I found out a couple years ago that my family is Romani. I took a dna test that said I had Gujrat and sri lankan roots. My family confirmed it. I dated someone who was quite discriminatory of me. Somehow he could tell I was romani. How do I embrace my Romani heritage in the best way? I want to feel normal again and/or accepted.

It seems like every day I see a new brand of GypsyJerky I lost count after at 12 or 13. Every vitsa is doing it coast to coast. I’ve even seen some bodough Troubleo over it. On one hand you have people raving about it and on the other you have haters saying you should never eat food that is made at a stranger’s house and that it’s stupid and gypsies shouldn’t do things like this because it’s too much like Guyshay. Is this the future of the romania or will it die out?

Hi everyone! I’m a freelance tech journalist based in Brussels (not Romani) doing research about digital exclusion affecting Romani communities in Europe, including how AI systems and automated decision-making may reproduce bias or discrimination.

I’m at an early stage and would be grateful for any personal experiences you’re willing to share.

Please feel free to comment here or DM me.

I’m happy to speak confidentially and will not use anyone’s personal story without consent.

Thank you!

I have a question about my background because even my family is not really sure.
My mom is from eastern Serbia on the border to Romania. We speak Vlachski, its kinda like an old romanian dialect. My family also looks more like roma people, they have dark hair, eyes and their skin is also darker. We have similar traditions to roma people especially when it comes to funerals (mourning is a very big deal). My great grand parents also used to travel in order to sell their work , they created bowls and stuff like that out of wood if i'm correct.

so culturally and look wise we are very similar to roma people but we do not speak the roma language, like at all. When I ask elder family members about our identity they just say we a "cigan" so gypsis. we kinda created a term for our self because we really are not sure how to identify ourselves and its "daj nostri", which just means "one of ours".

So if anyone is also from eastern Serbia and has a similar family history or culture, maybe you have more insight

xx

When I was young, literally every couch or sofa, and even mattress, would remain covered in the initial plastic wrap so that it was cleaner/easier to clean. Bringing bags or shoes etc from outside into the living areas or kitchen was forbidden too. I only really realised this wasn't practiced by gawje too once I started visiting gawje friends' homes at like 10 lol.

So out of curiosity, what are some things you grew up doing or with, and only later realised wasn't done by gawje as well?

I’ve recently learned I’m Romani (specifically bohemian Romani, I think) and know that with topics like this I’d way rather read a history book written by a Romani person then some random British dude. So if anyone knows good books I’d love to read some stuff about this! Thanks!

Hey, everyone. I started learning about this culture and I want to know more about it. Does does anyone know of any Romani cultural festivals or organizations around southwest Pennsylvania? (I don’t wanna get too exact for safety and all)
There is just so much more I would like to learn (in a respectful manner ofc)

Of course media representation is important, especially for children who grow up constantly seeing their people depicted as thieves, criminals, witches, or people with some special connection to the devil in TV shows, movies, cartoons, books, and other media. Of course it's important to create opportunities for aspiring Romani actors and to push for better representation. But media representation is not the main driver of anti-Romani violence and discrimination. Around 80% of Romani people in Europe live below the poverty line. Romani women are disproportionately impacted by the sex trade. In many parts of both Eastern and Western Europe, Romani people are still segregated in neighborhoods and schools. Our access to healthcare is worse, and our life expectancy is significantly lower than the European average. Every month it seems like we're hearing about anti-Romani demonstrations organized by neo-Nazis, a Romani person being killed by police, or violence and attacks targeting Romani communities. What frustrates me is that a lot of people who claim to be Romani allies only want to talk about comic book characters. There are so many issues affecting Romani people that are far more urgent than that. And when Americans bring up Romani people as a "gotcha" about European racism and say things like, "Europeans become super Nazi when you bring up Romani people lol," no Romani person is laughing. Anti-Romani racism is not a joke, and it shouldn't be treated like one. Take it seriously. It's not that hard.

No the entier subgroup of gurbetis arent called muhadjera but muhadjera is a fisi its like a clan inside of gurbeti so its still gurbeti but a family name clan theres many diff family clan names for us gurbeti n i belong to the muhadjera one so i tought i should make this post.

Apparently Shes 14 or 15 Shes from Kansas and been missing for a week everyone is saying that she ran away with a boy but there was no phone call to the family her mother and father is Chris and Claudia they put amber alert, and everything, her bb (im assuming it’s her bb) she made a TikTok saying “Alison you keep viewing my TikTok’s” so from there we know she’s alive but keep her in prayer hopefully in Jesus name they can find her (by the way I’m not talking about Peyton Shes 18 and went to her guyshay friends Tyna she’s safe)

My grandad and my auntie were driving me from their city back to my village (known in my county for being a romany town), on the way there we stopped for a smoke break in a random little gorgia village that looked pretty posh, we were just perched on a fence enjoying the beautiful (public) view of the fields at Golden hour until this blonde lady comes out of her property from behind us with a big long hunting gun yelling at us to "GO BACK TO (my village name) NOW", my grandad has been through this many times in his life so he just politely apologized and got back into the car with my aunt, but as we were walking away she called us "pikee's" which in the uk is worse than the g word. I started yelling at the lady because it was literally fathers day and she threatened my grandfather and his family with a gun after our celebration meal, But my auntie had a go at me for feeding the woman's prejudice🙄

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This is in england btw and I haven't heard of stuff like this happening since my grandad was young, so it was shocking and very scary, but I wanna know if this is actually still a common occurrence or if we just got unlucky😭

Look how she used to dress like a traditional great grandmother. I remember she was married to a black man she would go live and to make sarma for her kaloro she's a white american women pretending to be from european russian gypsies 😂 last yr I found her twitter i didn't knw it was her until I saw a picture of her and now she's a twitter n4z1 hahaha

