Notes Notes on scientific racism

Acton noted in 2016 article titled, Scientific racism, popular racism and the discourse of the Gypsy Lore
Society. He analyses in detail the connection of scientific racism, the Holocaust and the Gypsy Lore Society
as moral question.1

But I would argue that we can only do so successfully, if we have a clear understanding of racism
as a scientific mistake that anybody might make in context, even though, as it happened, it formed
a terrible part of the legitimation of various acts of oppression and genocide and facilitated various
forms of scapegoating, many of which continue, even if the overt form of their legitimation has
changed. The danger of broadening the definition of racism, is that the definition itself becomes
fluid and contested, and the debate, over whether or not a particular form of oppression is racist,
replaces the debate over whether that form of oppression is in itself right or wrong. When that
happens, the discourse of anti-racism itself can become the justification of oppression of minorities.
Acton (2016), p.1191

Following the structure of Acton (2016) I have looked at some similarities in the Romanian scientific
racism. To analyses this, I chose to look at the most comprehensive examination of the opinions from
eugenicists on Roma; and I tried to extend some of my considerations beyond the confines of intellectual
history to incorporate the impact of opinion makers (academics)on policymaking over the time. The old
and new perspectives that have emerged from scholarship provided by different schools, engaged
researchers in the ’Roma problem’2 and the potential to broaden the entire research agenda by bringing to
the table some dominions of experience that have previously been ignored by researchers and policy
makers.

My argument here is that such reconstruction of Roma problematization in the research have been cyclical
and can take place only if it was combined with the structures of power which could translate the ‘science’
into polices. In other words, the production of knowledge supported the politics, and influenced the policies
towards Roma and other adjacent agendas.

1. Romanian social scientists of the interwar period, among them anthropologists, ethnographers,
demographers, healthcare professionals, and eugenicists, developed a discourse that moved the
government in the direction of more active social engineering, in particular in the sphere of what
they called “population policy.”3 This included improvement of public health4, the promotion of
population growth, and changing the ethnic composition of the population by means of migration
control and population exchange with neighboring countries.5 The adepts of eugenics, biopolitics,

1
Thomas A. Acton (2016) Scientific racism, popular racism and the discourse of the Gypsy Lore Society, Ethnic and
Racial Studies, 39:7, 1187-1204, DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2015.1105988.
2
Benjamin Thorne, 2011, Assimilation, invisibility, and the eugenic turn in the “Gypsy question” in Romanian
society, 1938–1942, Romani Studies 5, Vol. 21, No. 2 (2011), 177–206 issn 1528–0748 (print) 1757–2274 (online)
doi: 10.3828/rs.2011.8
3
Irina Livezeanu, Cultural Politics in Greater Romania: Regionalism, Nation Building, and Ethnic Struggle, 1918–
1930 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 7–10. As Livezeanu demonstrates, during the interwar period
ethnic/cultural heterogeneity was seen by Romanian elites as the central political problem.
4
Typhus emphysema 1940 provided the first opportunity to begin the separation of Roma and arguing that nomads
posed a danger to national health, gendarmes and health officials collaborated in placing them in labor camps
located within Romania.
5
Vladimir Solonari 2009 Purifying the Nation: Population Exchange and Ethnic Cleansing in Nazi-Allied Romania.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center.
 and racial science, such as Iuliu Moldovan, Traian Herseni, Iordache Făcăoaru, Gheorghe Facaoaru,
and Sabin Manuilă, promoted theories targeting non-European minorities who allegedly
represented “a bio-ethnic and racial threat” to the Romanian nation. Romanization at its core, this
revolves around their assimilation and re-education in terms of the dominant society and not around
their values and potential for development.

2. The anthropologist assigned to conduct research in Roma was the director of the bio-
anthropological section of the Central Institute of Statistics, Iordache Făcăoaru6, with his wife Tilly
as assistant. The importance of the Central Institute of Statistics within the new biopolitical context
of the early 1940s is illustrated by the national census it organized in 1941. An impressive number
of 150 specialists were involved in this activity. The research in Transnistria was part of this
statistical mapping, the ultimate goal of which was to establish this region's ethnic composition in
an orderly and regulated manner7.

3. I would illustrate how education of Roma has been scientifically problematized and then
implemented as the scientist had kept advisory and executive positions in the state structures. The
construction of the ‘objects of education’ which remained even today8 was then exclusively deficit-
oriented and according to I. Facaoaru, ‘not capable of being brought up and educated’ as the
Romanian peasant children. Făcăoaru, was a sociologist who began his career at the Institute of
Hygiene in Cluj, before working as an advisor under both the national Legionary State and
Antonescu’s dictatorship. All the above-mentioned scientist held different position in the academia,
research institutes (state funded) and ministerial or advising positions.

Romanian problematization from the point of view of research is kind of vicious circle. Neither
Sabin Manuila nor Iuliu Moldovan or any other employees of the Institute of Hygiene in Cluj or
Iasi, were found guilty by the court. As far as I have been able to determine, no ideologist
individual who had been involved in the persecution and extermination of the Roma was ever
condemned for their actions in the context of legal court proceedings.

