Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies

ISSN: 1369-183X (Print) 1469-9451 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cjms20

‘In England, they don’t call you black!’ Migrating

racialisations and the production of Roma
difference across Europe

Jan Grill

To cite this article: Jan Grill (2017): ‘In England, they don’t call you black!’ Migrating racialisations
and the production of Roma difference across Europe, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2017.1329007

Published online: 01 Jun 2017.

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JOURNAL OF ETHNIC AND MIGRATION STUDIES, 2017
https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2017.1329007

‘In England, they don’t call you black!’ Migrating racialisations

and the production of Roma difference across Europe
Jan Grilla,b
a
Department of Social Anthropology, University of Manchester, Manchester, Great Britain; bDepartment of
Sociology, Universidad del Valle, Cali, Colombia

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

This article draws on long-term fieldwork among Slovak Roma Received 14 October 2016
migrants, identifying processes through which a haunting figure Accepted 7 May 2017
of the Roma migrant emerges across Europe, to argue for more
KEYWORDS
differentiated accounts of continuing and emerging forms of Migrating racialisations;
racialisation. It explores how the movement of Roma (whose movement; race regional
bodies are marked by their racialised ‘darkness’ in Slovakia) to configurations; symbolic
Britain granted them a temporary escape from this modality of violence; Roma
branding while simultaneously exposing them to different
categorisations within a re-configuring classificatory matrix. The
article develops the concept of ‘migrating racialisation’ in order to
empirically trace how historically developed forms of racialisation
in Slovakia migrate across Europe through the movement of
Roma and non-Roma migrants from Eastern Europe, as well
as through particular forms of knowledge circulating within
transnational fields constituted not only by Roma migrants
themselves but also by various institutions for ‘managing’ or
‘researching’ ‘the Roma’. This concept allows us to analyse how
the recent forms of racialisation simultaneously draw on
heterogenous histories and nation-state formations, social
conditions and sedimented bodily dispositions, which are re-
adjusted to new social conditions, discourses and emerging forms
of knowledge produced about Roma migrants over the last
decade in British and European contexts.

‘In England they don’t call you black … Over there, they don’t care if you’re black, white,
yellow or whatever.’ These were the words used by many Slovak Roma migrants among
whom I carried out over two years of ethnographic fieldwork. The statement was often
accompanied by the observation that: ‘In Slovakia, you will always be only black
Gypsy!’ or ‘Gypsies will always be humiliated’. These expressions1 illustrate a relational
knowledge born out of the comparison between Slovakia and Great Britain, which has
become a common way of juxtaposing the everyday significance of race for Slovak
Roma in these two settings and within the wider transnational social field they inhabit.
It also shows how migration towards the imagined ‘West’ has crystallised as one of the
most desired avenues for social and existential mobility for Roma, whose everyday lives
in Slovakia came to be marked out as ‘stuck’ in time and space (Grill 2012a) and their
mode of existence circumscribed by racialised stigmatisation. Their social, spatio-temporal

CONTACT Jan Grill jan.grill@manchester.ac.uk

© 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
2 J. GRILL

and existential ‘stuckedness’ (Hage 2009; Jansen 2015) have been simultaneously produced
by the social conditions and structures transfigured by the complex entanglements of wor-
sening economic conditions, unemployment, neo-liberal reforms (shifting the governing
focus from welfare towards punitive workfare) and reinforcement of racial stigma in
the last decades.
This article dissects the changing significance of race, and the modes of migrating racia-
lisation, of Roma migrants moving between their eastern European villages and urban
areas in Britain. In particular, I examine the period following Slovakia’s accession to the
European Union (EU) in 2004 and consider how the migrants conceive their racialisation,
or partake in racialising themselves and others in relation to the social condition and
structures constituting these forms of classification, and how these change in the
context of migration and encounters with new forms of categorisation on their transna-
tional migratory circuits.
This article examines the category of ‘Gypsyness’ in relation to its varying articulations
at the intersections of racialisation and class positioning in time and across geographic
space.2 I explore how Slovak Roma migrants, moving from a society where race and
skin colour are firmly cemented as a central category of social understanding, negotiate
their identities in their migratory destinations in Great Britain where their mode of exist-
ence is not circumscribed by this specific Slovak formation of racialised Gypsyness, and its
interlocking with the ascribed and recognised measures of ‘darkness’. How do these forms
of racialisation relate to, and intertwine with, the ongoing racial formations developing in
the British and Slovak contexts, as well as at the pan-European level? And how do these
formations and configurations emerge and/or get re-produced through what I will call
‘migrating racialisations’ related to the circulation and distribution of knowledge about
‘Roma’ (and) ‘migrants’ in Europe?
‘Migrating racialisations’ refer to processes in which forms of racialisation operate as
(re-)produced forms of knowledge but also as embodied dispositions among migrants
moving towards societies with different histories of racial formation. These forms of
knowledge about ‘racialisation’ can be intimately shared among migrants who originate
from the same country with particular ‘cultural intimacies’ (Herzfeld 1997) but whose
understandings might also be mutually contested and vary in relation to the social con-
ditions and positions they have occupied in relation to social, class, gender, ethnicity,
race or other vectors of difference. My empirical focus contributes to so far understudied
field of how migration contributes to changing racial meanings in the case of mobilities of
minorities stigmatised within particular nation-state formations and transnational fields.
Similarly to Kusow’s study of Somali migrants in the North America (2006), I examine
how migrants’ understanding of ‘race’ transfigures in a new social classification system.
This article explores how particular networks of Roma migrants moving to the UK
encounter new forms of categorisation, and how they re-negotiate these in relation to
their classificatory matrix developed in east Slovakian borderlands. These forms of knowl-
edge become re-negotiated and enmeshed with pre-existing forms of knowledge in their
new migratory destinations, but they also operate as an important baseline and yardstick
contributing to reproduced but also emerging forms of knowledge and understandings of
difference in these new settings. Empirically, I draw on ethnographic fieldwork among
Slovak Roma networks from Slovakia, many of whom were seeking asylum in western
European countries throughout late 1990s – early 2000s. Most of their claims were
 JOURNAL OF ETHNIC AND MIGRATION STUDIES 3

