Syndemic and systemic: the synergy of neoliberalism and neofascism

Part of a series discussing Romani Chronicles of Covid-19: Testimonies of Harm and Resilience, edited by Paloma Gay y Blasco and Martin Fotta (Berghahn: New York and Oxford, 2023).

Covid-19 is a pandemic that has to be approached as syndemic. This is what Yasar Abu Ghosh convincingly argues in this deeply disturbing and profoundly illuminating collective volume, Romani Chronicles of Covid-19: Testimonies of Harm and Resilience: “Despite the invocations of an unprecedented emergency, it is the pre-existing conditions that become actualized and magnified during the pandemic” (p. 250). This is true in epidemiological terms (interactions among diseases), but also in sociological ones (interactions with environmental factors). The reverse is equally true: antigypsyism has to be understood not only as a kind of ideological racism but also as a synergy of logics – not just race, but also class: the pandemic is but a symptom. This syndemic nature could actually be the very definition of systemic racism.

It is first and foremost about racial bigotry. The stigma of contagion had been attached to the Romani populations long before Covid-19. But prejudice is a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy: indeed, marginalized groups are exposed to health hazards. But this is not so much the cause of racism as its consequence. In France, for example, forcing migrant Romanies to live in slums near dumps, without either water or toilets, does create risks in terms of public health that are then invoked to justify their segregation. This is not merely a problem of hygiene. Dismantling shanty towns has often been justified in terms of public safety, following frequent fires; however, criminal arson has also been a frequent technique used to expel the Roma. Again, racism reverses causes and consequences.

This is the way it operates, by converting social and political issues into cultural ones. Anything that concerns the Roma can be attributed to their culture, which becomes their nature. To quote the book’s introduction, “policy makers, state representatives at all levels, and the media often approach Romanies through the master symbol of ‘Gypsyness’—as disorderly, primitive, willfully transgressive” (p. 8). The disease is supposed to affect them because of their lifestyle, be it kinship or religion: pop ethnology can thus serve to feed stereotypes. It is generally assumed that Romani culture is the obstacle to these children’s education. Their lack of schooling can be attributed to nomadism. The French Roma are thus categorized as “Gens du voyage,” regardless of their sedentary lives. Those from Romania and Bulgaria come from villages and towns: they are migrants – not nomads. What creates the confusion is that they are often on the road because local and national authorities will not allow them to stay anywhere. Expulsion has nothing to do with a nomadic culture; it is State-induced nomadism.

This conflation of biology and culture, bodily realities and social practices, is what defines race. Antigypsyism is no different from other kinds of racism – for example, as the chapters on Brazil make clear, against indigenous or black populations (part II, “Brazilian Chronicles”, chapters 7 to 12, pp. 91-144). In 2010, when president Nicolas Sarkozy launched an attack against the Roma, in his infamous Grenoble speech, a politician ironically quoted “a text message from a Muslim friend”: “After fifty years of good and loyal service, it is with great emotion, but also with a certain relief, that the French from the Maghreb, including myself, are very proud to officially hand over the baton to the Roma, as the scapegoats responsible for all of France’s ills.”[1] Muslims and migrants are structural equivalents of the Romani. In racist logic, all these “others” are synonymous.

However, I would argue that antigypsyism is not just one signifier among others; it is the paradigm of all racisms. It requires no justification: why bother to invoke women’s rights as a democratic pretext, as is often the case when targeting Muslims? Antigypsyism needs no excuse. Indeed, it is available to all, whether bourgeois or working-class, both for Whites and racial minorities. Compared to the Roma, everyone belongs, or at least can feel like belonging. All can commune against them as they embody the flip side of whiteness: exclusion. They provide the ultimate formulation of the opposition between “us” and “them.” In other words, antigypsyism is chemically pure, unadulterated racism.

