Paper short abstract:

The paper focuses on the Romani anti-racist protests in the Czech Republic, which in certain situation were directed against Ukrainian refugees. Based on this situation, the author calls for a reframing of the situation of Roma as dominated and situates them in the broader racial hierarchies.

Paper long abstract:

The war in Ukraine has revealed the full extent of the securitization of the Roma and their heavily racialized position in the Czech Republic. First and foremost, it was the Roma from Ukraine who were securitized and systematically excluded as "undeserving refugees" from the otherwise unprecedented assistance to the hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian refugees. Gradually, however, it was primarily Czech Roma who, amid a general moral appeal for solidarity with Ukraine/Ukrainians, began to increasingly express frustration with the persistence of anti-Romani racism, long unaddressed and even downplayed by the state. Public protests by Roma gradually turned against Ukrainians themselves, escalating after the death of a young Roma man, in which a Ukrainian man was identified as the assailant. Many Roma began to label Ukrainians as a security risk and joined similar public manifestations led by representatives of nationalist parties.

The author argues that this situation forces a reframing of the prevailing understanding of the position of Roma in the binary opposition of "dominant" vs. "dominated". On the other hand, it is necessary to understand the position of the Roma as distinct actors in the dynamic processes of racialization and securitization and to situate them within complex racial hierarchies and broader power relations. Moreover, the protesting Roma – mostly from socio-economically marginalized backgrounds – explicitly questioned the position of so-called Romani representatives and activists. In doing so, they were reminding the class conditionality of the experience of racism and thus illuminating the limits of the policies of the existing Romani movement.