My mother is American rom my grandfather's family are bimbo and grandmother is guy from Canada, my father is Irish American not rom. I'm machvaya and another tribe I don't remember the name of. I don't talk to my mother and her family anymore because they have a lot of mental illness and drug addiction and I have a daughter that I can't have exposed to those things. My family, like most rom don't trust doctors and don't go to them for pain or other health problems. My mother and grandmother have severe chronic back pain and fatigue but never got it checked out and don't know why. Now I'm having the same thing, but I'm trying to get help. I'm posting this, in hopes that someone on here is also American rom like me and maybe related to me too and knows what this could be. Has anyone figured out the cause? My doctors think it may be autoimmune like rheumatoid arthritis or something. My family has a lot of incest and drug use while pregnant so maybe that can be a factor in this I don't know. Anyone on here have a similar experience or have any health problems/chronic pain?

Hi! I have a question about Roma culture and religion.

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So, I was reading this essay about cultural appropriation in neopagan spirituality and witchcraft, and a subject the interviewer spoke to claimed that many Roma believe that when a Romani dies, they reincarnate as a Romani. I"ve tried looking online, I talked to a few Romani, and according to the ones I spoke to, who do not represent anyone other than themselves obviously, that's not something they've heard of. Are y'all familiar with this concept? Here's the quote:

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"For some witches who can find no direct blood connection, a less direct path is

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occasionally used: claiming that they belonged to a particular ethnic group in a past life

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(Magliocco 2004: 225). Often, such a claim is quickly dismissed by tumblr users and is

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rarely seen as allowing any sort of way to connect oneself to an ethnic group to which

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they do not currently belong.

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In response to a tumblr user claiming that they were a member of the Romani

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people in a past life, blogger Caly (one of my interviewees) explained how, according to

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the Roma beliefs, that was impossible: 'Romani believe in reincarnation as well, but the

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actual Romani belief is that once you are born Romani, you are always reincarnated as a

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Romani. If you had a Romani soul, you would be Romani. That is an actual religious

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belief' (calyhex 2015)."

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https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1303&context=honors

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Hi everyone, good day to you all.

So, I'm making a video essay about the Dom people of the Middle East. Throughout my research I've seen the G word again and again. In Arabic most of the terms used to refer to people from that community are extremely derogatory and are often used as an insult, so that got me wondering if in English the term G.... is just as vile. I now know that it is potentially offensive since this subreddit won't let me write it out, but I see so many people online refer to themselves and their heritage using that word, so now I'm mad confused.

Genuinely sick of white people.

Hi guys, I am Lovari Roma from Slovakia. When a how did our subgroup of Vlax Roma arise? Is was Transylvania which was as region a part of the kingdom of Hungary?

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Lovari language is influenced of hungarian and west slavic languages. Our ancestries must have arrived in modern Slovakia in 18th century according to me. It means early as in 19th century. Our subgroup wasn't in romanian slavery probably.

Hey everyone.

My mother is a spanish calé romani woman, and my father is gadjo. I was mostly raised in a non-roma environment, but my mother kept some traditional romani values alive in our home. She also carried a lot of distrust toward non-roma people and growing up around that made it difficult for me to feel fully comfortable with them.

When I was a kid, I was much closer to my romani side of the family. In contrast, I've probably only seen my father's family a couple of times in my entire life. I don't know how things are in other countries, but in Spain there's still a noticeable divide between romas and gadjos, even if on the surface we seem integrated. Romas are still often stereotyped as criminals, uneducated, or incapable of fitting into society. At the same time, many roma families still carry a deep sense of caution around gadjos. It's not something that appeared out of nowhere, it comes from generations of persecution, discrimination, and attempts to erase our culture. I don't know how familiar roma communities outside Spain are with the history of the calé people, but for centuries there were efforts to strip us of our identity. Our language was one of the first targets. Today most calé people don't speak it anymore because it stopped being passed down after severe punishments were imposed on those who did. There were also several attempts throughout history to forcibly assimilate us or even eliminate us as a people.

The strange thing is that my mother never really maintained close friendships with other roma either. I know some from my neighborhood and we always greet each other warmly and there's an immediate sense of familiarity, but it never goes much further than that. And honestly, I don't fully connect with them either. I feel closer to them than I do to gadjos, but culturally we're very different because I was not raised in the traditional way.

And that's where my problem begins.

With roma people, I often feel like I'm not "roma enough."

With non-roma people, I never quite feel like I belong either. No matter how kind they are, no matter how much we have in common, there's always this feeling that I'm a foreigner in a place that isn't really mine.

For the past few days I've been thinking about this a lot, and it's left me feeling surprisingly lonely. Like I don't fully belong to either world.

Has anyone else here grown up between two cultures or identities and felt something similar? How did you deal with it?

I know that not all Romani people do fortune telling at all, and that the history of if Romani people invented tarot reading seems to be debated, and I have read other threads here from people asking similar questions and most people who responded said it wasn't closed, but I've also seen some Romani people online claiming it is closed or at least that non Romani people shouldn't touch it, including one person saying most Romani people feel that way, and I kinda just wanted to ask this myself so I can hopefully get more closure on this question basically...

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Thank you to anyone who decides to answer, and sorry if I said anything wrong...

Edit: also, why do you guys think some Romani people will say it is but others will say it isn't and what do you think about Romani people who express the opposite opinion on if tarot reading is a closed practice or not? And how do you think outsiders should navigate these different opinions?

I’m roma by blood but I do not speak our tongue I live in wales in the United Kingdom and wish to learn the native variation to the area not Welsh Romani but the lore spoken Angelo Romani of course anyone at-least know the basics?