Regular contributor Sidney Street Porter's thoughts on the 2011 Dale Farm Eviction, the prejudice Roma people face and that TV show....
My mother never said “I never should play with the gypsies down in the wood”, she was quite open-minded like that; unlike some of the other mothers about who'd tell their kids not to do so, in keeping with that quaint, bigotry-enforcing nursery rhyme of old. Mistrust of gypsies and travellers by insular, parochial society stretches back centuries, through Prosper Merimee’s Carmen, turned into a famous opera by Bizet, past the not very politically correct Enid Blyton character Gipsy Jo, through Nazi elimination in concentration camps, to the gypsies, tramps and thieves of popular pop ballads and jokes by lazy middle of the road hacks like Peter Kay and Jimmy Carr. Isn't it about time that we overcame this fear of the not that particularly unknown?
.
.
RSS Feed