Scientific racism, popular racism and the discourse of the Gypsy Lore Society

ABSTRACT

Scientific racism continued to be the guiding paradigm of the oldest scholarly association for the study of Gypsies well into the 1970s. It is important to acknowledge and analyse this when considering the continuing influence of racism on policy towards Roma.

KEYWORDS:

• Roma
• racism
• Gypsy Lore Society
• Travellers
• ethnicity

Acknowledgements

Thanks are due to many GLS members who commented on drafts, especially Ken Lee and Brian Raywid, and to the anonymous reviewers for Ethnic and Racial Studies.

Disclosure statement

I am a member of the board – a defeated former secretary – of the Gypsy Lore Society, Patron of the Roma Support Group, and a committee member or officer of several other organizations, which have conflicting views and interests about the issues and arguments in this paper.

Notes

1 A reviewer asked whether I prefer nominalist or realist definitions. The answer is that I believe, following Doug Hofstadter, that a pragmatic, post-Gödelian approach to definition has dissolved that dilemma.

2 The word ‘racism’ itself was probably not used until it was identified as something to be challenged (first recorded by the Oxford English Dictionary as happening in 1902).

3 This does not mean, that I think social psychologists have no contribution to make to the study of the formation of ethnic stereotypes; but as Omi and Winant (2014) and their followers show, specific, detailed, contingent historiography of the type I attempt here is the sine qua non of explaining particular racisms.