turned down, and they were often labelled in the tabloid media as ‘bogus refugees’, and
deported. When Slovakia joined the EU in 2004, previous asylum seekers or ‘illegal
migrants’ were transformed into EU citizens legally entitled to live in Britain, and many
others started to come in search of a ‘better life’ (feder dživipen) (Grill 2012a).
Following Wacquant’s analytical critiques of studies of race (1989; 1997), the article
develops an ethnographic critique responding to the persistent focus on Roma as a
unified category (of analysis, of suffering, of racialisation, etc.) in political and academic
discourse, which contributes to obfuscating the internal differentiations and particular his-
torical transformations animating both the differential forms of racial domination in par-
ticular times and spaces and social agents’ understandings of race. Although the forms of
domination and violence to which they have been exposed in the past left significant col-
lective imprints on their social lives and bodily dispositions, they are also actively respond-
ing to these, and they too manufacture and perpetuate racial distinctions depending on
their social locatedness.
My argument contributes to filling an empirical gap in critical scholarship on the
ongoing racialisation of Roma migrants. Although a number of scholars have demon-
strated new forms of racialisation and neo-liberalised ways of governing poor Roma
across Europe, many of these accounts focus on documenting examples of how Roma/
Gypsies are produced as particular subjects in relation to discursive transformations
and differential forms of inclusion/exclusion (see e.g. Sigona and Trehan 2011; Hepworth
2012; Fassin 2014; van Baar 2014a, b). While these accounts provide insightful accounts of
how Roma are constructed and racialised, they remain relatively (ethnographically) ‘thin’
when it comes to discussing the complexity of Roma responses, socially and regionally
embedded particularities and their embodied dispositions deployed and re-adjusted
within changing social conditions. Additionally, most of these accounts do not provide
sufficient analysis that bring together particular Roma migrants’ understandings, and
the social conditions and structures of domination crucial to shaping their categories of
thought and perceptions, which in turn inform their understandings. For example,
there is a generic assumption about racial discrimination towards Roma, but we do not
have sufficiently differentiated accounts of how particular national histories prefigure
national fantasies and racial ideologies in which Roma/Gypsies occupy particular pos-
itions, or how differently situated Roma might experience and respond to these. One
can ask how we account for regional differences, rural/urban distinctions or different
class trajectories and aspirations influencing Roma migrants’ understandings? Occupying
positions as ‘dark-skinned’ citizens does not necessarily translate unproblematically as
one’s presumptive (stigmatised) Gypsyness in the same way. In contrast to Slovakia or
the Czech Republic, in some regions of Europe, Roma can and do pass as ‘non-Roma’
if ‘fulfilling’ other criteria of national fantasies of belonging (dress, body posture,
manners, class, language and others). In other words, imagined and constructed darkness
of complexion does not automatically qualify and differentiate a person as Roma/Gypsy.
Ethnography is particularly well suited to unpacking some of these questions and can serve
to refine the analytical apparatus of various processes subsumed under the term of ‘racia-
lisation’ (Fassin 2011), broadly conceived as ‘race-inflicted social situations’ in the rela-
tional field of analysis (cf. Goldberg 2006; 2009).
This article is based on a large body of observational, life-story, interview-based, archi-
val, documentary and experiential data collected during an ethnographic study of the
4 J. GRILL

social world of Roma in their Slovak homes and on their migratory pathways. Between
2006 and 2008, I carried out continuous participant observation in east Slovak villages
and several British cities. I followed their oscillating movements within this emerging
transnational social field. Since then I have intermittently continued the research within
this ‘single geographically discontinuous site’ stretched across various locations (Hage
2005, 463; cf. Andersson 2014) through regular revisits (Burawoy 2009).3 Furthermore,
I accompanied Roma on their daily interactions and encounters with the state and non-
state agents (such as social workers, health specialists, police officers, aid workers, repor-
ters and NGOs). In addition to observing their practices and interactions with Roma, I
conducted semi-structured interviews with these state and non-state agents who are
working with, controlling, caring, disciplining, helping and interacting with Roma/
Gypsies in these transnational social fields. Classical ethnographic methods were compli-
mented by archival research in order to obtain more historical data on the late socialist
period.

Race in Slovakia, or ‘elsewhere’?

When responding to the critiques of international human rights’ organisations highlight-
ing the plight of Roma/Gypsy groups, Slovak politicians frequently deny that there is any
racism and racial discrimination in their country. This often seems to be supported by
explicit comparisons with countries with official racial ideologies elsewhere, underlying
policies of segregation and discrimination in the past or present. Similarly, the category
of race seems to be rather absent in most social scientific debates in Slovakia and, fre-
quently equating race with genetic differences, there is a tendency to argue that racial cat-
egories are not as significant as (or considered as distinct from) ethno-national or cultural
categories in the production and social organisation of difference. However, in Slovakia,
the very categories of nation (národ), nationality (národnosť), and ethnicity/ethnic identity
or culture (kultúra) are often conflated in practical use, and in certain contexts act as a
substitute for ‘race’ (rasa). Frequently, these categories were deployed as possessing essen-
tialised qualities transmitted across time and space. It is beyond the scope of this article to
provide a comprehensive historical contextualisation outlining the formation and trans-
formation of ‘blackness’ and ‘whiteness’ in Slovakia in order to reconstruct a genealogy
of Slovak ideas about ‘blackness’, racial ideologies, practices and institutional frameworks
deploying racialised visions and divisions across a long history. Instead, I will focus on
Roma/Gypsy categories and modes of external ascriptions of blackness and the ways in
which a particular formation of the blackness-whiteness continuum coexist with class
positionalities and other symbolic markers of racialised difference.
At times, the perceived or presumed absence of racism in Slovakia is attributed to the
legacies of socialist policies and ideologies where racism was deemed to be a problem of
Western imperialists with colonies, or countries with large numbers of past and present
migrants. During the socialist period, the official political rhetoric was articulated in
spatio-temporal opposition to racism and racial inequalities characterising the pre-social-
ist past, the horrors of German Nazism and other capitalist countries of the West. In fact,
the pre-socialist definition of ‘Gypsies’ was derived from racial and social conceptualis-
ations – as members of a ‘Gypsy race’ who were descendants of Gypsy parents (settled
or nomadic), as well as an allegedly ‘asocial lifestyle’ (indexed by ‘avoiding work’)
 JOURNAL OF ETHNIC AND MIGRATION STUDIES 5

