Saturday, June 6, 2009

LETTER TO THE NEW YORK TIMES


This was a very hard picture to include. So many Rromani people look this devastated because of the very real conditions of their lives.
Does anyone ever ask themselves if Romani could avenge so easily would many gaje (non Gypsy) remain.


June 7, 2009
Letters
Sam Raimi: Roma Stereotyping
To the Editor:

Re “After Spidey, a Return To Hell” by Charles McGrath [May 24]:

Many of us in Roma advocacy circles were already aware that Sam Raimi’s new film has as its horror villain not merely a Hungarian woman, as you write, but more specifically a Gypsy.

This regrettable racial stereotyping perpetuates an indifferent and largely ignorant world’s vilification of a persecuted people while simultaneously exploiting their mythical exoticism.

Filmmakers use Gypsy characters as the source of chills and thrills but are silent in cases like the one last year in which sunbathers in Italy were undeterred after the corpses of two Roma girls who had drowned were laid out on the beach. Now that would be the subject of a true horror film.

Elizabeth Schwartz

San Diego

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