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7 Racist Things I’ve Been Told for My Own Good
Reflecting on “well-meaning” advice about my biracial relationship
“What you’re going through now is what people in biracial relationships experienced here in America over half a century ago,” I was told by a very wise and dear American friend when I shared with her how people around me were reacting to my new relationship.
I am white and my boyfriend is not. He’s Roma, or — to use the more popular term in the West — Gypsy. The “problem” is not just his darker skin, though make no mistake, dark skin is not celebrated here in my home country of Bulgaria. The “problem” is the ethnicity. The Roma are the most marginalized minority in Europe. Over half of them were murdered during the Holocaust, their homes have been systematically burned down and their communities destroyed, they’ve been enslaved, sterilized, and — to this day — people disenfranchise them and taunt them with this history of violence.
In Bulgaria, the word “Tsiganin” or “Gypsy” is used as an insult. Darker-skinned people of different ethnicities or nationalities are called “Gypsies” as a put-down, and we have an endless list of descriptors like “lying like a Gypsy,” “lazy like a Gypsy,” “ugly like a Gypsy.”
