Gypsy Leader Teaches Courses Debunking the Myths About His People

Some students show up for Ian Hancock’s class barefoot, wearing beads and bandannas. He hates it when they they do that.

“I get rid of that real quick,” said Hancock, who for 10 years has taught Gypsy culture and language at the University of Texas.

The students’ attempts at Gypsy fashion perpetuate myths that underlie hatred of Gypsies, Hancock said.

The hatred, he said, caused Gypsies to be enslaved for hundreds of years in Romania and other countries. During World War II, they were almost wiped out by Nazis.

Prejudices were carried over to the United States in laws designed to keep Gypsies on the move, ironically fulfilling the stereotype of nomadic bands, he said.

Discrimination has increased recently in Eastern Europe, where new freedoms have been accompanied by old hatreds and Gypsies once again are the target of violence, said Hancock, who was recently elected head of an international Gypsy organization.

“The biggest shock for students is to learn the extent of the prejudice,” he said. “But, once you’ve been made aware of it, you start seeing it. Hardly a day will go by without hearing the word Gypsy mentioned in a song or on a television program.

“Somebody’s always talking about gypping somebody. It’s that association with fraud. It’s always either romanticized or insulting. Either way, we’re not seen as real people.”

Hancock, 47, recalls the scorn of non-Gypsies he felt while growing up in Britain. His family was directed to the back doors of pubs after they had been in the fields all day harvesting hops.

Hancock’s father was taken away from his parents because they were Gypsies and was put in government care at age 7, Hancock said.

“For any Gypsy, you are pretty well taught to hide your ethnicity in the outside world because it just invites problems,” he said.

Two things triggered Hancock’s determination to struggle openly against discrimination.

As a young man, he was denied entry to Canada for a visit. The official reason, he said, was his Gypsy heritage.

Then in 1969 he was horrified by news accounts of an English Gypsy woman whose home was bulldozed while she was giving birth. That child and her three other children were killed in the demolition.

Gypsies, who prefer to be called Roma, are believed to have migrated from India to Europe more than 1,000 years ago. They number about 12 million throughout the world, about 1 million in the United States.

Their language, Romani, is a Sanskrit dialect influenced by the languages of countries in which they have lived.

Hancock’s class, offered by the university’s Linguistics Department, combines language and cultural studies. He teaches about 30 undergraduates and a handful of graduate students each semester.

The courses cover Gypsy traditions such as reluctance to marry non-Gypsies and their rules for food preparation, similar to the Jewish kosher requirements.

But course work also covers the prejudices that Hancock said have shaped the insular culture.

“They were horribly oppressed and they are discriminated against today,” said Michelle Hilton, a 21-year-old government major from Houston who signed up for Hancock’s class thinking it would be an easy elective credit.

Instead, it was an eye-opener, she said.

Before, she said, “I didn’t even know they were a race of people. I thought they were a people who preferred not to work and had a carefree, fun-loving life.”

Hilton discovered firsthand the myths Hancock tries to debunk. When doing research for a paper, she interviewed Austin police detectives who told her they dealt with Gypsies involved in car-theft rings and fraud rackets.

“The police officer said Gypsy culture is that they are thieves and they are proud of that fact. They’re raised to steal,” she said.

Although he dropped out of school at 14, Hancock was enrolled at the University of London as part of an experimental program.

He had caught the attention of a professor who was impressed by his independent studies on West African languages. In his spare time away from his factory job, Hancock was taking notes on West African languages from neighbors in his building.

He eventually received a doctoral degree, taught in the West Indies and arrived in Austin in 1972.

A few years later, Hancock, the late actor Yul Brynner and other Roma representatives helped Gypsies win recognition at the United Nations.

In the Fourth World Romani Congress held this spring in Warsaw, Poland, Hancock was elected head of the Romani Union, which is composed of national Gypsy leaders.

His fight against discrimination continues.

Nearly two decades after joining the University of Texas, Hancock said he still finds people there uncomfortable about Gypsies.

“There are colleagues of mine that are very nervous, they’re not sure of how to deal with me,” he said. “One of them asked me if it were really true that Gypsy girls had very loose morals. One asked me how long I’ve been in jail.”

To protect themselves, Gypsies exploit the stereotype, he said.

“If people want to believe that we’re magic and can curse people . . . if that stops them from hurting us, then we’re going to do it,” he said.

Most anti-Gypsy laws in the United States were repealed by 1984, thanks to the lobbying efforts of Gypsy families, according to Ruth Andersen of Austin, who has done extensive research on the subject.

But oppression continues in Eastern Europe, Hancock said.

Gypsies were the target of Romanian miners who rampaged through Bucharest in early June. In Czechoslovakia, Hancock said, Gypsies are being forcibly sterilized. Political rhetoric and popular songs in many Eastern European countries advocate violence against Gypsies, he said.