Acceptable Hatred

Imagine an English village building an effigy of a car, with caricatures of black people in the windows andthe numberplate "N1GGER", and burning it in a public ceremony. Then imagine one of Britain's mostsocially-conscious MPs appearing to suggest that black people were partly to blame for the way they had beenportrayed.

It is, or so we should hope, unimaginable. But something very much like it happened last week. The goodburghers of Firle, in Sussex, built a mock caravan, painted a Gypsy family in the windows, added thenumberplate "P1KEY" (a derogatory name for Gypsies which derives from the turnpike roads theytravelled) and the words "Do As You Likey Driveways Ltd - guaranteed to rip you off", thenmetaphorically purged themselves of this community by incinerating it. Their MP, the Liberal Democrat NormanBaker, later told BBC South East that "there is an issue about the rights of travellers which has to berespected, but also the duty's on travellers to ensure that they treat the areas in which they are living withrespect. ... That did not happen in Firle earlier this year which is why the Bonfire Society has taken the actthat they have." [1]

Racism towards Gypsies is acceptable in public life in Britain. Last month the Now Show on Radio 4satirised "pikeys" running fairgrounds "with no safety documents".[2] It would surely nevercrack jokes about "pakis" or "yids", or suggest that members of another ethnic grouptypically engage in dodgy business practices. When Jack Straw was Home Secretary he characterised Gypsies aspeople who "think that it's perfectly OK for them to cause mayhem in an area, to go burgling, thieving,breaking into vehicles, causing all kinds of other trouble including defecating in the doorways of firms andso on". [3]

Now all these people would doubtless claim that they are attacking not a race but a lifestyle. Jack Straw,for example, explained that he was not talking about "real Romany Gypsies ... who seem to mind their ownbusiness and don't cause trouble" but about "people who masquerade as travellers or Gypsies".[4]It is, of course, true that not all traditional travellers are ethnic Roma, and not all Roma are travellers.But the same could be said of Judaism, which embraces both an ethnicity and a religious culture. We recognisethat there is no moral distinction between attacks on Jews by people who object to their way of life andattacks on Jews by people who object to their race. We also recognise that racism is a matter ofcharacterising a community by the behaviour of some its members.

The persecution of Gypsies has often been accompanied by questions, like Straw's, about their authenticity.In 1554, a British law explained that people calling themselves Aegyptians were in fact "falsevagabonds", and condemned them to death.[5] The report on the "Gypsy question" presented toHeinrich Himmler, which recommended their confinement to labour camps, asserted that "most gypsies arenot gypsies at all" but "the products of matings with the German criminal asocial proletariat".[6]

One might have hoped for a particular sensitivity about the rights of traditional travellers. Between aquarter and half a million Gypsies were killed during the Holocaust: in many parts of Europe, the Nazis almostsucceeded in eliminating them. Throughout eastern Europe, the Roma are still denied employment, herded intoghettoes and beaten to death by skinheads. In Britain, some 67 per cent of traditional travellers' sites wereclosed between 1986 and 1993. [7] In 1994, the government released local authorities from the duty to providesites for travellers and introduced new laws penalising people who stopped without permission.[8] In one act ofparliament, it effectively destroyed their way of life.

So why, despite so much evidence of persecution, are expressions of hatred towards Gypsies still acceptablein public discourse? Part of the reason is surely that they are trapped in a vicious circle: excluded frompublic life by racism, they are poorly placed to defend themselves against it. But it seems to me that theremight be something else at work as well, the residue of a deeper and much older detestation.

The conflict between settled and travelling peoples goes back at least to the time of Cain and Abel. Cainwas a farmer, a settled person; Abel was a herder: a nomad. Cain killed Abel because Abel was the beloved ofGod. The people who wrote the Old Testament were nomads who had recently settled, and who looked back withlonging to the lives of their ancestors. The prophets' constant theme was the corruption of the cities and thepurity of life in the wilderness, to which they kept returning. All the great monotheisms were founded bynomads: unlike settled peoples they had no fixed places in which to invest parochial spirits.

Yet the city, despite the execration of the prophets, won. Civilisation, from the Latin civis, atownsperson, means the culture of those whose homes do not move. The horde, from the Turkish ordu, a camp andits people, is its antithesis. It both defines civilization and threatens it. We fear people whose mobilitymakes them hard for our settled systems of government to control. But, like Cain, we also appear to hate themfor something we perceive them to possess: the freedom, perhaps, which the prophets craved.

Of course, today the settled people are often more mobile than the traditional travellers. Across easternEurope, Gypsies have been sedentarised by decree; in Britain they have been settled by the enclosure of theirstopping places. Many of the Gypsies who travel across Europe today do so because they have been driven fromtheir homes: Queen Mary’s "pretended Aegyptians" have been transformed into "bogus asylumseekers".

Yet, as our continued romanticisation of the Gypsy, or bohemian, life suggests, we appear to suffer stillfrom a residual envy. We are a migratory people (our ancestors, in the savannahs of East Africa, were forcedto move from place to place as the rain moved on) with the brains, the legs, the senses of creatures who weredesigned never to stay still. The lives of those we associate with perpetual movement often appear (whateverthe reality may be) to be more desirable than our own. When the starving traveller in Cormac McCarthy's novelThe Crossing arrives in town, the people there "beheld what they envied most and what they most reviled.If their hearts went out to him it was yet true that for very small cause they might also have killedhim". [9]

Envy is intimately connected with racism. Racists associate Jews with money and black people with sexualpower, but our hatred of Gypsies may arise from a still deeper grievance, the envy of a people whose instinctfor continual movement is frustrated by the constraints of the humdrum settled life. We wish, like Cain, torise up and slay our brother, as the horde, not the civilized, are the beloved of the god of our creation.Could it be that it remains acceptable to hate Gypsies because it remains acceptable to romanticise them?

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References:

1. Norman Baker, 28th October 2003. BBC South East News.

2. Marcus Brigstocke, 10th October 2003. The Now Show, BBC Radio 4.

3. Jack Straw, 22 July 1999. Interview with Annie Oathen, Radio West Midlands

4. ibid.

5. A Law for the Avoidance of All Doubts and Ambiguities, 1554. Cited by Dr Angus Murdoch, Community LawPartnership, 22nd August 1999, in a letter to the Guardian.

6. Final Report on the Gypsy Question, cited by Dr Angus Murdoch, ibid.

7. Tony Thomson, 1994. A study of site use since 1987. Community Architecture Group. 67% is the medianfigure from his survey across several English counties.

8. The Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994

9. Cormac McCarthy, 1995. The Crossing. Picador, London.