(Donert 2008, 9). In these optics, the pre-war racialised category of ‘Gypsy’ was replaced
by the class-based prism of ‘citizens of Gypsy origin’ following the socialist takeover in
1948 (Sokolova 2008; Donert 2010). The latter category was equated with members of
the lumpenproletariat who were to be re-educated through their incorporation into the
working class to become full-fledged socialist citizens. Circumscribed as ‘backward’ on
the socialist evolutionary ladder of progress, their alleged ‘Gypsy way of life’ was to be
abandoned through diligent and ‘honest work’, which would in turn guarantee them
their equal socialist citizenship free of racialised categorisation. In theory, there was no
(place for) racial ideology in the building of socialist society, and ‘racism’ was located as
spatiotemporally elsewhere (Weitz 2002; Hirsch 2002; Lemon 2002; cf. Law 2012;
Alamgir 2013, 72–73). In her study of Vietnamese migrants in socialist Czechoslovakia,
Alamgir (2013) shows how the absence of official racial ideology served as a legitimising
tool for evidencing the ‘impossibility’ of the existence of racial classification in socialist
society while, in everyday usages, ‘white Czechs’ continued to use racially tinged castiga-
tions and condescending patronisations against those who were conceived as ‘not-good-
enough’ workers or as ‘not-grateful-enough’ subjects. These forms of relational distinction
operated through a triangulation whereby Vietnamese and Cuban migrants were evalu-
ated alongside ‘Gypsies’ within the graded hierarchies of worthiness and a continuum
between ‘honest workers’ and work-shy scroungers (Alamgir 2013, 75–79).4 One of the
most persistent perspectives still largely embraced today by white Czechs and Slovaks
hinges on the claims that the socialist state simultaneously: taught the Gypsies how to
get everything for free; and failed in its efforts at assimilating, re-educating and integrating
Gypsies, which in turn only appears to re-confirm the collective fiction of ‘them’ being
‘uneducable’ and ‘unadaptable’ – therefore only reinforcing ingrained categorisations of
them as ‘uncivilised’, ‘backward’ and incorrigibly different.
For the majority of Tarkovce Roma, the socialist era was remembered rather nostalgi-
cally: ‘Things were better … the communists did not make differences between people like
now.’ In other words, many Roma recalled state socialism as a period when Roma were
treated more as equals and their sense of security and viability was linked to socialist
forms of employment (cf. Grill 2015). In contrast, the postsocialist transition in the
newly created and officially ‘colour-blind’ democratic state was characterised by intensi-
fied practices of racial discrimination. And yet, even during socialism, one’s darkness
operated as ascribing one’s stigma of Gypsyness. For an exceptionally ‘white’ Roma
woman named Markéta, with pale skin, who on many occasions was not seen as being
different from the dominant ‘Slovaks’, recalled how it was always her white-looking
father who insisted on going to her school for parents’ meetings (rather than her dark-
skinned mother), for fear that she would be picked on by others as ‘Gypsy’. Additionally,
while most Roma worked, the majority of them did not occupy higher positions in their
workplaces and most of them were assigned Gadžo supervisors who were tasked to teach
their fellow co-workers (of Gypsy origin) how to work (cf. Davidová 1965). Thus, while the
socialist ideology in theory allowed for the exemplarily hard-working citizens of Gypsy
backgrounds to merge into the (racially undifferentiated) proletariat, the Roma continued
to experience racially tinged categorisations intersecting with their particular class posi-
tionalities (this occurred to a much less severe degree than during the postsocialist period).
Skin colour continues to operate in Slovakia as one of the defining features of the racia-
lising logic stemming from a particular history. With its relative racial homogeneity,
6 J. GRILL

people of darker complexion are often presumptively seen as Roma/Gypsies. In Slovak, the
adjective ‘black’ (čierny) or ‘dark’/‘swarthy’ (tmavý/snedý) is often used in tandem with
specific references to Roma. Following Althusser’s notion of interpellation we can see
this as a form of negative interpellation, which is recognised by the racialised subjects
and by those who hail them through this classificatory calling as firmly cemented
within the very fabric of the dominant symbolic order (Althusser 1971; Hage 2010).
This logic can be illustrated through the way in which the dominant ‘Slovaks’ speak
about themselves in the context of differentiating themselves from Roma. Many used
the adjective and noun: ‘white’ (biely) thereby asserting their whiteness in contrast to
the others. For instance, one of the common responses to researchers’ inquiries about
the Roma presence in the locality was: ‘Here live only (the) whites’. This is almost exclu-
sively done vis-à-vis Roma. The category of ‘black person’ (černoch), nevertheless, is not
used to designate Roma/Gypsies and instead constructed to mark the difference as non-
Slovak, and implicitly as non-European. The racialising logic of colour is not necessarily
present in relation to ‘nationalities’, ‘ethnicities’ or ‘cultures’. I have never recorded the
same when referring to the Hungarian minority in Slovakia, for example. Their difference
is explained differently, albeit also with references to the essentialised qualities of ‘blood’.
For example, in the eastern Slovakian borderlands, where there are many Hungarian-
speaking inhabitants, the ‘Hungarians’ (Maďari) are seen as hot-tempered and tempera-
mental. At times, one hears a widely shared assumption in Slovakia: ‘this is Hungarian
blood’ (maďarská krv). These distinctions have been deployed by non-Roma and Roma
Slovaks alike vis-à-vis ‘Hungarians’ (be they Hungarian-speaking citizens of Slovakia or
citizens of Hungary). But the same categorisation, in which ethnicity, race and nationality
blend, was deployed by Slovak- and Romani-speaking Roma vis-à-vis the Hungarian-
speaking Roma who were seen as wild, hot-tempered and ‘crazy’, but also stubborn and
stupid. These differences, in certain contexts, were seen more as a matter of ‘manners’
(maňýra) – that is, as practices and dispositions that are learned, but which might be
seen in essentialising terms as largely ‘unchangeable’ nonetheless.
References to biologically predisposed manners and lifestyles stemming from an
assumption about one’s collective ‘blood’ have come to be normalised and internalised
both by Roma and non-Roma alike. For example, as described by Lemon (1995; 2000)
in Russia, both non-Roma and Roma in Slovakia believe that the Roma have ‘music’
and ‘dance’ ‘in their blood’. This assumption operates both as a self-referential term of
identification and as an external categorisation. In fact, these two often formed a particular
entanglement, racial disposition and matrix through which differences are perceived.
Other naturalised racial and ‘cultural’ markers of difference in Slovakia could be found
in one’s name, clothing style, hairstyle, body language, gestures, movements, language or
accent, as well as social status or manners. However, these categories are more malleable
than the external ascription attached to the ‘darkness’-cum-Gypsyness in Slovakia. Thus,
most ‘Hungarians’ in Slovakia can cultivate their bodily dispositions, re-learn a way of
speaking in Slovak, and re-adjust other external markers in order not to be seen as ‘Hun-
garian’ in certain contexts. In contrast, like many other people racialised through their
‘colour’, Roma – who are seen as ‘darker’, despite the fact that there are also many
Roma who are relatively ‘light-skinned’ and might approximate the dominant construc-
tion of ‘whiteness’ – ‘do not enjoy the same degree of choice’ (Desmond and Emirbayer
2009, 341) as those who belong to the dominant groups.
 JOURNAL OF ETHNIC AND MIGRATION STUDIES 7

