Historicizing Roma in Central Europe

Between Critical Whiteness and Epistemic Injustice

Victoria Shmidt, Bernadette Nadya Jaworsky

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000176889
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Historia
• Categoría: Historia del mundo

In Central Europe, limited success in revisiting the role of science in the segregation of Roma reverberates with the yet-unmet call for contextualizing the impact of ideas on everyday racism. This book attempts to interpret such a gap as a case of epistemic injustice. It underscores the historical role of ideas in race-making and provides analytical lenses for exploring cross-border transfers of whiteness in Central Europe. In the case of Roma, the scientific argument in favor of segregation continues to play an outstanding role due to a long-term focus on the limited educability of Roma. The authors trace the long-term interrelation between racializing Roma and the adaptation by Central European scholars of theories legitimizing segregation against those considered non-white, conceived as unable to become educated or "civilized." Along with legitimizing segregation, sterilization and even extermination, theorizing ineducability has laid the groundwork for negating the capacity of Roma as subjects of knowledge. Such negation has hindered practices of identity and quite literally prevented Roma in Central Europe from becoming who they are. This systematic epistemic injustice still echoes in contemporary attempts to historicize Roma in Central Europe. The authors critically investigate contemporary approaches to historicize Roma as reproducing whiteness and inevitably leading to various forms of epistemic injustice. The methodological approach herein conceptualizes critical whiteness as a practice of epistemic justice targeted at providing a sustainable platform for reflecting upon the impact of the past on the contemporary situation of Roma.

Part I

Whiteness

The never-ending story of epistemic injustice against Roma

1 Whiteness

A locus for doing race

Roma in Central Europe: obsession with whiteness

“When I got my bachelor diploma in social pedagogy, I was joking that Bc.¹ should mean Bílý cikán [White “gypsy”]. If I were to get Mgr.,² I would become mimořádně geniální Rom [exceptionally gifted Roma],” Joška, one of my Romani colleagues, told me a few years ago. Within this joke, those familiar with the history of Roma in Central Europe can immediately recognize several interrelated sociocultural layers. The capital “B” in “Bílý,” indicated by putting his hand up, and the lower-case “c” in “cikán” (hand down) sharpen the division between white superiority and those non-whites that socialist authorities had refused to acknowledge as an ethnic group. Obtaining a university degree is seen as a prerequisite for becoming whiter, and moving to a higher degree, from bachelors to masters, correlates with replacing the pejorative “cikán” by the respectful “Rom.” This long-term and ambivalent role of education as somehow proving the ability to acquire a collective and individual “me” calls for an exploration of the (in)educability of Roma, one of the central arguments underpinning various policies concerning Roma in Central Europe over the last four centuries.

Central Europe should be seen as a region that has produced one of the most influential pathways for racializing Roma. Conceptualizing (in)educability has shaped a specific path of racialization by melting together various analogies, between Roma and animals, children, indigenous populations of other countries, Jews and African Americans. The Austro-Hungarian Empire and its successor states introduced and rooted the politics of enforced assimilation of Roma, which called for systematic legitimation of policies such as the enforced placement of Romani children into institutions, tough surveillance over both nomadic and sedentarized Roma, sterilization and even extermination. This long history of segregation has relied on flourishing scientific arguments aimed at negating the possibility for Roma to become “civilized.”

Historically determined, the position of Roma as intractably non-educable infiltrated various conceptions in favor of opposing Roma to core Europeans, and such a view continues to be propagated in different realms and localities. In Slavic countries, Roma have been situated at the lowest levels of various racial hierarchies, opposed to Jews and Turks,³ as well as to those groups of Rusyns or Vallachs seen as the most distanced from Slavs.⁴ In Hungary, they have been seen as belonging to a lower level of hierarchy than Romanians and Slovaks – nations that were under the pressure of eugenic and anthropological arguments about their inferiority from the side of Hungarian experts.⁵ The extermination of Roma, Jews and Serbians by the Croatian Ustasi regime stemmed from producing an analogy among these ethnic groups as equally inferior.⁶

Along with massive social injustice, situating Roma at the bottom of racial hierarchies has shaped ongoing epistemic injustice – the systematic negation of the capacity of Roma to be producers and givers of knowledge, to make sense of their own social experiences and to obtain access to testimonial exchange. The taken-for-granted suggestion concerning Roma as “serflike or slavelike by nature, who can make their living only from this physical strength … artless and unintelligent, without spiritual accomplishments, or with gifts for only non-literate arts like music”⁷ continues to exclude Roma from trustful conversation and the ability to forge an essential aspect of their identity,⁸ relegating the major part of experiencing segregation obscure and unspeakable.

