criticalculture:

Maybe Europeans’ hatred of Roma persons (aka. gypsies) isn’t motivated by racism, but rather by the bad behaviour of Roma children and their parents’ unwillingness to discipline them. Seriously, these punks could easily give the brattiest of spoiled North American tots a run for their money.

Near Florina in Greece, at an outdoor market, about three children around the age of ten cornered a woman I had been talking to and started groping her. They didn’t stopped until her boyfriend punched the biggest one in the back of the head.

In Skopja, the capital of the Republic of Macedonia, a kid tried to steal my wallet as I was paying for a sandwich. Thankfully, the co-owner’s wife was able to contain the kid as we struggled over it.

The guide who took a group of us to Bitola instructed our small group to not give money to the children who would surely beg us, because they wouldn’t leave us alone for the rest of the day. However, the one American in our group didn’t listen to him and ended up having her butt squeezed and her camera stolen after handing each child five Euros before we managed to shake them.

Jesus Christ. Today I am destined to argue with small-minded people on the internet it seems. Critical Culture, this is so disappointing! I have enjoyed your blog in the past and found much of it pretty good political/social commentary - but this is just straight-up boring racism. No reflection on the consequences of structural exclusion and discrimination; the histories of white supremacy and eurocentrism; the economic imperatives that create classes of thieves. Let’s make widesweeping assumptions about a whole race of people. Let’s project our moral norms of child-rearing onto them. Let’s label those kids who are easily the most disenfranchised and persecuted across Europe as “brats” and actually place them alongside the privileged spoiled kids of North America. Seriously? Boring, boring, boring.

Not to even mention the vulgarism of blaming children for the violent hatred projected onto a group of people…