Re: [Callers] [Organizers] contra dance gypsy

I am working on a shared document, if only because it takes a lot of time and work to educate people and I'd like a resource with lots of links that people can easily share. If you'd like to positively contribute, please email me directly contraron at gmail dot com. It's the 21st century. We're smart people who love history, right? "G*psy" has its etymology back to mistaking olive-skinned peoples from India and Persia for Egyptians. It's _always_ been a racial term, and it's always been a slang that was put on Romany. While some groups have reclaimed the term, this is not the majority, and, like f*ggot to LGBTQ people, or the N word to Africans and African Americans, the word simply isn't white people's word, even if someone has "given you permission" to use it. When Cecil Sharp introduced it, so far research I've seen shows he didn't use "gip" it in the racial sense. It was a Morris dance word that had no roots in Romance languages. Sometime after in the 20th century, probably because of homonym confusion, other callers and dancers assumed it was "g*psy". Romancing nomadicism: So, y'all have Jewish friends, right? You all know the diaspora, and thousands of years of nomadicism by Jews was _forced_, right? You know that it was forced because of racism and anti-Semitism, and Jews have suffered greatly, culminating in the Holocaust, right? It's nearly identical to Romany oppression. Their nomadicism has been forced. They have the same myths, same racist stereotypes of baby stealing and dark magic. They've been denied citizenship and forced to relocate century after century in Europe. They suffered over a million deaths in the Holocaust. Why, then, would we romanticize their forced nomadicism? In dance, Ron Blechner On Tue, Oct 8, 2019, 9:16 AM Isaac Banner via Callers < callers(a)lists.sharedweight.net&gt; wrote: