Racism: Just a Dirty Word?

As a white girl raised in the South, there is one word in the English language that I absolutely cannot say. I’m just not allowed; it’s not within my rights to say it. The word hearkens back to a time when it was used as an instrument of racism, a tool of the oppressors, and even though I didn’t have any family in the South until the 1980s – that is, well past the Civil Rights movement, let alone the Civil War – my skin color, just as it has undoubtedly and inexcusably given me a lot, takes away my right to say the n-word.

At least in public, almost all white Americans would agree with me. It’s not a word you hear in polite company, but that doesn’t mean that none of the people who refuse to say it out loud are racists. Racism, despite what having a black president may indicate, is far from dead in America. It is, however, unspoken. Racist outbursts and outward discrimination make headlines and lawsuits. Rallies against specific races or ethnic groups are confined to the realm of groups like the Ku Klux Klan. I cannot, in my 25 years of living and interacting with Americans, remember anyone actually telling me that they hated black people, American Indians, Asians, Jews, anyone.

You’re probably thinking, okay, but that’s only because of the social circle that I grew up in. And you’re right, it is. I am admittedly middle class, and I do not often come into contact with people in a socio-economic class below my own. But that experience made it all the more shocking when I moved from the middle class of America to the middle class of the Czech Republic, and I started hearing people talk about how much they hated gypsies.

We were warned, actually, in the first day of our teaching orientation, that we might hear some racist comments. They told us that we would hear outward racism from otherwise decent people, educated people, our students, our teachers, our friends. “I’m not a racist,” people say. “I just hate gypsies.” I still cringe every time.

When I first heard the sweeping generalizations from my students about how all gypsies were dirty, lazy criminals, I naively tried to teach a couple of lessons about the benefits of diversity, about how the society was stronger for having different groups of people living within it. Across the board, my words fell on deaf ears. What I got in return for my lectures were lectures from people whom I respect, telling me that white Czechs really do have reason to dislike the Roma population, that gypsies don’t work and have more children to get more welfare, that unemployed white people get less from the government because they’ve had jobs in the past, and that it’s a government problem, but in the end, it’s because gypsies are lazy.

It’s been difficult trying to understand the issue from an outside perspective, but it seems like the sources are threefold. None of these would be a problem on its own, but in coming together they create the tension that is apparent in the Czech Republic today. First of all, the government social welfare system provides enough income to the point that for people who have never worked, it makes more sense to have another child than to get a job.

Second, Roma culture doesn’t place such a high value on education or professional success, which we can see in the practice of pulling teenage girls out of high school before they’ve graduated. It also tends to be quite insular, which creates fear and mistrust. But thirdly, if a Rom does want to work hard and succeed, he comes face to face with a huge amount of discrimination from the Czech population. He is expected to fail, and he is far more likely to get fired than his white peers.

All of this combined leads to the discrimination that is so apparent in the country today. 60% of Czech prisoners are Roma, but how much of that is because of “gypsy crime” and how much is because of the expectation that the Roma are criminals?

So, where can we go from there? Racism is a dirty word both here and in America, but somehow here it doesn’t extend to include the hatred of the second biggest minority group (behind Slovaks) in the Czech Republic. Will “gypsy” ever join “the n-word” on the list of words that I can’t say? We all know that something has to change, but I haven’t seen anything here that makes me think that it will any time soon.

Autorka studuje český jazyk a politiku na univezitě v Glasgowě a je stážistkou Respektu