Recognizing epistemic (in)justice as a process of testimonial exchange within the production of collective hermeneutical resources calls for historicizing – rethinking – the historical-cultural settings for producing injustice.⁹ If epistemic justice reproduces dialogue between the virtue hearer and the giver of knowledge, historicizing epistemic injustice emphasizes the mutation of this dialogue under the pressure of prejudice, “a powerful visceral force … those social-imaginative and emotional commitments that surreptitiously shape hearers’ perceptions of speakers.”¹⁰ Representing the conceptual machinery of universe-maintenance relative to the concept of “race,” whiteness operates as one of the most powerful sources of the most intractable prejudices. As an unquestioned standard of Western civilization against which everything is measured,¹¹ whiteness has obtained the position of the main broker in communication between those labeled as white and non-white.

Critical whiteness: options for justice

As relevant to the outstanding historical impact of whiteness on segregation, critical whiteness studies have occupied a central position in anti-racist thinking by addressing whiteness as a social norm.¹² Originating from slavery studies,¹³ several waves of critical whiteness scholars have tried to unpack the “invisible knapsack of white privilege.”¹⁴ To the extent that whiteness has started to be seen as a way of “doing” identity,¹⁵ one question remains a driving force for new generations of academics and activists: “Should whiteness be reformed, abolished or reconfigured?”¹⁶ Current debates between eliminativists, racial skeptics or abolitionists, who aim at minimizing or even eliminating racial terms from lexicons, laws and policies (e.g., Anthony Appiah, Naomi Zack) and critical conservationists, constructivists or pragmatists (e.g., Paul Taylor, Michael Root) who suggest reconstructing concepts such as whiteness and race instead of jettisoning them,¹⁷ frame the central issue in critical whiteness studies – how to elaborate a solid platform for deconstructing reactionary theories of whiteness, which have received a second wind from the current “migrant crisis” and the conservative backlash in the public policy of many countries in Central Europe and beyond. Despite their common target, namely, minimizing the impact of racism and the reactionary theories that aim to legitimize it, eliminativists and conservationists vary in their response to the call to “know and measure carefully all the forces and conditions that go to make up the different problems [of those who are successors to whiteness], to trace the historical development of the conditions [of whiteness], and discover as far as possible the probable trend of further development.”¹⁸

While the scientific dismissal of discursive categories of race represents an essential conceptual underpinning for eliminativists,¹⁹ constructivism accepts race as socially constructed and yet fully “real” – along with the illegitimacy of the hierarchical racial taxonomies established during the Enlightenment era.²⁰ Recognizing not only “white pride” but “white responsibility,”²¹ constructivists bring forward two main arguments against both branches of eliminativism, either negating any race or focusing on abolishing whiteness: the considerable positive, life-affirming aspects of non-white racial identities such as black, Romani and indigenous, and the risk of increasing the invisibility of whiteness within the very attempts to eliminate it.²² In these critical claims, it is possible to recognize the threat of epistemic injustice within eliminativist stances. Indeed, determined by liberal values, the color-blindness of eliminativism has become “color-evasiveness,”²³ which ignores the role of race as a historical social setting likely to distort the credibility judgments of those labeled as non-white.

This risk of hermeneutical injustice reverberates with the universalization of humanness, part of the core of the invisible norm of whiteness,²⁴ which obscures the task to develop a historically contextualized and socially situated account of racism through a maximally abstracted conception of the human subject that prevents the possession of identity power by those who have not been seen as white.²⁵ One of my Romani colleagues, Zlata, whose family experienced the “dispersion” strategy (placing one Romani family in a small Czech town or village in order to hinder any relations with the Romani community in favor of total assimilation) explains:

It was right to let Roma learn to live as whites, but now I do not know who I am. I am neither Roma (because I live like whites) nor white. One time in school, when the teacher who should fill out the forms concerning Roma students publicly refused to do it for me because, according to her, I was not Roma at all, I felt myself strange – because they did it for my sister, whose behavior was much worse than mine. It was so distressing that I said to myself: I am just human.

Until such universalized humanity leads to a cognitive commitment to ignore the experience of segregation, the sensitivity of white hearers within testimonial exchange remains limited by such generalization in which whiteness is hidden to knowers.

A recent example of the consistent epistemic injustice embedded in the eliminativist vision on whiteness can be seen in the approach of the popular Czech moderator Jan Kraus, who invited Romani activist Elena Gorolová²⁶ to his TV show after she made the BBC list of the mos...