Romani Epistemic Resistance beyond White Fragility: Decolonial Refusal in a Workshop on Romani Genocide

Abstract

This article critically engages with racialized epistemic structures that pretend to “include” Romani voices while simultaneously colonise, extract, and discipline them. Based on my lived experience in 2025 as co-trainer in a workshop on Romani genocide, I delve into the attitude of a “White” historian who perpetrated epistemic violence (Spivak 1988) by controlling the narrative, essentialising and Orientalising Romaniness, silencing Romani epistemologies, ignoring first-hand Romani family histories, and ignoring ongoing systemic biopolitical violence against Roma in Europe. This article has three aims: (1) to show that Romani epistemic sovereignty acts as a refusal to the colonial “neutrality of academia; (2) to show that so-called institutional “inclusion” is, more often than not, containment through Orientalism, neo-colonial forms of knowledge production (Trehan and Kóczé 2011) and White fragility (DiAngelo 2018); and (3) to show that acts of refusal by Romani people constitute decolonial resistance. Therefore, intertwining my lived experience with critical theory, I suggest that Romani knowledge is a theory, a method, and a decolonial intervention in and of itself. This is a call for epistemic justice and, at the same time, an assertion that Romani subalterns have spoken.