Symbolic violence and race in everyday categories of perception in

Slovakia
The mode of existence for Roma groups in Slovakia has been circumscribed by their
assumed darker complexion, accompanied by naturalising assumptions about their intrin-
sic traits and proclivities. When analysing ways through which hierarchies of worth
become inscribed onto individual bodies as well as instituted within the social order
and its organising categories of thought, Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic violence has
been particularly useful (Bourdieu 2000; 2004). He defines it as a ‘violence which is exer-
cised upon a social agent with his or her complicity’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, 167).
Forms of racialisation always exert a particular mode of symbolic violence upon those who
are designated through these acts of ascription (Bourdieu 2000; Fassin 2011, 423) and who
often internalise and (mis)recognise the very categories of their oppression as natural. The
categories of perception can be read as being products of wider social structures and asym-
metrical relations of domination. In fact, as Bourdieu argues, there exists a close relation of
complicity between objective structures and the subjective categories of perception and
knowledge of particular social agents. The act of ascription always reflects particular
forms of domination through which the more powerful impose a particular vision and div-
ision of social reality, which might be contested by the dominated, but equally results in its
normalisation and internalisation.5
A telling example of the workings of symbolic violence is in ways in which dominant
categorisations infiltrate the self-understandings and hierarchies of worth in Roma self-
racialisation according to standards of beauty along a whiteness-blackness continuum.
In my fieldwork, I was surprised how often Roma parents praised the newly born baby
or beautiful youth with the following idiomatic phrases:
S/he’s beautiful like a (non-Roma) girl/boy (sar rakli/raklo)

S/he’s beautiful like a non-Roma (sar Gadži/Gadžo)

Look how beautiful, how light/white he/she is (savo parno/i)

You would say: (she is) a ‘non-Roma’ (Gadži hini)

In other words, this suggests that if ‘you look at her/him you wouldn’t be able to say that s/
he is like a Rom!’ There is a clear hierarchy of beauty when it comes to skin colour. The
degree of one’s whiteness and blackness was reflected hierarchically on the scale where
lightness represented the highest and darkness the lowest pole. Lightness of skin was
seen as more desirable and as an index of beauty, and was taken to signal somehow
superior qualities to those of dark skin, whereas the Roma were pronouncedly less enthu-
siastic about ‘darkness’ or ‘blackness’. Being seen as ‘swarthy’ was ambivalently and con-
textually located somewhere between these diametrically opposed poles of ‘whiteness’ and
‘blackness’, seen as praise when used to describe a beautiful swarthy girl, albeit one who
would never be considered as being as beautiful as a ‘white-looking’ girl with pale skin.6
In certain contexts, the distinction between white and black also correlated with desired
Roma qualities in opposition to those of degeši (Gypsies considered as being the most
socially and morally ‘low’).7 Being ‘black’, in other words, was seen as least desirable in
the classificatory matrices of both Roma and non-Roma.
8 J. GRILL

This particular formation of racialised whiteness-darkness can be traced back histori-

cally. For instance, in her autobiography, Lacková describes how her mother was
shocked over her ‘blackness’ after her birth in 1921:
When I was born my mum was frightened at how black I was. She thought that it was dirt, so
she took some lye and started to scrub my face until I was bleeding. … ‘the child is so hor-
ribly black!’ my mother lamented. (Lacková 2010, 19).

Possessing the desired ‘whiteness’ made everyday movement and interaction within the
dominant society easier as it enabled one to pass as white ‘Slovak’. Of course, in small-
scale local contexts based on long-term social interaction, other factors might contribute
to the construction and recognition of one’s Gypsyness by the members of dominant
Slovak society (i.e. name, family membership, the neighbourhood where one lives, cloth-
ing style, language, etc.). However, in their interactions with Gadžos (non-Roma) without
prior interpersonal knowledge, Roma with lighter skin could potentially pass as non-Roma
Slovaks. This was in stark contrast, however, to the experiences of most Roma whose
modes of interactions with white Slovaks and institutions was permanently marked by
their darkness, which in turn contributed to particular modes of action derived from
colour-based preconceptions of Gypsyness (i.e. workplace discrimination; assumptions
about ‘disorderly’ behaviour and ‘unreliability’). This has led to past and present strategies
on the part of some Roma to ‘pass’ and hide their ‘Gypsyness’ from the non-Roma gaze at
their workplaces.
The degree of one’s perceived darkness and its associated symbolic stigma in Slova-
kia elicited two sets of responses: one of naturalised mis-recognition of such ascriptions,
but also of simultaneous transposition of its associated stigma to others. In certain con-
texts, the Tarkovce Roma appeared to be somewhat ashamed to be classified as dark/
black, or to be seen as getting darker (which reflected the malleable and shifting
quality of the concept). For example, men were often teased when their skin became
tanned after long summer days. ‘Look how he darkened’, my adoptive mother in the
field would tease her husband after coming from an all-day shift working on the
roofs of building sites. Her husband, with a bashful smile, would reply: ‘But what
can I do (about this)? I’ve been working hard all day.’ And turning to me he would
entreat, ‘say something, Jano, I’m dark/black (kalo) and you’re light/white (parno).
I’m Rom, you’re Gadžo. I work with my hands, you with your head … and, you
know, that I will always get darker quicker.’ His response reflected the commonly
held perception of bodily difference along racial lines. These perspectives reflected
not only naturalised differences between kinds of racialised bodies but also indexed a
certain recognition of the particular naturalised position the racialised body occupies
within the social order.
Following a long history of racial domination combined with class subordination and
violent oppression, the categorisations of whiteness and blackness, lightness and darkness,
have acquired particular moral configurations and subtle meanings inscribed on bodies
and classificatory schemata in the Slovak context. This reflects the persistent racialised
subordination of the figure of the ‘black Gypsy’ in the Slovak national imagination,
which has become imprinted in the dispositions of the dominant and the dominated
alike. Similarly to other examples of racialised and oppressed minorities (see e.g.
Holmes 2013), particular categories of scorn, mockery and disdain through which the
 JOURNAL OF ETHNIC AND MIGRATION STUDIES 9

dominant partake in interpellation of the dominated become internalised as negative in

the categories of those who are thus ascribed.
The racial matrix of classifying difference may have been anchored in the past, but have
become sedimented in the material forms and entrenched bodily dispositions that con-
tinue to propel social agents to see and act in the social world in particular ways. But
what happens to these dispositions entailed in this ‘racial habitus’ (Sallaz 2010;
Hancock 2013; Wacquant 2014, 124) when they migrate to different social, transnational
fields of action? How do these categorisations change, for instance, when social conditions
(of which they are product) change through the process of migrating to Great Britain?

