Whoopi Goldberg And Jimmy Carr’s Holocaust Comments Worsen Roma Exclusion

Whoopi Goldberg barely had time to hang up her coat to begin a two-week suspension from ABC’s “The View” for widely criticized comments that the Holocaust “isn’t about race” and was “[white people] fighting each other” before an even bigger scandal erupted on the other side of the Atlantic. In his Netflix special, British stand-up comedian Jimmy Carr drew widespread anger, especially from Roma and advocates, with the following … well, he called it a joke:

“When people talk about the Holocaust, they talk about the tragedy and horror of 6 million Jewish lives lost to the Nazi war machine. But they never mention the thousands of Gypsies killed by the Nazis. No one wants to talk about that because no one ever wants to talk about the positive.”

The two comedians’ comments had different starting points. Goldberg’s stemmed from ignorance and imposition of contemporary American conceptions of racism – as based on skin color – onto a European past. Carr claimed he intended his joke to be educational and call attention to groups apart from Jews that the Nazis persecuted, though he seemed more interested in punching down on an easy target. No less appalling were people who defended Goldberg’s remarks and laughed at Carr’s joke.

Both incidents highlight ignorance about Romani people’s experience in the Holocaust and how news media have unfortunately contributed to it. With discrimination and violence against Roma in Europe worsening amid the rise of far-right politics and the COVID-19 pandemic, ensuring that narratives about the Holocaust include and properly contextualize Romani victims and survivors is more salient than ever.

As they did to Europe’s Jews, the Nazis identified Roma – who originated in India and migrated to Europe in the Middle Ages – as “racially inferior” and targeted them for extermination. Estimates of the number they and allies murdered vary widely, from 500,000-1.5 million, but many countries lost more than 80% of their Romani populations. Yet, news coverage frequently shunts Roma into a nebulous “others” category of non-racial victims of Nazi persecution like Jehovah’s Witnesses, LGBT people and the disabled, wrongly implying Roma too were targeted on something other than racial grounds. That’s if coverage mentions Roma at all, which a Feb. 1 Associated Press article about Goldberg’s suspension didn’t. Even more routinely overlooked are Germans of African descent.

The implicit notion that the Roma were not persecuted based on race, not to mention the misconception that Jews in World War II-era Europe qualified as “white,” feeds false beliefs like Goldberg’s that the Holocaust was “white-on-white,” thereby diminishing the Holocaust and in particular perpetuating ignorance of the the racism that led to the genocide of Roma and that remains widespread in Europe today.

Petra Gelbart, a Romani ethnomusicologist at Fordham University and cofounder of Families of Roma and Sinti Holocaust Victims, rejects the notion that Carr had any genuine educational intent.

“For one thing, it’s not educational if you claim ‘thousands of Gypsies’ rather than hundreds of thousands of Roma and Sinti, but that’s a finer point,” said Gelbart, whose Czechoslovakian Romani maternal grandparents survived the Holocaust and whose family suffered “unspeakable losses.” “Also, every other group that was mentioned is unmarked by his supposed edgy joke, so all it does is normalize similar behavior towards Romani people.”

Roma migrated from India and arrived in Europe in the Middle Ages. Europeans mistakenly believed they came from Egypt, hence the term “Gypsy,” though that term is widely seen as pejorative today. Sinti are a group mostly in Central Europe who often consider themselves distinct from Roma.

But news media often perpetuate inaccurate and unfair representations of Roma, even if unintentionally.

As an example of coverage that misses the mark, Gelbart pointed to Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah’s Feb. 3 piece about Goldberg’s comments. Attiah refers to Roma in the present tense as “a nomadic group,” but doesn’t mention that Roma are a visible race, with most being various shades of brown.

“No journalists or experts are being held accountable for Holocaust distortion, which is what erasing, minimizing and tokenizing Romani victims amounts to,” Gelbart told me.

It happens in education too, with Roma left out of Holocaust narratives through ignorance such as in high school lessons or through deliberate erasure in college courses and museum exhibits. Even efforts to improve Romani representation can lead to resistance, she said, though some people have tried to rectify the situation, such as Yom HaShoah event organizers in Cambridge, Mass.

