I will not read your story, and I may be rude to your face if --

[ritaxis]

I read yet another book synopsis where a character's "gypsy blood" is supposed to imbue them with mysterious magical powers.

Try this: read that as "heebie blood," or "injun blood," or any such thing.

The "magical negro" is an offensive plot device or character construct, even if the the character is some other ethnicity. 

Just quit it, okay?  And quit supporting writers who do this kind of thing.

If you think it is harmless entertainment because it is only fiction, I will ask you to take a stroll through the news articles coming out of Europe these days, where Rom are being deported, vilified, and brutally attacked, because they can be "othered" in this way.  And in Romania, where the former government wore purple to defy witchcraft,  enough people actually believe that "mysterious magical" powers stuff, and they don't think it's cute, they think it's vicious, and they're willing to do terrible things because of it.  And in Bulgaria, they can drum up crowds of a thousand and more who demonstrate against the Rom as a people because they believe they are the source of crime in their country.  And in the more modern and "western" Czech Republic, a thousand people gathered outside a Rom housing development holding weapons and Molotov cocktails and demanding the right to parade right through the neighborhood with these things.

Lest you think it's all about the Eastern Europeans, let me remind you that the French government recently rounded up as many Rom as they could and herded them into camps for deportation.

If you think that calling real-life ethnic groups mysterious magic users by blood in fiction is innocent, think again.

I have decided not to protect the author: it is Lorraine Ulrich at Dreamspinner Press, and this is the link to the summary.

Comments

Our beloved (and late) chiropracter

[dragonet2.livejournal.com]

was of romany blood. Writing about that stuff casually irks me because of it. She was horribly offended about Rom treatment by the NAzis and etc. Then again a lot of things (maybe too many things) offended her, she ended her life by her own hands.

My only theory about hear death is that, when she was done with someone, she was DONE -- al dialogue, etc was over, she cut them off from any discourse, period. I think she realized she had overdone that theory and got 'done; with herself. Otherwise, like a lot of suicides, it doesn't make much sense to me. It was not accidental, she put a hose from her exhaust into her car's interior.

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

I am ashamed to admit that some of the most disadvantaged and reviled people in the UK today are the travellers. Admittedly, that's more a hatred of their lifestyle than their ethnicity and I don't know how many are actually Romany. A lot of them must originally have been of Irish decent and more recently 'Hippy Travellers' took to living on the road to escape a mundane lifestyle, but any Othering of whole groups of people based on one characteristic is a bad thing.

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

And the thing about Travellers is that they have their own culture (and not all of them live in caravans, either.) I've encontered people who are aware of the prejudices against Roma who are happy to speak ill of non-Roma travellers. (I'm not convinced of the settledness of 'settled' people anyway).

[khiemtran.livejournal.com]

Yes, last year I was stunned to find the (admittedly terrible) local paper running an article warning of "gypsy families" (by which they meant nomadic criminals) preying on locals. And "gypped" seems to be a completely inoffensive expression meaning to be ripped off...

[erikagillian.livejournal.com]

May I link? I don't have any kind of following but this is important, I think. I heard about the French and was just astounded.

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

Of course.

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

I've worked on a book detailing the struggle the Roma faced in getting compensation for Nazi persecutions, and it was chilling all the way through - from the history of prejudice going back to the Kaiserreich through the deliberate stoking of enmities, to the modern-day pretense that they must have done something to deserve persecution.