After taking a quick trip across the border to Romania, I was more and more curious about the history of Roma people. After being in Ukraine and knowing about them, I realized that I was still very uneducated as to who they were, where they came from, and why they are so discriminated against. Here is a little summary of what I have researched:
The Roma people were a mystery as
to where they came from until people traced their language and physical
features back to North-West India. About
1000 years ago, this minority group migrated from India westward for what seems
to be due to several reasons. These
people first migrated to the Middle East and eventually worked their way
towards Europe.
Their
name came from their own language “Dom” which means ‘man’. Once they reached Europe, the D sound turned
into an R creating “Rom” and “Roma” for the plural version. They are commonly known as ‘gypsies’ which is
actually a derogatory term for them created because back in time, they thought
Roma people came from Turkey of Egypt and called the “Egyptians/ ‘Gyptians”
creating th word “gypsy”. The Rom,
Roma, Romania, and Romanya minority group has no relation to the country of
Romania or the city Rome.
When
the Roma first migrated, many of them were craftsman, artisans, bookkeepers,
musicians, etc. and were not discriminated against like they are today. But in the 1500s, Eastern European countries forced them into
slavery until the mid 1800s. During this
time, they were also killed for no reason.
Mutilations and executions were taken place in western European
countries. This created them to flee
back more east towards Poland and Russia where it wasn’t so bad.
They
were among the first people during WWII to be executed by the Nazis. Over 500,000 Roma people died during the
holocaust but after it was over, they received no recognition or aid from
either side.
There
is assumed to be about 12 million Roma people worldwide, 10 million in which
live in Europe along (Bulgaria and
Romania are the 2 countries that have the most with about 10% of their total
population being Roma). Today they are
still discriminated against.
I got all this information from:
thegypsyconnection.blogspot.com
channel.nationalgeographic.com/channel/american-gypsies/articles/a-history-of-the-romani-people/
Check these sites out to get more
official information about the discrimination today and what this minority
group has to deal with.
Again, this is just a small summary of what I researched. This doesn't include the slums and shacks where they are placed and how they get evicted with little to no notice and how their education is hindered because many Roma kids are sent to "special needs" schools or segregated schools where they don't get the same kind of education as the majority population in the country they live in. Or how their poverty rates are 10 times higher than the majority population in the country they live in and the life expectancy is 10-15 years less than the majority....
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