WE ARE AMERICAN ROMA!
We are citizens, not your "outsiders.
Dr Raven Dolick M.s.D.
Apr. 29, 2015

In the U.S., we’re scattered: coming from a multitude of countries, speaking many dialects, practicing disparate traditions, and observing various levels of traditionalism. But few Americans realize that there are Roma living in their midst, or that we've been here since the beginning—three Roma are said to have accompanied Columbus on his second voyage to the New World. And we Roma count a number of high-profile figures in our ranks. Guitarist Django Reinhardt was Romani, and some theorize such disparate icons as Charlie Chaplin, Michael Caine, Elvis Presley, and even former President Bill Clinton come from Roma roots.

Undocumented by the U.S. Census, We the American Roma may keep our heritage under wraps, but when it does emerge, we faced discrimination from friends, landlords, waiters, classmates, strangers, cops, store clerks, and professors. Many of us were raised with warnings not to tell others of their ethnic identity, and so many of us in America do remain a hidden ingredient in America’s melting pot.

“WE American Roma come from many different sub-groups, so it is hard for us to organize when we may have little culturally in common,”

But in the past decade, a new crop of activists within our populace has emerged, and we’re forming advocacy organizations and school programs to aid our under-served communities, determined to set the record straight on our cultural identity. But each headline-making event or raid can set our work back but only makes us more vigilant as ethnic based Romani warriors for a judicially charged status.

Maria’s story is one of the most modern American hits and especially close to home for to me, she was seven years old when she and all Romani children her age and older were taken from their Brooklyn community by authorities of the State of New York and put into institutions and foster homes. It was 1955 and flooded my Roma community, and her parents--Roma who had escaped the Holocaust in Europe as also my Father--were accused of child abuse because of their itinerant lifestyle. It was a program she likens to the forced assimilation of Native Americans through government-run boarding schools. She lost her native Romani dialect, she says, after it was beaten out of her at Catholic institutions.

In the early 80s, while teaching women’s studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder, Ahern bumped into a woman crossing the street. “I think I’m your mother,” the woman said. She was right.

To fast forward to current, in 1985, Ahern launched her Roma-heritage organization, Lolo Diklo, which is now a roving educational museum based on Vashon, an island off Seattle. Not long after she settled there, a friend proposed she rent the cottage on her property. But the offer was rescinded just before Ahern was due to move in. The friend’s husband refused to “let a dirty gypsy on his property,” Ahern says she was told.

Since then, the islanders have come to know that derogatory remarks won’t fly with the now-retired cousin of mine and now 66-year-old Ahern, who gives anyone who uses the term “gypped” a talking to. “No one says anything insulting to me,” Ahern says. But the Maria incident was a reminder of the pervasive discrimination. “It’s as if people were gleeful finally they could prove gypsies could steal babies, when, in all the centuries of that stereotype, there's not one recorded proof it has happened once,” she says.

“Should you need to have a lighter skinned person vouch for you? Does that have to be the standard?” asks Kristin Raeesi, a 34-year-old Romani activist and grant writer at the University of Alaska. Though Raeesi has a dark complexion, her newborn son, with his blue eyes and light brown hair, and Raeesi’s younger sister, who sports light hair and bright green eyes, are proof of the diversity found in Roma populations and even within families. “The blond angel found must have been snatched by horrible dark people,” Raeesi says scathingly.

Growing up in a Wyoming town of 600 people, Raeesi was instructed to hide her Romani background and claim a more “acceptable,” as she puts it, heritage. This lesson was solidified the only time she ever heard her culture mentioned in school, when a grade school teacher read Shel Silverstein’s poem, “The Gypsies Are Coming” to the class. It begins:

“The gypsies are coming, the old people say,
To buy little children and take them away.”

After that she kept her mouth shut. “When you don’t see yourself represented in the school and you don’t see yourself even in dominant society, TV shows, or movies—maybe one reference here or there and it was always something negative—you hide,” she remembers. Today, she is out of the closet. “I know it sounds corny but I feel like I’m OK with myself—finally—it’s only taken me 30-plus years to get there.”
As this sentiment is now shared widespread in my Chillicothie Familia.

Gypsy Sisters
Nettie, Laura, Mellie and Kayla from the TLC show “Gypsy Sisters.” (TLC)
In college, Raeesi took a Balkan music class at the University of Wyoming and spoke publicly about her heritage for the first time. But shortly into the term, an anthropologist guest lecturer called the Roma a dirty and culture-less people. Raeesi couldn’t contain herself. “Stop talking,” she yelled, standing up in front of the class, near tears, and berating the woman for using her standing to discriminate. “If I hadn't been in the class, people would have said, 'I guess they really are dirty,'” Raeesi says.

The clichés of gold-draped gypsies in caravans reading fortunes and swindling outsiders have dogged Roma since they arrived in Europe as refugees from India in the Middle Ages. Considered heretics for their practice of fortune telling and palm reading, we adopted a nomadic lifestyle to avoid persecution, and practiced trades they could take on the go. A thousand years later, millions of my Familia still live across Europe in shanty towns, often targeted by police, denied social services, and even segregated within schools. Though many no longer practice traditional occupations or travel nomadically, the stereotypes persist.
Although to duly note I still live in a vardo and perform all the traits of our music with belly dance and magic to show as a living museum how we relynon our own skills without government aid to have secure family.

