I do a lot of public education around gypsy fiction and Roma reality. A lot of people, even some people with double degrees, still don't know who the Roma are. They've heard of gypsies and know all the stereotypes, the negative connotations, that go along with being a gypsy.
I grew up in this country. My Canadian friends always thought it was kind of cool, but they asked me funny questions—i.e., do I have a crystal ball at home, or do I have a caravan in my driveway? Some of my friends would wear the gypsy Halloween costume to school. That stuff was a little bit perplexing at times, but it didn't hurt me.
Whenever I encountered a person who was ethnic Hungarian, for example, they would tell me—not every time, but often—if I were willing to divulge who I was and my background, “Keep that to yourself. That's shameful. Don't let anybody know that. Keep it a secret.”
There's this whole fiction that gypsies like to travel and can't settle down, and find it impossible to be sedentary. That's a lie. I mean, when you're kicked from place to place and not allowed to stay, it doesn't mean that's how you normally are.
Another fiction is this whole criminality thing. There's not this mass community of criminals in Europe. It doesn't exist. There are people who are criminals, just like in every other single community there are people who are criminals.
In the Roma community there's been a huge problem with the cycle of poverty—lack of education, people committing crimes of poverty. You hear this whole rhetoric in Hungary of the gypsy terror. You hear about gypsy criminals. It's dehumanizing. In Gyöngyöspata they had that mass rally because of the gypsy terrorists. But if you read a little bit deeper, you end up finding out that people were stealing firewood from the local privatized forest to heat their homes because they live in such endemic poverty.
The reality is so much different from the fiction that we have over here, but the problem is that the fiction here influences people's thought process, even at schools. At the schools our kids go to, staff are reporting to me that many of their colleagues have these very negative stereotypes of gypsies. When kids hear the discourse that happens often in our media, it just compounds the problem.
They believe the kids don't want to go to school. What they don't realize is that they're living for three years in this abysmal state of not knowing if they're coming or going, or what they're going back to.
There are so many complicated issues. It's so important to be able to depict Roma reality versus gypsy fiction.
In Europe it's very clear who are the Roma, as these are homogeneous societies. Ask somebody from Greece, from Italy, from Hungary, “How can you tell if someone is Roma?” Often it's because everybody who's not the ethnic majority are Roma. The only diversity that exists is in the main European city centres. As soon as you leave Budapest, it's a mono-ethnic, homogeneous society.