(Re)claiming the right to Roma self-determination
Guest post by Sebijan Fejzula, a militant with Kale Amenge (Roma for Ourselves), a Roma anti-racist organisation, and a researcher at the Center for Social Studies, University of Coimbra, Portugal. Sebi participated in Systemic Justice’s roundtable on Access to Justice
As a Romani woman, being the narrator of our own history, struggles and experiences has always been and remains a challenging task: to be able to break with the hegemonic understanding about us, the Roma people and “our issues”, precisely because we have been framed, constructed and defined by white supremacy for five centuries. From ‘The Gypsy’ to ‘El Gitano’, historical white constructed and imposed identities mainly by white academics have defined “what does it mean to be a Roma. Other “experts on Roma” have designed the Roma agenda based on their own priorities, centring on cultural instead of political issues at the heart of our struggle.