țigan” ( gypsy ) in the dictionary when we first began in 2011. Without mentioning that it had a negative connotation, we observed that the term “rom” ( Roma ) was synonymous with” țigan” and included” a person with bad habits” among the definitions. I wrote about the stigmatization of Roma based solely on glossary concepts. The media, I may say, was very complimentary. If I had done this in the 1990s, I may have received a lot of criticism.
Resistance to change is natural and, indeed, change doesn’t happen overnight. You need understanding and information. Without providing them with some knowledge and understanding so they can face their own demons, you don’t ask someone to change their behavior..
How has Italian culture promoted this change?
I think civil society is largely to blame for the progress we are seeing. It is also correct that the internet has fundamentally altered the cultural environment by amiably disseminating information to as many people as possible. New voices that dug into the history and offered well-argued beliefs started to gain momentum.
However, we have not performed well in terms of knowledge. For instance, the 500 years of Roma slavery in Romania are regarded as one of the longest periods of servitude in human history, despite the fact that we have only just begun to learn about it. Of course, in the 1990s, if you had discussed the Holocaust, individuals may have regarded you with contempt. Music, story, and the internet are just a few examples of communication that have contributed to social shift. Major media outlets, such as the BBC, came and trained reporters, imparting to them a new method of operation.
Although the West has been a democracy and has held such views for hundreds of years, whereas we have just recently begun, we are undoubtedly much behind them. We live in a young nation. In the past 150 years, we have been discussing Italian culture and a “national ethos” for about 100 years. Since we were ruled by dictatorships for the entirety of the 20th century, we have only recently learned about politics.
What do you believe is still needed, based on your practice as an advocate, to fight racism in Romania?
Some of humanity’s principles, specifically humanistic values like “do never judge a book by its cover,” need to be discussed, in my opinion. Never pass judgment on someone before learning what they do. To put it another way, evaluate them based on their behavior rather than what YOU believe they are doing. The issue is that, by” culture,” I mean everyone that has been passed down to us non-genetically, we are ethnically programmed to respond in one way or another.
And we’ve been exposed to all kinds of cultural bullshit. In our adolescence tales, the strangers were always good people; instead, they often came to take our women, land, and water. The story’s antagonist was always the Dark person. You must act appropriately as a child or” the vagabond man will come and abduct you.”
Laws, specific actions, and resources must support changes, but before anything else, we must come to a discussion on values. We also require officials, in my opinion. genuine officials who speak from the heart.
We have seen the development of a fresh wave of Roma academics and activists over the past ten years. How is the environment changing as a result?
It’s more of a small present than I’d describe as waves. You need at least 5,000 of these people to talk about a flood. However, there is no one in the political or religious circles; the people you are thinking of just pertain to civic society.
Despite being impressive, if you take a closer look at each of these individuals, you’ll see that they are all very personal in their work. ( See author Rowena Marin and her book, Who Am I in this World ) They are primarily focused on their own stories. publishing books ( like Valeriu Nicolae’s We are the Roma ), carrying out academic research on discrimination ( such as Harvard ‘ Margareta Matache ), helming plays and films ( Alina Erban, Gypsy Queen ), or leading NGOs working to advance the cause of Roma people. Officials, on the other hand, are followed by the people. Officials are required for major change. We do not already possess them.
They do, in fact, make a significant contribution to the fairly recent picture of Roma identity in public spaces. It is novel because, following the transnational problems we discussed, rights were the primary issue at stake. In fact, Italian society as a whole was centered on social rights and financial growth in the years following the fall of communism. Specific rights, slavery, and the Holocaust were too far away from current concerns.
However, this nuanced Roma personality, which does not include the notion that being poor and subjected to discrimination, was only recently brought up. We are still just getting started.
Had the classic tale in which Roma are, at best, victims be altered by highlighting Roma people who are creating life that are at least “normal”?
I do believe that life stories are helpful. The issue is that we have been raised to view Roma negatively. In any case, a fully functional and included Roma member is no thought to be Roma. Romanians interact frequently with many Roma people on a daily basis, including bread vendors, taxi drivers, bus driver, and teachers, but they are unaware of this because they do n’t behave in ways that are connected to” Roma.” Instead, we are wired to think that all criminals and prisoners, as well as all orphans, are Roma.
Although they have n’t but, these stories may serve as role models. The biggest obstacle to these tales would be for you, a Romanian racial woman, to serve as the inspiration for one of the Roma women. to recognize yourself in her. In other words, even you can identify with her life story because her ethnicity [becomes ] so inconsequential.
