My Romani ancestors struggled for their rights. How I continue their fight — and forge my own identity

For the record:
4:35 p.m. April 10, 2023: An earlier version of this article incorrectly listed Macedonia as a country where Romani people have faced marginalization in the last 20 years. The country is North Macedonia.

April 8 is known as International Romani Day, marking Romani communities' survival and resistance through centuries of persecution. The date commemorates a historic meeting of activists in 1971 outside London. They adopted a Romani anthem, known as “Gelem, Gelem,” and the Romani flag depicting a green field, a blue sky and a red wheel at the center, to create a sense of nationhood for the Roma people, scattered across the world.

For Romani people such as myself, the xenophobic and anti-immigrant rhetoric of recent years in Europe and the United States is nothing new. Our story is that of so many migrants and oppressed peoples and communities of color. International Romani Day recognizes the ways in which we make lives, build worlds, resist — for ourselves and for everyone — within these histories of marginalization and exclusion. On Saturday, we celebrate that coming together, but also the ways in which our individual identities — and notions of what it means to be Romani today — can evolve.

Romani people are Europe’s largest ethnic minority. We are descendants of people who moved from the Indian subcontinent to Europe a millennium ago. There are an estimated 10 million to 12 million Roma in Europe, with millions more making up Romani diasporas in North America, South America, Australia, Africa and Asia. Romani migrants have had a presence in the United States since the colonial era. Larger waves of immigration began in the 1860s, from England, Eastern and Southern Europe, and continued into the 20th century.

Romani communities have contributed to European culture, from music and dance to medicine and horse-breeding. Despite this long presence, Romani groups have been subjected to centuries of slavery, pogroms, segregation, violence and genocide. During the Holocaust, hundreds of thousands of Romani people were victims of genocide, murdered by the Nazis and their allies. Some countries have also enforced assimilation of Roma, including restrictions on using the Romani language. Over the past 20 years, Romani people have faced racially motivated violence, discrimination, school segregation, evictions and expulsions in place such as Romania, Ireland, Turkey, Hungary, North Macedonia, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, France, Greece and now in Ukraine.

We celebrate April 8, 1971, as a defining moment of standing up and speaking out. It’s part of a larger activist history where Romani people advocated for rights and claimed a Romani identity that was transnational, based on shared Indian origins, language and culture. This coming together of Romani and non-Romani activists in defense of rights was a claim to belonging, a recognition of ethnicity, of peoplehood and part of a larger wave of movements for civil rights and national liberation that stretched across the globe.

The legacies of those activists’ meeting also include the use of the terms Romani and Roma to name ourselves, our people, in place of the G-word, the exonym that had defined us for so long, and the acknowledgment that we share a common language, Romanes or Romani chib, and a common culture. These elements — the anthem, the flag, the understanding of ourselves as a people — are also part of the making of a national narrative encompassing who we are, our shared history and our shared future.

And yet, my own Romani identity is one that is built on diversity. People can — and should — identify as Romani, as one of us, without negating the multiple ways we can be Romani: with the multiplicity of our language practices, cultural formations, gender and sexual identities, religions and class.

I am a feminist, not a nationalist. I love the “Gelem, Gelem” anthem and have taught it to my daughters. The flag is beautiful. I grew up speaking a Romani dialect. I believe that Romani people are a transnational minority who share a common history and a common future. But I also know that when any group constructs its own nationalism and national myths, these are built on patriarchy, on maintaining power and hierarchy, on erasing diversity and effacing difference.

Our Romaniness — our romanipe — includes the strong community of women who raised me; it includes my daughters, cousins, sisters and my ancestors who continue to sustain me. It includes various accountings and stories about who we are. Whether we are women, queer, poor, disabled, we are still Romani. We should refuse exclusion and embrace the changing, makeshift and contingent ways of being Romani.

This is why my celebration is about coming together to celebrate our community, beautiful cultural practices, language, sense of solidarity — of yekipe —the love that has sustained us throughout.

On April 8, 1971, Romani and non-Romani activists came together in a makeshift, contingent way, in a boarding school outside London. They came together because the cook at the boarding school was a Welsh Romani man who convinced the headmaster to open its doors to a group of Romani people from all over Europe.

That coming together was in remembrance of those we had lost in the Holocaust; in mourning for the group of children who had just died in Birmingham, in central England, after their caravan had been set on fire in an act of racist violence; and in protest for our homes that had been taken away, for our children who had been denied schooling, for our history that had been suppressed and for our people, whose lives had been marginalized and threatened.

There is still much work to be done to promote Romani rights, to teach Romani history and to ensure that Roma are accorded basic human rights. Far too little has changed. People still have to fight for a voice, a place. We continue to make a home in the U.S., in Europe, globally, together and alongside other marginalized communities.

For us, our survival is proof of our strength, our history, our future. Survival is resistance, and resistance is survival.

Ethel Brooks is a professor of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies and sociology at Rutgers University, New Brunswick.

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.