Reporter's Notebook: Gypsies & Racism

L O N D O N, Aug. 6 -- I was sitting in a conference room in Romania, teaching television production to a group of 20 high school students. Suddenly one of the students came in late. She was quite agitated, saying she was delayed because the police stopped her to check on her identification and her subway pass. Because she was from a small town she lacked the proper identification. "The police stop me and ask me questions and I didn't do anything," she said. "But every Gypsy has a knife, and the police do nothing."

I was taken aback. Sitting right next to me was another young woman, one of two dark-skinned students in the room. She is a Gypsy — the politically correct term is Roma, but in Romania, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, the places I was teaching, they are all called Gypsies.

Later, the young Gypsy woman tried to explain to me the everpresent attititudes — that she is a thief, that she is bound to be a welfare queen and destroy public housing, that she will grow up to have many children and live off the system. Her father is an emergency room doctor, she spoke perfect English and was well-read in literature, math and science. But no matter. To the people in the room, she was still a Gypsy.

I had dozens of such encounters throughout Eastern Europe during the six months I spent in 1999 as a Knight International Press Fellow, a sabbatical program that allows American journalists to train other journalists in post-democratic societies. I taught and trained in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary and Romania. Time and again I met people who were energised by the new freedoms and new tolerance. But that tolerance rarely extended to their attitudes towards Gypsies.

In each country I was told that I was too naïve to understand the racial situation in their country — and just look at America's treatment of black people, they would say. Most of the time these views came from intelligent, accomplished individuals who claimed they were not racist, just honest.