Moving to Britain: from invisibility to re-racialised visibility

Roma migrants have moved from relatively homogenous Slovakia to diverse urban areas
of Great Britain. What characterised these British neighbourhoods was not only their
racial diversity but also their social position towards the bottom of local class hierarchies,
which in some contexts merge class-inflected derision with territorial stigmatisation.
Moving to these neighbourhoods alongside other ‘Eastern European’ migrants, Roma
migrants entered a space characterised by a variety of social and racial hierarchies, and
an ongoing process of (re-)making of boundaries between different cultural, ethnic,
social or religious collective categories. This change entailed a significant move away
from the previous all-encompassing mode of classification and racialisation in which
the spectre of existence was constantly connected to the possibility of being negatively
interpellated as ‘darker’ in Slovakia. From the Roma point of view, they had moved
away from a country where they were unrelentingly exposed to racism, to a setting in
which their existence was not simply marked by externally ascribed stigma of ‘Gypsyness’
(Grill 2012b). As many noted: ‘Here you don’t have the same racism like in Slovakia.’ They
evidenced it by the possibility of their finding jobs in UK. The preconceptions they
encountered in Slovakia, however, were soon confronted by other forms of categorisation
in their British destinations.
During the early years of their migration to Britain, many Slovak Roma migrants self-
identified mostly by their citizenship and nationality – as Slovaks – vis-à-vis British insti-
tutions. This largely overlapped with their inclusion into the ambiguous category of
‘Eastern European’ migrants whose largely inferior status could be legitimised and to
some extent valorised in so far as they were seen as embodying the figure of the ‘good
worker’ – a hard-working, ‘cheap’ and exploitable migrant labour force silently included
within the British economy (cf. De Genova 2013; Dzenovska 2013; Fox and Morosanu
2013). The category of ‘Roma migrant’ did not occupy any clearly racially and/or culturally
delineated position within the socio-symbolic order during the early years of their
migration to Britain. Some locals referred to them as ‘Slovaks’, while others used the
generic ‘Eastern Europeans’ (Grill 2012b).
Upon arriving in Britain, most Roma found it liberating to realise that their skin colour
and appearance did not automatically ascribe to them the negative symbolic capital (Bour-
dieu 2000, 241) of Gypsyness-cum-blackness underlying their daily existence in Slovakia.
These experiences of initial invisibility and the accompanying sensation of no longer being
interpellated as a ‘black Gypsy’ by the white Slovak gaze, were frequently celebrated with
great satisfaction and enthusiasm, and some migrants even exploited their initial
10 J. GRILL

invisibility by adopting a range of strategies in order to pass as someone ‘else’ than Roma
by suggesting other categories of identity when asked. Some Roma compared this to their
experiences in Slovakia, where their mere racialised appearance as ‘Gypsies’ fixed them
within a category of suspicion, leading to the humiliating stops and searches in shops
to which they were occasionally submitted, motivated by the presumption that had had
engaged in theft. As one of the migrants put it, ‘Where would it happen to you here to
be stopped in the shop and asked to show what you have inside your bags!?!’
Unlike in Slovakia, in the UK most Roma migrants used the category of Slovaks as the
preferred self-ascriptive term. In Tarkovce they often deplored the ethno-national cat-
egories of differentiation between Slovaks (Slováka) and Roma, which were frequently
conflated with racialised distinctions attributed to the visibility of their colour, in the
local village context. For instance, referring to a street inhabited exclusively by non-
Roma villagers, they would say: ‘There only live Slovaks’. In British cities, the self-referen-
tial uses of ‘Slovak’ were deployed not only in the context of interacting with institutions
but also vis-à-vis other collective identity categories, such as ‘Scots’ or ‘Pakistanis’ as well
as vis-à-vis other Roma groups from Romania or Bulgaria. When referring to Roma
migrants from Romania, Tarkovce Roma often used the national category of ‘Romanian’
(Rumun) rather than Romanian Roma.
Roma experience of encountering difference in British neighbourhoods often radically
re-negotiated the previously taken-for-granted racialised-by-colour stigmatisation. What
in the Slovak context appeared as fixed and naturalised within a well-established classifi-
catory matrix was suddenly exposed as contingent. The relational yardstick in terms of
local hierarchies of prejudice and stigma had shifted from a place where the Roma
mode of existence was racialised by darkness (intersecting with other factors) and they
were seen (and were aware of that perception) as the ultimate marginalised pariahs, to
a new place where they saw others as ‘dark(er)’ or as ‘blacks’ and where (in the symbolic
order of things) and they were no longer required to perceive themselves as the ultimate
culprits within the dominant gaze (or, at least now in Britain, they were not the only ones
to thus viewed).
Their categorisation of ‘being black’ also shifted in the British context, where Roma
used the category to refer to others whom they came to perceive as ‘black (person)’ (čer-
nochos or kalo in Romanes), ‘dark’ or ‘swarthy’. Thus, the omnipresent ‘darkness’ attached
to their skin colour in Slovakia transformed in a British context marked by a wide range of
racialised colour categories, and different shades of darkness. The Roma were not seen as
‘blacks’ and they themselves came to differentiate themselves from ‘blacks’. For example,
they used the adjective kalo (black) as a nickname for Ivan, a corrupt job agency manager,
believed to be originally from Cuba, who was in charge of recruiting and notifying regis-
tered workers about who was to work when and how often. Thus, the Roma did not use the
category of darkness in the same way as it was used in Slovakia with references to racialised
ascription. The category shifted and was deployed in referring to ‘Blacks’, while the adjec-
tive of ‘swarthy’ could suddenly be used for several different types of people, such as
‘Pakistani’. In this relational re-configuration of their structural position that accompanied
their relocation from Slovakia, they suddenly found themselves as ‘lighter’ and more white
then other groupings in their British destinations.8
This sense of possibility of not being fixed as ‘dark Gypsy’ did not mean that there were
no other racial hierarchies they encountered and were made aware of in their British
 JOURNAL OF ETHNIC AND MIGRATION STUDIES 11

destinations. For example, some Roma families warned me not to go out in the evenings as
this ‘might be dangerous,’ only to somehow teasingly add that ‘he can go out … one won’t
be able to tell if he’s Scottish or not anyway’. Their remark highlighted their perception
that while their darker colour might make them appear as non-Scottish and different,
my assumed ‘whiteness’ allowed me to pass as ‘Scottish’ and thus somehow afforded
me a safer position to an eastern European ‘foreigner’ on the streets of Glasgow. It
must be noted that, at least at the beginning, Roma migrants did not recognise these
forms of potential racialisation and danger as related to their stigmatised Gypsyness
and rather ascribed these to the perceived moral qualities of Scots as ‘crazy people’
(bešnelo nípos). It was only after several years that their everyday lives came to be stigma-
tised first on the basis of their assumed ‘East-European-ness’, ‘Slovak-ness’ and, later on,
their ‘Gypsyness’.
However, their relative ‘freedom’ from the racialised stigma of Gypsyness, expressed as:
‘Here they don’t care if you’re black, white, yellow or whoever … Here, you have a chance,’
proved to be relatively short-lived. Or, to be precise, it was not necessarily through the sig-
nificant connection of blackness and Gypsyness (as in Slovakia) but through a wide range
of other vectors of difference that the category of ‘Roma’/‘Gypsies’ came to emerge as ‘pro-
blematic’. For most Roma, the re-emergence of stigmatised Gypsyness in Britain was dis-
sociated from the racialised common-sense circumscribing their everyday modes of
existence in Slovakia. In other words, when Roma migrants started to note the fact that
‘they (UK institutions and dominant groups) already know that we’re Roma’, it was
seen as having to do less with skin colour and more with other factors contributing to
their negative visibility. This was further emphasised by the alternative assertion that:
‘they (Scots, English) do not want Slovaks any more’, in which they included Roma and
non-Roma Slovaks alike.