A reputation of thievery and crime brings with it closer monitoring and sometimes direct targeting of Roma communities, even in this great U.S.A., where the profiling is not nearly as harsh as in Europe. The 2001 Police magazine article titled “Gypsies: Kings of Con” asserts that Gypsies “look upon the rest of society simply as their ‘prey’,” and “there is no sin in stealing if you are a Gypsy.” Five years later, a Los Angeles Times investigation revealed a group of 800 or so detectives across the U.S. who call themselves “The National Association of Bunco Investigators” and who specifically patrol neighborhoods for “Gypsy crime,” mainly described as scams and fraud.
Yes Gestapo as it is, this abuse from peace keepers still runs rampant in modern Roma history in America!

Even fast forwarding to more recent indications of white supremacy rule in America, I consider the case against Morgan Ahern.

Morgan Ahern during a demonstration in Vashon, near Seattle, Washington, in the Spring of 2011. (Morgan Ahern/Lolo Diklo)
Activists’ allegations about racial profiling are an issue of semantics, says Dennis Marlock, the designated "special investigator" with the Milwaukee Police Department, who created a stir with his book License To Steal: Traveling Con Artists: Their Games, Their Rules—Your Money.

The crimes are not inherent to Roma as a whole, Marlock says, but the work of a organized criminal group of Roma who call themselves Gypsies. He equates them to the Sicilian Mafia, a criminal group within the population of Sicilians to invoke fear and control. “It’s not law enforcement that created negative connotation. If we’re guilty of bringing that to the public, then I'm guilty,” he says.

He later addresses the Roma activists who have come out against him: “It's not me causing you problems, it’s your criminal element.”

He recalls calling a meeting when “American Gypsies were flooding in by the carload” to Milwaukee. “This is America, if you claim fortune telling as what you do, fine, but if you’re gonna be ripping [people] off ... you’re going to see a lot of me,” he told them, and then asked for volunteers who submitted to being fingerprinted and photographed. I know this personally as a supportive activist for my people their at the time!

Raeesi knows the stereotypes she’s up against each time her heritage comes up as well as I do.

“When you identify yourself, you may not be starting from zero—you’re starting back from zero. First of all, we all don’t live in wagons, we don’t all travel, we don’t all tell fortunes. Some do, but a lot of us have university and college educations.” I even as a Doctor of Metaphysics degree do both successfully because many even outside of Romanies have very developed psychic awareness's but we the Roma get labeled as con's when in true accuracy many "con's" have stolen and bastardized our traditional up bringing's and life styles for their financial gain.These aren't the stories people are used to.

And mainstream media and entertainment depictions offer little diversity. “Americans tend to have a fantasy view of 'Gypsies’ from popular culture that is both romantic and criminal,” says a Dr. Silverman, noting that the depictions have been on the rise since the '70s. Representations of Roma as promiscuous, untrustworthy, and uneducated on shows like TLC’s My Big, Fat American Gypsy Wedding, which has aired for the past two years, followed by Gypsy Sisters, and National Geographic’s American Gypsies in 2012, have infuriated activists as I and hundreds like Romani's.

The issue is the narrow segment chosen for mainstream representation. It’s something that would never fly with another minority group, she points out, noting that for any one negative depiction of others, many successful, educated public figures serve as counterweights. Not so for us Roma's. “For Romani people you have these reputations, but what is the counter?” “What would make people say, ‘They’re not all like that’?” Just like not all cops are killers and all blacks criminals also.

The lack of diversity in pop culture portrayals can have real-world consequences. When TLC’s show first aired, Glenda Bailey-Mershon, a North Carolina Romani writer who tutors young Romani students, says they told her they were widely harassed. “That is a factor in young people not wanting to go to school,” she says. The entertainment industry may say depictions are harmless, but she says, as I agree, they don’t understand what power they hold. “Remembering that American TV is broadcast all over the world—and this show began in Great Britain—in places where our people have more problems, it can be the difference between getting beaten up and even losing your life.”

When 39-year-old author Oksana Marafioti first heard about the upcoming TLC show, she was excited enough about the opportunity to change mainstream perceptions that she auditioned. Meeting producers in Los Angeles, Marafioti, who used to work as a cinematographer in the movie business, told them she and her Romani peers were college educated. “They were like, ‘Yeah, but do you have gypsy weddings or get togethers where people wear traditional clothes or play violins?’”

Growing up California, my sister Marafioti had similar misconceptions about her culture. Her parents had been part of a traveling multi-generational variety show in the Soviet Union, but her father, more inclined to play Jimi Hendrix than traditional Romani music, ended up bringing the family to America and very likened to my Father and his coming to America as a circus performer after the Nazi uprisings settled. My parents didn't want to always be careful—they wanted to forget who they were and live how they wanted. My sister Marafioti's familia arrived in Hollywood when she was 15, and she found that being Gypsy made her cool. Kids would say things like, “I thought you guys all lived in caravans,” and not knowing much about her heritage, she believed it. “I was almost living the stereotype and thinking it was the truth because that’s what I was hearing.”

