Should the international media apologise for anti-Roma racism?

[angus]

Racist option.  

The stories here--I heard one yesterday on WITF radio news and one the day before, and have read in the NYT on-line a bit--are all about how brown Roma with pale children are being accused of childsnatching, but that generally the accusations are proved false and all is quickly set right.  Here's an excerpt from Today's NYT:

For centuries across Europe, children were raised on folk tales with a disturbing message: Wander into the woods and you risk being snatched by Gypsies.  Such a warning seems like an anachronism...  but the stereotype of the child-stealing Gypsy was reawakened in recent days when a Roma couple in Greece were jailed on accusations that they had abducted a blond, green-eyed girl...  This week, two blond, blue-eyed Roma children were taken from their parents in Ireland...  The children in Ireland were quickly returned to their families after DNA testing confirmed that the Roma were their parents. In Greece, the police confirmed on Friday that Maria was the child of a Roma couple from Bulgaria.

So it appears here that some reporters are reporting stuff, and what is getting reported here seems accurate.  I'd vote No if you offered the option, but since you didn't voted that I'm a racist.

You sort of make a good point, though.  The NYT piece writes

“Imagine if the situation were reversed and the children were brown and the parents were white, would they have ever been taken away?” said Dezideriu Gergely, the executive director of the European Roma Rights Center..

Point taken, but your instinct to shoot the messenger seems misguided.

[angus]

What with the rarity of blond hair even among the native population in the Balkans

Unless it's from a bottle, it's generally uncommon across humanity as a whole.

(Says the natural dark blond English man).

I don't know whether you have children, but I think it goes deeper than that.  My son doesn't really look enough like me for folks to assume he's mine, I suppose, and he doesn't look enough like my wife for folks to assume he's hers, but when they see the three of us together, you can see the epiphany in their eyes.  Yeah, I can see that.  Even with our own relatives.  (Her hair is jet black.  Mine is yellow--well, sort of; at 46, as you can imagine it's getting whiter by the day--and my son's is sort of a weighted average.  Brownish, I'd say.)  I sympathize with people who might have strangers look askance at them just because their children might not look like themselves.  I do not, however, sympathize with people who blame "the media" for all of society's problems.  And I certainly have never come to the conclusion that the currently morally fashionable constant demand for apologies solves any problems.
 

[angus]

 
 

Be careful not to give waltermitty more fodder for his signatures.  He's on some sort of hideous family photo kick just now.

I disagree with the assertion that the police acted correctly.  They weren't even profiling correctly.  They hassled, jailed, and embarrassed innocent people.  The newspapers, at least here, were just doing their jobs.  Moreover, the reporting ultimately led to a reminder to the general public that sometimes cops harass innocent people.  It is never a bad thing to remind the public of this fact. 

Incidentally, that child's coloring is pretty much the same as mine, and her father's is pretty much the same as my father's.  (My paternal grandfather was born in Bulgaria and every Bulgarian I meet looks at me incredulously when they see my last name.  Sometimes they even say, "Well your name is Bulgarian but you don't look Bulgarian.  You look like you should have a German name.")  I didn't think about this growing up, but I imagine that folks probably looked at my father in a weird way when he and I were out and about.  As far as I know, we were never hassled by any authorities, and we did cross many international borders together when I was a child.

[angus]

I agree that the girl doesn't "look Bulgarian" (or Greek for that matter.)  I guess this may be more of a European attitude.  We mix it up quite a bit here.  It's not unusual to see brunettes with German names or Blondies with Spanish names or red-haired, freckled people English first names and Italian last names.  As I said, at meetings conferences or in situations where there's an international crowd and everyone has nametags or is identified in some bulletin or program, I am often approached by real Bulgarians who comment on how bizarre it is for me to have a Bulgarian name.  Americans, on the other hand, wouldn't know a Bulgarian name if it came up and bit them on the buttocks, and lots of us have blue eyes and yellow hair even though we might have names that originated in the lands of olives and lemon trees and warm breezes.

I really take more offense at the awkward assumptions of the police than the reporting.  If an American cop detained a black couple solely on the basis of them having a white child, you'd be hearing about protests every night on the news, and rightly so.  Then again, it may be that I'm not aware of some aspect of the reporting that going on elsewhere.  Here, it seems to all be fairly accurate.  The reports, at least in US media that cover international stories, are about how ancient anti-gypsy bigotry is resurfacing in parts of Europe.  This reportage, imho, is public good.

[angus]

Maybe you should read what I wrote....

maybe.

Are you claiming that the police in this case would be called out for racism?

In the case you describe exactly, probably not, but one can never predict these things accurately.  You might wonder about whether a warrant was properly obtained, and how the suspects were profiled in the first place, but generally speaking I'll stipulate if it were a probable cause bust and all this went down, then I would think that the public would not be so sympathetic.

I hadn't read about 12 children, but then the thread was about reporting and reporters and whether they should apologize.  I had actually heard a couple of reports on this, and have read some more since, and from what I am reading the reports do not seem inaccurate and I can think of no reason that any of the writers whose reports I have read should apologize for what they wrote.

Even today, if I do a Google search of "gypsy child thieves" new stories, the first three have the following titles and opening sentences:   

For Roma, discrimination remains the norm
"Historical scapegoats, they suffer from harsh treatment and deep poverty in Europe..."

The grim history of the Roma is no fairy tale
"The reaction to the discovery of a little blonde girl in a travellers' camp illustrates an age-old and shameful persecution of an isolated people..."

Blond Maria is not ‘white’ after all!
"It was the irony of coincidence.  When the picture of the angelic blond, blue-eyed girl in a shabby grey track suit with her fingers blackened from mud was splashed across the front pages of the European press a few days ago, most of us jumped to the same conclusion..."


We could, of course, quibble about the third one, but in all fairness the third one was written by a European writer for a Turkish outlet.  The other two are American writers writing for U.S. outlets.  I really don't see any inaccuracies.  The reporting here seems very sympathetic to the gypsies, and most the stories I've heard on PBS and Public Radio, as well as from US on-line newspapers, point out that anti-Roma discrimination alive and well in Europe.  I don't think these US reporters who cover international news owe anyone any apologies for what they're writing.

While we're at it, about a year ago several US newsweeklies as well as the National Geographic Magazine were doing stories about nouveau riche Roma.  Gaudy palaces and bling were apparently all the rage in several villages in the balkans at that time. 

Here are some images from NGM:







While we cannot defend their tastes, we do apparently admire their new fortunes, and it was then that the lure of gypsy lore became somewhat popular in the US, or saw a resurgence of popularity.  (I think April Wine's "Sign of the Gypsy Queen" was the only other broad-spectrum American popular reference in my lifetime.)  Now, there's a rash of stories on how they have been accused of childsnatching by their European oppressors.  Or so it seems.  Is this not accurate?  If not, do the US international press corps owe us an apology for these inaccuracies?