Circulating flows, migrating racialisations

The last few years have witnessed a dynamic shift in Britain towards an intensification of
anti-Gypsy sentiments, accompanied by the increasing interest of ‘worried’ social and
community workers, as well as efforts by various activists and academics to counter nega-
tive representations of ‘Roma’. This process of differentiation of Roma/Gypsy migrants
from other Eastern Europeans, other Slovaks and other ‘non-natives’ has frequently
come to be framed alongside an alleged (racialised-cum-culturalised) ‘incompatibility’
with dominant norms. This emergence of negative visibility has often coincided with
the arrival of Romanian and Bulgarian Roma (and non-Roma) migrants, as well as
increasing media attention, local and transnational forms of social/community work
and activism and a generally growing production of knowledge stemming from various
intra-European forms of governing, managing, exploring and targeting the ‘Roma’
(almost unanimously circumscribed as ‘problematic’). Through the movement of migrants
but also through the emerging networks, expertise and technologies, the ‘Roma migrants’
has become an object of interest but also subjects to be governed.
Similarly to what Andersson (2014) has called the ‘illegality industry’ in his study of
border regimes, mechanisms and institutions that manage migrants attempting to cross
the Mediterranean sea to Europe, there is a growing body of interconnected institutions
and actors who have contributed to the development of what can be called ‘Roma
12 J. GRILL

migrants’ industry’. Andersson’s work maps out ‘how clandestine migration has been con-
stituted as a field of intervention and knowledge gathering in the past decades’ (2014, 12).
In his ‘extended field site’ ethnography he turns our analytical attention to agents, insti-
tutions and technologies who are participating and producing this ‘system’ that turns
‘clandestine migrants’ into observable and controllable. In the case of Roma, similar insti-
tutions, actors and technologies of governance operate on various scales and cutting across
national, international, local, regional, non-governmental or governmental lines. Through
the practices related to the production and circulation of knowledge, the so-called ‘Roma
problem’, as related to their mobility, is re-iterated and re-entrenched across European
and global spaces. This Roma-related industry is produced through everyday acts of
state and non-state actors such as social and aid workers, interpreters, police, politicians,
journalists, activists and academics. It also interlocks with particular policies and the pro-
liferation of media representations implicated in the re-bordering of Europe. In what
follows I will focus on how the circulating flows within this field of Roma migrants’ indus-
try contributes to the production, reproduction but also shifts in migrating racialisation.9
The production and circulation of knowledge about ‘Roma’ has developed in several
directions, levels and channels. In addition to encounters with these new migrants, new
forms of understanding of Roma emerged through media representations, but also
through the travels of variously situated ‘workers’ (and/or ‘experts’) as part of various
‘Roma-integration’ projects. All these contributed to the circulation of forms of knowledge
wherein particular representations of Roma migrants came to be produced, intertwined or
moved alongside, other migrating racialisations. Various institutions forged transnational
projects of co-operation and forms of information exchange. These led to the circulation
of new ideas about who the ‘Roma migrants’ are and to a (frequently) reifying vision of the
‘Roma culture’ or ‘traditional ways’ that these migrants supposedly bring with them to
Britain, with no consideration of the wide range of differences among Roma, as well as
the ways in which these intersect with other vectors of difference (class, gender, urban/
rural background and regional differentiation). In many urban areas of Britain, ‘Roma’
difference was foregrounded and their mode of existence became marked by classificatory
struggles re-inscribing particular racial, ‘ethnic’ or ‘culturalist’ visions – positive or nega-
tive – of Roma migrants.
Notably, it was not only through the impersonal representations of the mass media that
the wider British population started to develop particular representations about the Roma,
Eastern Europeans and the region. These representations were coloured by encounters
with newly arriving migrants, experiences of travelling to the eastern European countries,
but also other dispositions accumulated over time through interaction with other ‘min-
orities’ and migrants, or knowledge about Gypsy and Traveller groups. In August 2008,
I was talking to Gareth, one of the local police officers in Glasgow who had developed par-
ticular understanding and reputation among his colleagues for working with Eastern
European migrants and with Roma in particular. He first encountered the Roma migrants
back in 2004. As he remarked, for most people: ‘They were all Eastern Europeans, what-
ever background!’ When I asked him if he knew back then that they were ‘Roma’, he
replied:
Yeah … My first involvement with them, straight away was [in 2004] … I kind of did know
… I did know that they were Roma. When you look and you see Czech people, Slovak people
 JOURNAL OF ETHNIC AND MIGRATION STUDIES 13

and they are very similar. Roma are totally different caste. So, straight away you think: ‘Ok,
there is something different that needs to be said. … I don’t know where to find out but
somebody needs know that’

He then started to research about them in order to ‘understand … where they came from.’
Interestingly, only few minutes later he described more closely these first encounters. It
was also around that time when he met Khamil, a lecturer specialising in linguistics
and Central European and Russian Studies at one of the local universities. Gareth recalled:
He’s a very interesting man. He did couple of translations for me. Gave me a bit of back-
ground. And he put me in touch with Johana. Johana was Slovakian. … I met Johana and
she was the key … gave me more information about what kind of background this commu-
nity has, what kind of community [it is] …

Gareth’s understanding and knowledge stemmed from various experiences with different
‘communities’ of migrants, his own ‘research’ but it was also crucially shaped and
informed by these encounters with an academic specialist in Slavic languages and cultures
and a young, non-Roma Slovak migrant who was studying and working in Glasgow at that
time. Gareth drew on these encounters and his experiences over the years to understand
and explain Roma migrants and what he described as ‘the social issues’ and ‘problems’
they encountered in UK:
Like Gypsies and Travelers [in UK] … they moved around and this community is exactly the
same. So they are never at one place for too long. So, it’s very difficult to address, you know,
the kind of social issues that are there … there are not sending kids to school … it’s a bit frus-
trating. [They are] saying that they don’t have money for school uniform [sigh] … so, you
know they always search for excuses.

