One theme common to both Roma rights and civil rights is the role played by anti-integrationists and ethnonationalists, who argue that the nation and one particular ethnicity or race should be synonymous. These contingents within the majority populations oppose the two rights movements in order to maintain the status quo. During the Civil Rights movement, this camp insisted on preserving the “Southern way of life,” a racial stasis where “whites exercised power and blacks acquiesced.”

This book compares the rights and social inclusion of two racialized minority groups: Roma in Central and Southeast Europe (CSEE), and African Americans in the United States (U.S.), primarily in the American South. We couch those attempts loosely in the frameworks of Roma rights and civil rights, though we will focus mainly on Roma rights in post-Communist CSEE (from 1991 until the present) and civil rights during the U.S. Civil Rights movement (roughly 1954–1968).

In mainstream culture, the marginalization of African Americans and Roma is reinforced through sign systems, or associations between images and ideas. Stereotypes of both groups serve as signposts for an inability to become fully incorporated into the nation. This is hardly surprising: the prior Chapters of this book reveal how both groups have been excluded and marginalized for centuries, with weak recourse under law.

The paths of Roma and African Americans diverged sharply after World War II, when Europe was cleaved in half by the victors of the war. Western Europe allied itself with the U.S., embracing capitalism and democracy, while Eastern Europe – including CSEE, where the majority of the continent’s Roma lived – adopted Socialism and Communism. For both Roma and African Americans, the postwar years ushered in unparalleled gains, though under very different paradigms.

In the century after Reconstruction in the U.S., Jim Crow laws installed a caste system that tenaciously separated whites and “coloreds”; poll taxes, literacy tests, fraud, and intimidation suppressed the black vote; and peonage, chain gangs, and convict leasing conscripted African Americans and poor whites into hard labor. For Roma in Europe, the EU’s eastern enlargement failed to create genuine protections at the local and national levels.

For all the contested meanings of Europeanness, the EU projected a singular vision of Europe in its preparations for the fifth enlargement, which culminated in 2004. During that process, which began in the early 1990s, the EU imposed on the mostly Eastern and mostly post-Communist accession candidates a set of preconditions that included respect for and protection of minorities.

We first presented this project at Duke Law School in 2015. At the time, Barack Obama was ending his second term as President, and the U.S. had grown accustomed to seeing a person coded as “black” holding the country’s highest political office. Obama’s presidency seemed to hearken the unequivocal acceptance of African Americans into the cultural imaginary.

To properly contextualize Roma rights and explore the parallels with civil rights, we must first trace the history of Romani peoples in CSEE, a history that stretches back over a millennium. Scholars have studied the origins of the Roma as well as their paths into CSEE for centuries. For nearly as long, this scholarship has objectified, exoticized, and marginalized its very subjects – in short, replicating society’s exclusion of the Roma. To highlight and avoid these perils, we begin this Chapter by surveying how Romani studies as a field has evolved to a juncture that now facilitates broader structural comparisons with other minority groups.