But it is also, inseparably, the epitome of class. The Roma are relegated, not only spatially, but also economically: they are trapped in what can be called an underclass. Covid-19 just makes their situation worse, as they are deprived of the resources of an informal economy that is not acknowledged by public authorities. The quotation in the title of a chapter on Spain makes this clear: “Hunger will kill us if the virus does not” (Chapter 3: “‘Who cares…? Hunger will kill us if the virus does not.’ The COVID-19 pandemic in an informal settlement in Madrid”, by Beatriz Aragón Martín, pp. 59-68). 

This is why Romani populations are a paradigm not just for the treatment of racially segregated groups, such as exiles in the European Union, but also for the handling of economically marginalized ones, such as the homeless.

In fact, class and race can hardly be disaggregated. That is a difference with the racism that targets Blacks: while it does not spare the middle-class, class does make a difference. By contrast, the Roma are treated as if they all belonged to the underclass. They signify the radical racialization of class through poverty. This equation between class and race today puts the Roma issue at the intersection of two political regimes: neoliberalism and neofascism. Viktor Orbán’s Hungary is a case in point. It reminds us that racism should not be apprehended solely as social prejudice; it serves a political function. In a neoliberal logic, the Roma are discarded as that which has no value: they are considered economically useless. But in a neofascist one, they are useful precisely as that which can be rejected as worthless.

It is no wonder that several authors in the book refer to the concept of “necropolitics.” However, I wish to qualify this mobilization of Achille Mbembe’s conceptual framework in the case of the Roma. He is talking about murder and war. Necropolitics thus clearly applies to what is happening today in Ukraine or Gaza. But I have argued in a 2014 book that the “Roma question” can best be apprehended as a neoliberal variation on biopolitics. Foucault famously drew a distinction between sovereign power (to make die and let live) and biopower (to make live and let die). The Roma are not exposed to actual extermination. However, today’s political regimes render their lives unlivable: neofascist neoliberalism “may not make them die, but it won’t let them live.”[2]

So, are we doomed to despair? The situation is grim, and it gets worse. Those who endlessly fight for Roma rights, despite recurring defeats, first made me realize the risk of what I call “activist depression.” Could it be that there is no alternative after all? This is not just about the Roma. Is not the Left in general losing hope? This volume is somber, but what saves it from hopelessness is the presence of Romani voices who make themselves heard as political subjects, rather than mere objects of policies, as well as the enduring ideal of solidarity with non-Romani activists, social workers, and academics. Such a polyphony is definitely a political gesture. Indeed, these lights in darkness preserve the hope that fireflies may not disappear altogether.

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[1] Hervé Morin, minister of Defense, concluding speech of the summer meetings of the party he presided in La Grande-Motte (Hérault), August 29, 2010.

[2] Éric Fassin, « La question rom », in Éric Fassin et al., Roms & riverains. Une politique municipale de la race, La Fabrique, Paris, 2014, pp. 7-70, section entitled « Néolibéralisme et biopolitique », pp. 61-70, quote p. 70.

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References

Romani Chronicles of Covid-19. Testimonies of Harm and Resilience, ed. By Paloma Gay y Blasco and Martin Fotta, New York and Oxford, Berghahn, 2023.

Anne-Cécile Caseau, Le genre de la “question rom”. Migrantes roumaines en France, de la vulnérabilité sociale à la constitution de sujets politiques, Ph.D. dissertation in Political Science and Gender Studies, Université Paris 8, December 14, 2020.

Éric Fassin et al., Roms & riverains. Une politique municipale de la race, Paris, La Fabrique, 2014.

Éric Fassin, « Politiques de la (non-) représentation » in « Représentation et non-représentation des Roms en Espagne et en France », special issue co-edited with Marta Segarra, Sociétés & Représentations, 45, 2018 /1, pp. 9-27.

Paloma Gay y Blasco and Liria Hernández, Writing Friendship. A Reciprocal Ethnography, Cham, Switzerland, Palgrave MacMillan / Springer, 2020.