Rather than considering other factors for their frequent moves between flats, neighbour-
hoods, British cities and their Slovakian homes, Gareth drew an explicit culturalist connec-
tion to British Gypsies and Travellers in order to explain what he saw as problematic. He
also seemed to make a difference between attitudes of Roma migrants and other non-
Roma migrants (who were seen as being more willing to learn and to integrate): ‘I
don’t know if they [Roma] realize … [but] if they don’t learn the language skills … and
then you see the Polish migrants.’
Gareth was one of the first state agents who started to be interested and to work with
Roma migrants. However, there have been a rapidly growing number of various social and
community workers, journalists, academics and policy makers coming into contact with
migrants and starting to recognise them as ‘Roma/Gypsies’ (and not as ‘Slovaks’ or
‘Czechs’, as most of the migrants identified initially vis-à-vis the institutional actors).
As I have argued elsewhere (Grill 2012b), this new modes of recognition have emerged
mainly thanks to differentiations and acts of ‘cultural translation’ by non-Roma migrants
from Eastern Europe. Some social and health workers came to know Roma migrants only
through the ‘interpretative assistance’ of other non-Roma migrants from Eastern Europe
who were actively attempting to claim their own belonging and affinity with civilised
whiteness and European-ness by differentiating themselves from Roma/Gypsies (Grill
2012b; Fox and Morosanu 2013; cf. Humphris 2017; cf. Ignatiev 1995).
The layers and modes of understanding Roma migrants’ ‘difference’ emerged through a
growing number of channels of knowledge circulating through various projects and train-
ing programmes at the national and European institutional levels. As part of these
14 J. GRILL

international collaborations, some British police officers, social workers and ‘researchers-
cum-experts’ were given the opportunity to travel to other European countries to gain
first-hand experience abroad and to exchange knowledge about their work with ‘Roma’
in Britain with their Eastern European counterparts. These encounters usually consisted
of workshops where local political representatives, state workers and NGOs presented
their work with the ‘Roma/Gypsies’. Additionally, the visitors were taken on ‘field’ trips
to see the ‘the Roma’. This example of learning about ‘the Roma issue’ in eastern European
contexts is telling. As Peter, one British community worker who had participated in these
trips recalled, one of his strongest reactions was the ‘shocking living conditions’ and
‘poverty in which Roma lived’ but also the ‘level of institutional racism’ in Slovakia (cf.
Grill 2012b). These impressions only confirmed to him that the Roma migrants had
come to Britain in search of better lives and fortified his commitment to ensure that
Roma migrants were not exposed to the same racism and discrimination in Britain.
However, crucially, these short visits to particular localities in Slovakia, usually the
poorest ones, contributed to a kind of reasoning on the part of these social workers that
most migrants in Britain had come from conditions in which it is ‘normal’ to live in
extreme poverty (and, for that matter, where they were not familiar with certain ‘civilized’
habits, which are thought to be the norm in Britain). This process of normalisation then
served both to explain certain assumptions regarding how and why the Roma endured
poor living conditions in Britain but also served to reinforce the notion that their lives
in Britain were still incomparably better.
Based on their experiences with Roma migrants as well as their trips to various work-
shops, both frequently mediated by the linguistic and ‘cultural’ translation of non-Roma
interpreters (or by Roma of higher social status who had been inculcated with a particular
‘NGO culture’), these workers developed particular hybrid understandings of Roma,
which often included naturalised ideas about their difference derived from their
‘pariah-like’ status of oppressed minority and/or from their ‘culturalisation’ of difference.
These perceptions too reflected and refracted the particular hierarchies and symbolic vio-
lence formed in the present and historical British contexts. The culturalisation of differ-
ence by state and NGO workers was often expressed with reference to ‘traditional’ ways
(regarding gender roles, preferences for certain types of jobs, etc.) and frequently
slipped into essentialising ‘the Roma’. Roma migrants have come to be constructed as a
‘hard to reach community’ (cf. Sime, Fassetta, and McClung 2014, 37). For instance,
one report identifies the ‘influence of traditions’, such as a perceived cultural preference
for short-term jobs, as preventing some Roma from enhancing their employment pro-
spects and integration (Zabiega 2013).
This ‘culturalisation of difference’ must be situated within a wider shift in Britain’s
modes of governing intercultural and racial relationships (see e.g. Gilroy 2012), as well
as local configurations of the ‘biopolitics of Otherness’ (Fassin 2001). Long-term state
and NGO workers encountering Roma were often drawing on their previous experiences
of working with other minority ‘communities’, and moving between recognition of ‘suf-
fering’ and/or ‘racialised’ bodies. Reflecting this logic, ‘the Roma’ were seen relationally
vis-à-vis the already ‘older’ and established minorities (such as ‘Pakistani’) as well as
more recent migrants who were viewed as ‘trying (to integrate) harder’. Thus, at a
meeting in one of the local schools, one teacher asked: ‘But why is it that there are no pro-
blems with the Polish kids?’ By bringing together the particular ‘biopolitics of Otherness’
 JOURNAL OF ETHNIC AND MIGRATION STUDIES 15

(Fassin 2001) permeating the everyday lives of migrants, with the ways in which symbolic
violence operates both among the dominated and dominant, one can trace mechanisms
through which many institutional agents became complicit in the re-racialisation of
Roma through ambiguous modes of oscillation – simultaneously between acts of com-
passion and sympathy, and efforts towards ordering and the ‘management of integration’.

‘Found’ in translation and media flows

When analysing the making of ‘Roma’ difference, a range of discourses and institutions
entangle and produce various racialised representations of Roma migrants across Europe.
Here I will bring under one analytical domain the circulation of particular media represen-
tations of Roma migrants in Slovakia to and from ways in which British media represented
‘Eastern European’ migrants in general (see Fox, Morosanu, and Szilassy 2012) and Roma
migrants in particular (Clark and Campbell 2000; Clark 2014; Richardson 2014).
The racialising vision embedded in the categories and classificatory matrices in Slovakia,
but also animated by British-produced figures, can be found in Slovak media representations
and their circulations. For instance, one can detect a similar logic in the representations pro-
duced and circulated via media reporting about Slovaks and/or Slovak Roma migrants. When
a British TV channel broadcast a report in 2008 entitled ‘Gangs milked benefits system’,10 it
claimed to have ‘uncovered widespread organised crime’ perpetrated ‘by Eastern European
gangs around Britain.’ This news were taken over, translated and reinterpreted in the
Czech and Slovak media. In the Czech and Slovak media, however, the report was translated
in racialised terms. It reads: ‘Roma from Slovakia and the Czech Republic … are extensively
abusing the social welfare system of Great Britain, as well as their own fellow citizens for slave
work.’11 (my translation). Unlike the original report, which used the category of ‘Eastern Eur-
opeans’, all the stories published in the Czech Republic and in Slovakia automatically ‘trans-
lated’ this as ‘Roma gangs’. This is an example of the logic of racial common sense (Wacquant
1997; cf. Hage 2000) in which ‘gang(ma)sters’ with darker complexions are automatically
constructed as Roma.’
These images of ‘the Roma’ circulating between the international, national and regional
media contributed to producing and reproducing particular representations. In addition to
other channels,12 the Slovak and Czech domestic media contributed to this production of
difference by incorporating these ‘migrating racialisations’ – one could label them as
‘returning’ ones – through their re-interpretation and re-incorporation into the racial
scheme embedded within Slovak-specific constructions of Roma/Gypsy difference. With
the rapid increase in the use of social media networks, these images rapidly circulated.
Roma migrants used Facebook on a massive scale and despite using it mainly as a way
of maintaining their intensive sociability across transnational fields, they also started to
re-post and to discuss newspaper articles (mostly from the Czech and Slovak media).
This represented a radical shift in contrast to their earlier, relatively low level of awareness
about external media categorisations of them.