4. The ideas of the race scientists continued to operate in the thoughts and actions of the post-war
Romania. Manuila9, Herseni, Ralea, who used racialized arguments, came to be considered ‘experts’
on Roma and advised state and administrative authorities as well as socio-educational offices, police.
Although the post-war period, which became established in the university system towards the end of
the 1960s, abandoned the eugenic paradigm, they still furthered the dichotomizing and homogenizing
notions Roma and portrayed them as anti-bourgeois social dropouts. In this context, these thus imagined
the exclusion of Roma from the state educational system as a mode of the culture of resistance (Münzel
and Streck 1981). ‘asocial’ lifestyle. Beyond the breaking of bourgeois norms, Streck associated this
lifestyle with a lack of intelligence as well as illiteracy (Opfermann 2015).

See also Bucur, Maria 2001 Eugenics and Modernization in Interwar Romania . University of Pittsburgh Press,
Pittsburgh.
6
Representative are the following works by Făcăoaru: Curs de eugenie (Cluj: Institutul de igienă şi igienă socială
1935); Criteriile pentru diagnoza rasială (Cluj: Tipografia Universală 1936); Din problematica şi metodologia
cercetărilor eugenice şi genetice în cadrul monografiei sociologice (Bucharest: Institutul Social Român 1937); and
Structura rasială a populaţiei rurale din România (Bucharest: F. Göbl 1940).
7
See also Ion I. Nistor, Aspecte geopolitice şi culturale din Transnistria (Bucharest: Monitorul official şi
imprimeriile statului 1942). Call Bogdan Chiriac- sa reverific sursa.
8
See special schools polices.
9
Manuila had presented at UNESCO in sixties scientific papers.
 5. In the late 1970s, and 80s10 as a generation of socially engaged researchers emerged and an evolving
international circle of Roma activists began to embrace academic arguments to support their new
nation-building project, the established research tradition on Roma came under critical scrutiny.
The quest for knowledge came to be regarded by some as intrinsically serving the cause of
population problem and public health matter. Mobilization of research in support of political system
came to be seen as morally superior to the plain commitment to provide rigorous descriptive
accounts11. Nicolae Gheorghe participated actively and initiated investigations or research
dedicated to the integration of Roma in Romania at a time when this subject was considered at least
uncomfortable. One of these studies takes place in 1975, looking at "aspects of social and cultural
integration of Roma" from several counties in Transylvania. Nicolae Gheorghe stresses how the
communists deliberately neglected the presence of the Roma – although the communists supported
promotility policies for other population they were concerned about the birth rate in Roma
communities. The sociologist notes the difference between data from the 1966 census and the study
initiated by militia in 1975.

6. The launch of new paradigms of Roma studies in the early 90 (a tradition that continues to this day)
and the resulting proliferation of high-quality publications and collaborative research projects in
Romani studies has meant that the scientific study of the Roma population. Problematization
remains as center of studies and searching for “Panacea for Integration” remained the driving force.
However, first who benefited were the westerns12 who not only benefited from the state of the art
studies and theorizing but that it has also had considerable input into shaping that theorizing in a
range of sub-fields including, political views abbot the Roma, policy development and planning of
social integration etc. And yet, in the development of Romani Studies, western European
scholarship and institutions have played a disproportionate role. Arguably, this has been a
consequence of the influence of the first generation of ethnographers of the Roma (Kaminski 1982;
Williams 1982; Okely 1983; Piasere 1985) with different relations with the old school of
gysposlorism school of anthropology.

The examples of Gypsolosrists13, who inspired the eugenics14, and not continued with studies from the
communist period work shows how racist knowledge was combined with interests of the local lead and
informed the polices of integration and practice, ad kept the agenda till our days. It shows how such
‘knowledge’ could deliver supposed scientific arguments for the different policies of, assimilation,
sedentarization and integration of Roma in the Romanian society over the time15. It is within such a frame
of reference that Roma have been defined as objects of education and upbringing for a century.

11
Michel Foucault (1977) - states to fight criminality, vagrancy, the mentally ill, homosexuals and others from the
eighteenth century onwards. The expansion of techniques to ‘document individual identity’, especially by the police,
and the developments in criminology. State policies to create a better race through positive and negative eugenic
legislation.
12
Julia Szalay 2010
13
Thomas A. Acton (2016) Scientific racism, popular racism and the discourse of the Gypsy Lore Society, Ethnic
and Racial Studies, 39:7, 1187-1204, DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2015.1105988. Acton is also arguing the contribution
of science to racism and is asking for more attention
14
Ion Chelcea, Ţiganii din România. Monografie etnografica (Bucharest: Editura Institutului Central de Statistică,
1944), pp. 100-101. Chelcea is dedicating good part of his theoretical framework to Eugene Pittard’s anthropology,
on Roma from Balkans and Romania.
15
Michel Foucault (1977)