Neither Romanians as a whole, nor Romas in their entirety.
What do you do when you don’t know what to identify with?
Being a Roma means loving your parents, but it also means hiding that they are Roma. To be a Roma means to go to school, but also being regarded as an „exception” because you attend it. To be a Roma means to go to work, but still to remain just a g*psy in the eyes of others. To be a Roma means to be glad that your ancestors were Roma, but also to understand your mother’s tongue only with subtitles.
In Romania, according to official data, over 600,000 Romanian citizens of Roma ethnicity live, but the unofficial number is between 1.8 and 2.5 million. A good part of us choose, out of desire to protect ourselves from stigma, rejection and shame, to hide who we are. Because, day in and day out, we learn that being Roma is something wrong, bad.
So, easy-to-easy, we also start saying, „We’re not Roma. We’re not like them.”
No matter how much it hurts, if we choose to hide, we wipe everything that our nation had to endure, everything that our family means and all the care they give us, everything that our traditions and culture mean, everything that we really mean. If we hide, we become invisible. And the only voices to talk about us, are the others’.
Brother, sister, maybe the time has come to take our power back and take off our masks.
Let them see us.
Let them hear us.
And let’s let ourselves be.
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The video was done with our friends from Sector 7 and can be accesed, in full, here.
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The campaign „About this mask” is part of the project „Knowing the (r)oma besides us”, funded by the Active Citizens Fund Romania program, funded by Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway through the EEA Grants 2014-2021.
The project “Knowing of the (r)oma besides us” aims to raise awareness on human rights and equal treatment, with a focus on the Roma minority.
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