Conclusion
In the summer 2013 I met with a friend spending his ‘holiday’ in Slovakia – Belka, a
middle-aged Roma man who had spent the previous eight years in several cities in
16 J. GRILL

the British Midlands. When the discussion turned to the question of racism in Slovakia,
he pointed out that this might be due to the fact that the Slovaks are ‘backward people’
(zaostalo nípos). In deploying his experiences with multicultural Britain as a backdrop,
Belka asserted the latter’s superiority in relation to what he now perceived to be Slovakia
as a ‘backward country’. But though this new category of perception was derived from
the new re-adjustment and relational knowledge acquired through his exposure to the
new social fields and formations in Britain, it also reflected a certain refraction of the
old racialised dispositions in Slovakia propelling him to see the dominant Slovaks as
having ‘harder hearts’. This popular racial distinction and fantasy was frequently
evoked in naturalised terms as the taken-for-granted difference between ‘Slovaks’ and
‘Roma’. While this distinction remained durable and stable, however, it was re-articu-
lated in light of the particular trajectory of this transnational Roma migrant in
Britain. In the case of Roma migrants like Belka, many re-adjusted their dispositions
in relation to their movement, oscillating between Slovakia and Britain. When Roma
migrants moved to Britain, they initially encountered a space in which they could
escape the racialised stigma of Gypsyness closely associated with their ‘darkness’. This
vignette highlights how recent migratory experiences contribute towards a re-configur-
ation of forms of racialisation and thereby challenge the hegemonic national order of
things in Slovakia.
In Slovakia today, race continues to operate as a particular modality, as a principle of
vision and division and ‘collective fiction’ (Wacquant 1989, 15; 1997, 222) with respect to
Roma. While race continues to be significant, it is in no way the only determinant of one’s
symbolic and material positioning and it articulates itself in different blended modalities at
the intersection of class, gender, or ethno-national markers of difference. In Europe today,
one can observe the continuous significance of race that can be seen in various modalities
and definitions ranging from ‘cultural racism’ and neo-racism (Balibar 1991) to a racism
assuming inheritable ‘biological’ differences inscribed onto individual bodies and re-
inscribing racially tinged categorisations. By tracing migrating racialisations through the
movement of particular migrants, as well as examining knowledge-producing practices
and the circulation of certain representations, this paper has empirically explored how
these different modalities intersected and transfigured in the case of Tarkovce Roma in
a transnational field stretching between Slovakia and Britain. Drawing on Goldberg’s
analytical call for the study of race and racism (2009), my account moves away from
racial comparisons, revolving around contrasting analogies, towards differentiated
account of relational racisms. Using ‘relationality as a method’ allows for the tracing of
racial connections between different historical state formations, regional racialisation as
well as the (re)production of relational ties across geographies and temporalities (Goldberg
2009, 1280–1281).
This paper has examined the production, reproduction and movement of particular
forms of racialisation across European space. By characterising these processes as
‘migrating racialisations’ I have shown how their previously acquired dispositions
propel migrants to act and classify differences in particular ways and reproduce embodied
distinctions in the new settings. At the same time, these dispositions were transfigured in
the process of re-adjusting to the new conditions encountered on migrant journeys and
newly entered social fields. This paper examined the particular historical development
of ‘race’ in relation to Roma in Slovakia, and by following movements of people, as well
 JOURNAL OF ETHNIC AND MIGRATION STUDIES 17

as particular configurations of racialisation, which moved through migrants’ bodies but

also through the circulation of discourses and governing apparatuses across Europe.

Notes
1. The phrase ‘black Gypsy’ was almost unanimously articulated in Slovak and reflected the
power asymmetries underlying it as well as its directionality as something ascribed externally
upon the ‘Roma’.
2. Due to the focus of this article I do not address questions of gender or age, which significantly
intersect with race, ethnicity and class differentiations.
3. Most of the migrants’ networks came from the relatively large village of Tarkovce and its sur-
roundings, but also included Roma friends and relatives from other east Slovak localities,
urban areas of the Czech Republic and several cities in Great Britain. After living in Tarkovce
for a year, I followed the Roma migratory pathways to urban areas in the UK (and back) as I
accompanied family networks circulating between these locations. The author has changed
all names.
4. Despite the continuing racialisation and patronising practices embraced by many white
Czechs and Slovaks towards the ‘Vietnamese’ today, their second and third generations
are paradoxically often held up as an example (in contrast to the ‘Gypsies’) of a group
that is seen to be hard-working, docile and ‘less’ problematic.
5. Similarly, Fanon’s seminal work characterises these processes as ‘internalised racism’ (Fanon
1967; cf. Desmond and Emirbayer 2009).
6. Being seen as ‘swarthy’ (počarovná) entailed having darker eyes and hair. For non-Roma
Slovaks it was connected to a sexualised fantasy about dangerously seductive and attractive
Gypsy women and men with enchanting eyes capable of bewitching your desires. The word
počarovná has been used in eastern Slovakian variants of the Slovak and Romani languages
alike.
7. According to Hajská and Poduška (2003), this distinction was strictly deployed as a marker of
sub-ethnic distinctions between the Vlach Roma who saw themselves as ‘whiter’ than the
‘black’ Slovak Roma.
8. De Genova (2005, 167–209) describes similar processes of shifting re-racialisation among the
Latino workers of Chicago factories and their uses of irony and racialised slurs of laziness
within a space of negotiation constituted between ‘Americans’ and ‘Blacks’.
9. It is beyond the scope of this article to dissect the complex mechanisms and workings of this
‘Roma migrants’ industry’ in greater detail.
10. http://www.channel4.com/news/articles/society/gangs±milk±benefits±system/2667292.
Accessed on October 28, 2008.
11. http://aktualne.atlas.sk/falosne-deti-a-otroci-romske-gangy-zneuzivaju-aj-slovakov/zahrani-
cie/europa/. Accessed November 10, 2008.
12. Other channels include ‘travelling activism’ and the Europeanisation of ‘the Roma problem’
in international and national political spheres, as well as activism and social scientific
accounts, as discussed by van Baar (2011; 2013).

Acknowledgements
I would like to express my sincere gratitude to the families who have hosted me during my field-
work, and to the many people who have allow me to enter their everyday journeys and to share their
stories over the last decade. I am grateful to Can Yildiz, Nicholas de Genova, Rachel Humphris,
Beatriz Aragón, Aidan McGarry, Giovanni Picker, Daniela Castellanos, Stef Jansen, Madeleine
Reeves and Peter Wade for comments on early drafts of this paper, and to the feedback I received
from seminars and workshop participants in Buxton and in Stockholm for their helpful questions
and recommendations. I am very grateful to the JEMS editors and to three anonymous reviewers for
their feedback.
18 J. GRILL

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Funding
This work was supported by Economic and Social Research Council; Simon Research Fellowship,
University of Manchester; Wenner-Gren Foundation: [Dissertation Fieldwork Grant].

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