Historicizing Roma in Central Europe: Between Critical Whiteness and Epistemic Injustice (Routledge Histories of Central and Eastern Europe)

In Central Europe, limited success in revisiting the role of science in the segregation of Roma reverberates with the yet-unmet call for contextualizing the impact of ideas on everyday racism. This book attempts to interpret such a gap as a case of epistemic injustice. It underscores the historical role of ideas in race making and provides analytical lenses for exploring cross-border transfers of whiteness in Central Europe. In the case of Roma, the scientific argument in favor of segregation continues to play an outstanding role due to a long-term focus on the limited educability of Roma. The authors trace the long-term interrelation between racializing Roma and the adaptation by Central European scholars of theories legitimizing segregation against those considered non-white, conceived as unable to become educated or “civilized.” Along with legitimizing segregation, sterilization and even extermination, theorizing ineducability has laid the groundwork for negating the capacity of Roma as subjects of knowledge. Such negation has hindered practices of identity and quite literally prevented Roma in Central Europe from becoming who they are. This systematic epistemic injustice still echoes in contemporary attempts to historicize Roma in Central Europe. The authors critically investigate contemporary approaches to historicize Roma as reproducing whiteness and inevitably leading to various forms of epistemic injustice. The methodological approach herein conceptualizes critical whiteness as a practice of epistemic justice targeted at providing a sustainable platform for reflecting upon the impact of the past on the contemporary situation of Roma. Cover 1 Half Title 2 Series 3 Title 4 Copyright 5 Contents 6 List of Figures 9 Acknowledgments 10 List of Abbreviations 11 Introduction: a longue durée of segregation against Roma: inside of whiteness 12 Critical whiteness as the only option for epistemic justice for Roma in Central Europe: methodological grounds 15 Remapping postcolonial Central Europe: the book’s structure 18 Part I Whiteness: the never-ending story of epistemic injustice against Roma 24 1 Whiteness: a locus for doing race 26 Roma in Central Europe: obsession with whiteness 26 Critical whiteness: options for justice 27 Whiteness in Europe: the over­determination of racism 29 Central European resistance to critical whiteness: between overt reactionism and implicit eliminativism 30 Conclusion 32 2 Obscure racism: from national indifference to whitening Roma 36 National indifference in Central Europe: obscuring race and class 36 Fixing Jewish identity: in the footsteps of whiteness 38 Normalizing Roma: whitening the past 41 Conclusion 44 3 The post­socialist shift in pathologizing: from disabled Roma to disabled socialism 47 Pathologizing vs. normalizing: the two extremes of “whitening” Roma 47 Victimizing Roma: a (post­)socialist pathway of objectification 49 Historicizing as a possible response to pathologizing: toward epistemic justice 51 Conclusion 52 4 The limits and options of historical narratives concerning Roma in Central Europe 55 The normalizing and pathologizing of Roma as traditional narratives 55 Exemplary narratives in historicizing Roma: ruptures vs. continuities 56 Critical narratives of Central European history: losing Roma in transition 57 Quasi­genetic narratives of Roma: missing historical evidence 60 Conclusion 62 Part II The (in)educability of Roma: Central Europe between overt and enlightened racism 66 5 The inception of whiteness: the Grellmannian intersections of European Roma 68 The Grellmannian dichotomies: introducing colonial discourse to the “Gypsy issue” 68 Non­human “Gypsies” vs. human Europeans: struggling for progress 71 Eternal children vs. masterful adults: unapproachable assimilation 73 The bestiality of “Gypsy” women vs. the whiteness of European men: toward the radical divergence of racial difference 74 Conclusion 76 6 Global racial order comes to Central Europe: the puzzle of “White Gypsies” at the dawn of the twentieth century 80 Racial intermixture in the Western world: the inception of racial intersectionality 80 Postcolonial Europe in the focus of outsiders and insiders: deepening (non)whiteness 85 The threat of racial mixing in Central Europe: belligerent outsiders 86 Other Europeans? The view of benevolent outsiders 90 The response of insiders: adapting whiteness 93 Roma in the focus of insiders and outsiders: signifying peripheral Europe 95 Conclusion 101 7 The institutionalization of a racialized approach to Roma in the 1920s–1940s: rooting the stigma of an insecure population 109 A racialized approach to Roma in police surveillance: between the challenges of a global security agenda and nation­building 110 The doctrinal racism of František Štampach and Robert Ritter: the resonance of political will and personal choice 116 Schooling the (in)educable? The intraracial hierarchy of “Gypsy primitives” in action 123 Desirable “Gypsies” vs. unwanted others: an effective false antinomy in racializing Roma 128 Conclusion 132 8 In (re)search of inclusion: Roma under the pressure of de­historicizing between the 1950s and 1990s 138 Introduction 138 Post­Porajmos racism: whitening memories to exclude Roma 139 Roma in the global agenda of population studies: insecure populations vs. human progress 149 The “Gypsy issue” in the international agenda of human adaptability: the crystallization of the racist community 150 Implications for segregative practices: the outputs of the IBP in Czechoslovak policies concerning Roma 156 De­historicizing Roma in Czech socialist fiction: visualizing whiteness 158 Conclusion 166 Conclusion: epistemic justice for Central European Roma: toward the unlimited negation of whiteness 177 Index 182