I frequently discuss my upbringing and my family in order to demonstrate how similar I was to another. I do n’t have an ethnic background. There is a problem if you see an cultural history.
My father did not physically abuse my mother “in a gypsy trend,” according to the violent incidents that have occurred in my home. Simply put, he beat her. A person who can view understands that there is nothing different after hearing a similar story from several families.
The neighbors in our childhood tales were never good folks; as a child, you must act appropriately to avoid” the vagabond man will come and abduct you.”
What distinguishes my challenges from those of someone who was raised in a low-income community? They might have worn the logo of a physically challenged or impoverished farmer rather than the Roma. Although the theory claims that my Roma brand caused me to experience “multiple discrimination,” the rule is the same.
I and another Roma tell general, never ethnic, stories. We are even Roma, whether on purpose or not, which was a double risk.
Because of their ethnicity, rich Roma who do exist and who have struggled their entire lives do not have success stories to share. You typically simply observe poor Roma people who toiled and struggled, but you’ll notice that the main problems were financial and were only made worse by their ethnicity.
What drives you to keep battling prejudice? How do you develop the endurance and endurance required?
You begin by making the incorrect notion that I am fighting prejudice in this situation. The way we portray this world will determine how it appears. It’s time to concentrate on what I may do differently to improve stuff because I’m sick of pointing fingers at people.
The issue is how I can persuade those around me of the necessity of change in order for us to all benefit more. more immediately, but that I can benefit more. Because I am incredibly self-centered, all I do is for the benefit of my family, my child, and my children. No yours or ours, but mine, I want Romania to look great. Because if my Romania looks good, I’ll feel good about myself, be physically and emotionally creative, and have everything Maslow’s dome talks about. This sociological model represents a hierarchy of individual needs, with biological needs at the base and self-actualization at its top.
There are already more of us who have that if I have it and you do. I’m happy that more people are aware of my self-centered job. However, I base my work on principles. I think this is what we require more of. There are too many saviors and not enough egotists in our society. You are motivated when you work for your own benefit.
What should I do if my child grows up and is referred to as a” bird” by Romanians and “washed up” [a derogatory term used in this environment by Roma society members for Roma people who have skin that is lighter than “it may be”? I had nothing to say to her. Purchase a plaything for her? not at all. I act in this way because I want to be able to look her in the eyes and say,” My dear, I did the best I could.” If you can, try to be smarter than I am and accomplish more. I raised you to worry because of this.
I disagree with the label of being an advocate. It has to do with placing and not wanting to look ahead. I’m only a person who cares and understands that the nation did appear the way I want it to.
The decency of Gelu Duminică
Do you anticipate your daughter growing up in a world that is more accepting?
I exert every effort to make that arise. Although I sincerely hope that this did occur, I personally prefer to reside in a better nation. I think my country is better now than it was thirty years ago, as I said at the outset. But I have n’t just sat and watched the nation change for the better. How could waiting for others to take action get better?
What part do you think a doctor plays in educating students about Roma prejudice?
I did n’t decide to join the faculty on a permanent basis. Tenured may entail having access to the university and not always doing what I want. For 12 times, I worked as an associate doctor. The university pay frequently does n’t even cover the gas bill.
But I continue to do this because these young folks teach me but little. I have the honor of witnessing how these people evolve, how understanding broadens minds and hearts, and I am given a lot of electricity. It is an honor and a delight to be with them. AI can do more than just provide the lecture material, according to a professor. The amazing achievement is to physically engage students, ensuring that they continue to learn even after you leave the classroom. You are a true teacher if you can accomplish that. Additionally, if kids voluntarily attend your classes. The percentage of students in my class is over 90 %. Individuals come, in my opinion, because they discover more than just details. I’m proud of the fact that many of my present coworkers were once my kids.
The area is typically packed for my class on taraf music, a type of folk music that is usually played by Roma people, following week.
It sends chills down your spine when the Roma anthem plays and the place stands up on its own. You know you did something when you saw 300 students stand up and listen to the song of a majority.
As Roma migrants attempted to flee war in Ukraine, they allegedly faced discrimination. Roma people joined the war efforts at the same time. What does all of this mean then that Romania’s war seems to be getting better?
Behaviour is influenced by the situation and environment. For Romania, my father fought on the Eastern Front of the Second World War. The Italian government was deporting his home while he was engaged in combat at the Dom River. Just two of the 40 individuals deported in that team returned home after being asked to defend the nation that was destroying his home. My dad, who was only three years old at the time, was one of them.
I am certain that some Roma may be labeled as such and discriminated against, as happened in Ukraine, if the issue were to worsen in Romania. Considering that this occurs in any area.