White Fragility is a hell of a drug

[DanaC]

Originally Posted by xoxoxoBruce

Doesn't sound racial either.

Of course its racial - those are the negative qualities associated with gypsies: corrupt, thieving, unreliable, insular as a group and treats all others as fair game etc etc, along with unstable, wandering and outside normal society.

When those terms were coined, that was a common understanding of what gypsy meant - it was a quick way to raise connotations of something untrustworthy and outside the norm. it was also an easy way to depict something not fixed or without its own place

The same way as 'play the white man' suggests an entire cultural understanding, so the use of gypsy as a prefix draws on a whole weight of cultural understanding which has just been absorbed into our language.

That cultural understanding has become watered down and lessened across generations, but some of it still persists - we may not have all those old assumptions, but we instinctively know what is meant when the word Gypsy is used - it means all of those traits - even if we dont connect the mental dots quite as directly as might have done a couple of generations ago.