Gypsy weddings and America’s fundamental rejection of racism
Lessons learned while watching YouTube videos about American gypsy culture.
Yesterday was the last day of my daughter’s visit. It was also my second Pfizer shot which left me not sick but completely exhausted. (Long story as to why I decided to get it but it was a carefully thought-out decision.) It was also a house painting day, something that needed to be redone after a water leak, with me adding on some painting to get rid of a wall color I hated. The entire house has been swathed in plastic and dust for three days. The combined effect of all of that was that my daughter and I spent the evening hunkered on her bed watching girly videos on YouTube.
At some point, we insensibly moved from watching Say Yes To The Dress videos to watching videos about Gypsy culture in America. Apparently, there’s a whole genre of reality shows that track American Gypsy life. The main focus seems to be the wedding and party dresses that the gypsy girls wear. They are something else.
The show is also a look into a culture that is unlike anything my daughter and I have seen before. Gypsy’s are very tight-knit and marriage is the central feature of young women’s life. In one episode, the 15-year-old girl was secretly seeing a non-gypsy (“gorger”) boy. Her mother was horrified that she would marry outside of their race:
To my daughter, an American who had her ideas about race in place before Black Lives Matter reached its apex, the idea of marrying within a race was bizarre. She truly is a “content of character” person.
She was rather shocked when I told her that racism has been intrinsic in all societies since the dawn of time. It is a way to keep valued traditions alive and to keep the tribe viable. Early tribal societies were miserable, with incredibly high attrition rates from disease, accidents, and war. The only way to keep the tribe members intact, lest they think the grass was greener where the other tribe lived, was to convince them that the other tribe was inferior down to the bone.
It’s only in America that we are organized around values, rather than race. That doesn’t mean we haven’t had racism and racists. (Duh! It’s our early experiment with racism that planted the seed that Marxists have nurtured into the poisonous fruit destroying us now.) It does mean, though, that as racism mercifully mostly disappeared and racists became the marginalized people (until Obama and BLM came along), America had another unifying principle to hang onto: The Constitution and our belief in the good things that flow from adherence to that doctrine.
The Black Lives Matter movement, with its obsession with race and its hatred for the Constitution, is leeching from America the only thing that made us American. Unless we stop these racial obsessions and the drift to racial tribalism, America as a nation will cease to exist.
I know I’m stating the obvious, but you all know about my belief that we reach people best by plugging our values into the things that matter to them, that interest them, or that allow them to see things in a different way. For my daughter, watching a gypsy mother obsess, not about culture and values, but about racial bloodlines, was a huge eye-opener to the single most important thing that had set America apart.
For more than two-and-a-half centuries, being an American didn’t mean being born here or being a specific genetic type. It simply meant embracing the Constitution and the nation. Again, that doesn’t mean there wasn’t racism; it just means that America and Americans had the tools to rise above racism. We must fight back, demanding a colorblind society organized around constitutional values, or all will be lost.
IMAGE: YouTube screengrab.
