Zkušenosti Romů ve světě dominanceneromské normality

Abstract

The text is based on interviews with two university-educated Roma, Zdeněk and 
Věrka. It presents their everyday experiences with the surrounding, mostly non-Romani, 
world. In order to emphasise the narrators’ agency, impressions and interpretations of 
these experiences, if thematized, are also presented. The author grounds his discussion 
of this material in the book Black Skin, White Masks, in which Frantz Fanon focuses 
on the inequality of group identities on the example of the lived experiences of colonised 
people. He identifies the power behaviours of the non-Roma as rooted in the normality 
of racial discourse and co-constructed by the perception of Romani identity as an 
overarching category. In his view this further enables the non-Roma to overlook the 
individuality of the Roma and to base the racist narratives and related practices on 
a normalised notion of a priori homogenised Romani difference. At the same time, the 
author emphasises the diversity of experiences of racism and the ability to recognise and 
respond to racism as situational and temporal.