Negating those stereotypes is why, Marafioti says, she chose being Romani as the subject of her 2012 book, American Gypsy: A Memoir . It was a nerve-wracking undertaking for someone who rarely revealed her ethnicity beforehand, but she hoped to just change one mind into thinking, “Well look, they’re just like everyone else,” Marafioti says. “I want for people to understand behind the word Gypsy there’s an actual human being and there’s a diversity in human life.”

Her effort is apparently contagious. When she recently told her oldest son to be careful about letting people know his Romani roots, the 14-year-old struck back: “He says, ‘No, Mom, this is who I am, this is what I’m going to say.' He’s very convinced that he deserves to be able to be what he wants to be,” she says, bemused and then pauses. “Maybe he’s too young and just doesn't understand.”

Some of Marafioti’s fears came true. In 2012, when she was on tour for her memoir in California, a couple began to follow her. At two or three of her readings, she says, they heckled her. They believed, she says, that she belonged to “a subhuman category” and that “we’re prone to criminal activity, early pregnancy, and a lack of education is due to our inability to learn properly.” Not long after, Marafioti had another follower: a man who sent her threatening notes. “Gypsies must die,” she said he wrote in one.

People in the U.S.A. are actually not thinking of us like we’re human beings, and when you consider someone less than you, you can justify anything. And to be part of a freedom societal government as our's is this is very disturbing as a human race for all. The aggressors and the abused.

And yet again...... At a recent cocktail party, a woman stuck out her hand and asked Glenda Bailey-Mershon if she would read her fortune. For Bailey-Mershon, who grew up in Appalachia as a descendant of Romani slaves brought to America in the 1700s, her light hair and complexion didn't raise many eyebrows. But for anyone curious enough to ask, she cited a mixed Native American ancestry as I too do from my rezervatipn raised Cherokee mother. Today, the 64-year-old writer takes any opportunity to answer questions about the Roma.

Over the past two decades, Roma activism has been on the rise. At the time Secretary of State Hillary Clinton designated Roma Heritage Month even but she also provided no evolution to any programs except schooling, but of course political challenges from modern Romani activists as I had her to at the minimal "Take Notice"!

Women especially have been claiming leadership roles. Bailey-Mershon and Raeesi are founding members of the Foundation for Roma Education and Equality (FREE), a new organization that plans to form a free school program, both online and in physical locations, for Romani teens looking to get their GED. It will tie in classes on history and culture, and maybe even a language program. Many Rom's I am elder too in America have never been taught our own history and excited to be a participant in the program. They're also advocating for Roma inclusion in Holocaust remembrance programs, where they're often ignored, even though the Nazis exterminated an estimated half a million European Roma. Yes, again an attack on the Rom's even today as a sub-species on the earth not entitled to truth and recognition.

FREE has completed a three-student test program which began in January 2012, and plans to launch another version next fall in the neighborhood of FREE’s president, Sonya Jasaroska, who lives in a tight-knit community of more than 300 Macedonian Roma in the Bronx that formed in the early '70's.

It wasn't until a 2002 trip back to Macedonia that Jasaroska, now 37, delved into activism for Roma rights. Her family sat down at a restaurant, and though it was completely empty, the waiter refused to serve them. “This table’s reserved,” he told them of every table in the establishment. “I don’t need your Gypsy money,” he said. When Jasaroska put up a fight, he offered to move them into a back room. “I said, fuck you, fuck your restaurant, you can go to hell, I’m not giving you a cent.” After other racist incidents, she decided to stay in the Roma area of town where it felt more comfortable.

Back stepping to 1978 when my Familia's now dismantled traveling circus visit a Denny;s restaurant in Knoxville TN we were told they simply ran out of food and were told to go to McDonald's as we were still in our performing regalia watching the whites glutton down full plates of hot food.

Today Jasaroska, who said she once “hid and hated” her heritage, is eager to tell people about her background if they ask as I do commit also. “I wait for them to make a stereotypical comment and then I school them,” she says. And it rarely fails: “They say, ‘Are you a fortune teller? Are you a musician? Do you steal kids?’” Then she explains the role of discrimination in how these stereotypes came to be. She hopes speaking out will give the kids in her community a sense of pride she never had growing up. “We’re still learning the ropes,” Jasaroska says and as we Rom's take a stronger lead mistakes will be made for the advancement of future minds and unity. “When you’re not educated and don’t know what your options are, you’re going to sit back and be quiet.”

Now the population of educated Roma is bigger than ever, and we’re ready to speak up when cases like Maria’s make the news. It’s time that the TRUE Roma make a fuss and speak for ourselves in truth and education instead of what anthropologist say of us who have no REAL knowledge of our closely guarded lifestyle. “This is the land of the free, home of the brave, where you have equality, and if we keep quiet as Americans and Roma, then shame on us.”