he plight of Roma people is just so utterly, utterly depressing.
And as much as Guardian commentators try, the issue can’t be addressed with simplistic, black and white, ‘liberal’ accepted wisdom. This isn’t a matter of ‘racism’ or ‘education’. It is deeper, more complex and quite possibly hopeless.
I doubt that anyone commenting has ever worked with or even encountered Roma families up close.
My mother-in-law works with Roma children and families in an Eastern European country. Whenever my wife and I visit, I fill up my car with second-hand clothes and toys that my wife proactively collects all year. We help distribute these to Roma families and help Roma children in the classroom.
Being close to Roma people has led me to understand that the problems that Roma communities suffer aren’t because of their ‘race’. They are rooted in the prevalence of specific cultural problems, whatever their original causes, which exist within large sections of the Roma population. It’ll be some time before Europeans have the intellectual maturity, judgement and compassion to addresses or even discuss these problems. Yes “problems”.
And these problems go far beyond the default sociological factors that ‘liberal’ commentators espouse. Poverty, education. ‘Racism’.
I suspect that many here – those people who have never encountered Roma people up-close nor ever sat in their homes and shared slivovice with them will be bristling with outrage.
They’ll be gibbering “what you’re saying is racist, racist, racist!” They’ll also declare, with typical sanctimony and self-satisfaction, that the reason that staggeringly disproportionate numbers of Roma people are represented so negatively in education, economic and criminal statistics is because of ‘racism’ toward them.
“If only the bigoted majorities were as tolerant, enlightened and clever as me, then there wouldn’t be a problem,.”
Of course they’d be wrong.
For decades the Communists forced ‘integration’ on Roma people. They forced education on them. They forced them into guaranteed jobs. It failed. Indeed, the Communists invented the crime of ‘Parasitism’ specifically for those Roma who refused to work under any circumstances.
With the EU came money and Roma families found themselves moved into new and better housing. I’ve been inside of these homes, where wooden structures have been ripped out and burned and where rubbish is simply thrown into the stairwells and onto the common areas in front of the apartment buildings.
Any rational person that puts aside their ‘liberal’ prejudices will conclude that aspects of Roma culture are indeed defective. For example, many of the families that my mother-in-law works with praise their children stealing.
The problems that exist within Roma culture create problems for Roma individuals, families and communities. The tragedy is that ultimately, they create communities that are incapable of supporting themselves.
Consequently, wherever they exist, these communities cause resentment and yes, ‘racism’ from their neighbouring communities, creating a viscous circle that makes everything worse.
The way to help the Roma is not to deny these problems are caused at least in part by Roma culture. The cultural factors exist and must be confronted.
And just as other cultural and ethnic groups have managed to consign some of the harmful and problematic aspects of their cultures to history, so must the Roma people.
Even educated Roma people acknowledge these problems. I heard a Roma councillor say, “My people have to learn that they can’t live their lives as if tomorrow isn’t going to come”.
So Blunkett is indeed brave to raise this issue.
And left-wing commentators are the real cowards, who for reasons of ideological dogma, seek to prevent these issues from being acknowledged or even discussed.
It is they who are failing the Roma.