Ensuring proper acknowledgement of the Romani experience in the Holocaust takes on a special importance given the persistence of racism against Roma today.

Gelbart pointed out that Romani and Sinti children were among the first children the Nazis murdered in significant numbers, as racial enemies and as “hereditarily sick” and disabled. Today, especially in Eastern Europe, teachers, social workers and other professionals still consider Romani children hereditarily disabled, leading to school segregation and discouragement of white parents from adopting or fostering them.

On a 2018 trip to Belgrade, Serbia, as I was waiting in the hotel lobby for a cab to take me to the airport, I got into a conversation with the clerk, a 20-something man who wouldn’t have looked out of place at a hipster bar in Williamsburg or Portland. The conversation was going perfectly fine until, with no prompting from me, he began spouting off racist stereotypes about Roma as violent criminals.

Shivani Sharma, producer of the British talk radio show LBC, tweeted a “very revealing” remark in response to Carr’s joke from a caller who initially said the comedian should be “‘locked up’ for his comments on Jews”; when Sharma clarified that the remarks were about Roma, the caller replied, “ok that’s a bit different then.”

Such casual acceptance of racism inevitably leads to far worse consequences.

A March 2019 fact sheet by the European Roma Rights Centre detailed years of mob violence and collective punishment against Romani communities in nearly a dozen European countries. In December 2011, for example, a teenage girl in Italy falsely claimed “two gypsies had stolen her virginity,” after which a mob of hundreds set fire to a nearby Romani camp. In Greece, the accidental gunshot death of an 11-year-old boy nearly led to an anti-Romani pogrom instigated by neo-fascists and involving 1,500 people. In Slovakia, police searching for criminal suspects are known to conduct warrantless, violent raids on entire impoverished Romani neighborhoods.

Police violence is common: Last summer, in the Czech town of Teplice, 42-year-old Romani man Stanislav Tomáš died after cops knelt on his neck during an arrest, which led many to draw comparisons to Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin’s murder of George Floyd.

Americans accustomed to seeing Europe as a paragon of human development and cultural sophistication might find it jarring to discover that in addition to universal health care, bullet trains and fairy tale charm, it’s also home to Roma who, well into the 21st century, routinely experience horrific levels of poverty, discrimination and violence.

But Americans who might feel inclined to dismiss the furor over Carr’s joke as more woke whining by oversensitive Gen Zers should be aware of this ugly part of European society he is perpetuating, which might go unnoticed during “Game of Thrones” tours in Dubrovnik.

Goldberg’s remarks, meanwhile, perpetuate unfair and inaccurate representation – if not outright exclusion – of Roma in the Holocaust.

“Like most Americans, Goldberg did not realize that Roma were murdered in the Holocaust and/or thinks Roma are generally white,” Gelbart said. Even Goldberg’s apology left Roma out.

“Since most Jews read as white, and most Roma are visibly brown, and we are talking about white supremacy, I don’t even know where to begin with this one,” Gelbart said. She said Goldberg’s omission left her Jewish husband similarly befuddled, as the two brown-skinned Romani children they adopted from a Czech orphanage had suffered racist physical and verbal attacks in Europe.

On a more encouraging note, uproar at Carr’s joke led to 40 UK charities calling for adding the genocide of Roma and Sinti to the national Holocaust curriculum.

A similar reflection should happen in the US, including among journalists, who should get in the habit of making it clear that the Nazis and their allies targeted Roma alongside Jews for extermination on racial grounds rather than listing them among “others.” An illustrative news peg to put on their calendars is Aug. 2, which marks Roma Holocaust Memorial Day because it was on that date in 1944 that nearly 2,900 Roma – most of them women, children, and elderly – were murdered in the Zigeunerfamilienlager, or Gypsy family camp, at Auschwitz.

That way, perhaps people like Goldberg and Carr will know better in the future, and their audiences will know better than to defend and applaud them.

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Alaric DeArment is a journalist in New York. Follow him on Twitter at @biotechvisigoth.