The structural racialized patterns of segregation and structural violence of Roma have been tacitly accepted, institutionalized, and invigorated by recent populist politics in Europe. This alarming normalization of structural race-based exclusion has become the foundation for the inferiorization and dehumanization of Roma in the public imagination.
Based on the belief of populists and their explicit political agenda to mobilize deep-rooted anti-Roma racism, Roma are now simply “inferior” and their material dispossession is deemed to be the outcome of their “cultural tradition”. Their disposable lives simply do not matter! This message is legitimized on a daily basis by politicians and extensively replicated and reproduced by individuals and organizations – police officers, bankers, teachers, doctors, local authorities, and so on – who are consciously and unconsciously endorsing this deep-rooted racialized cultural and political script.
Consequently, de facto, material deprivation, repressive legislation, micro-aggression, and routinized discrimination and violence against Roma have been encouraged, (re-)confirmed and consolidated by powerful European political leaders such as Matteo Salvini, Viktor Orbán, and lately Boris Johnson, whose repressive legislation outlined in the Queen’s Speech will criminalize a significant number of Roma, Gypsy, and Travellers in the UK. Unfortunately, these events are not isolated; rather, they are part and parcel of a growing institutionalized anti-Roma racism.
