Since a few days there is a debate on the Berlin reflect mailing list about anti-Romaism and racism in general. A person negatively affected by antiromaism had criticized the mail of a white person whose user name included “gypsy” and which was about wanting to settle in Berlin “after all the rumzigeunern”. When asked, she wrote that she had the right to use it to positively describe her attitude to life. The person who problematized this as racist was met with massive attacks (in the sense of “relax,” “white people are also discriminated against,” “scientifically speaking, it’s a completely different story,” “if you react like that, you can’t be taken seriously,” etc., i.e., classic defensive reactions that can be found in almost every book on racism). We cannot recount the exchange in the form of more than 100 emails here, but we are blogging here in a slightly modified form the email of a member of glokal, which refers to some mails. With this, we hope, you can do something even without exact knowledge of the previous mails. Continue reading →