There is an extraordinary scene narrated by Ion Vianu in Amor intellectualis, a scene that I return to obsessively whenever I try to understand the complicated relationship between Romania and Roma identity. In a few seconds of anger, arrogance and lucidity, she manages to say more than dozens of reports, government strategies or conferences about inclusion.
In Capșa, in interwar Bucharest, Dan Barbilian – the great mathematician and poet known as Ion Barbu – is challenged in a discussion about his origins.
Someone challenges his Roma identity and tells him that he is actually Armenian. Barbilian stands up suddenly, strikes with his cane, and answers almost violently: “I came here as a slave, with the conquerors!”
It's a moment of deep pride.
It is one of those rare moments when a man completely refuses society's right to establish his identity.
Ion Barbu doesn't try to explain, he doesn't try to become more acceptable, he doesn't mitigate anything. He simply refuses to let anyone else decide who he is. Today, that scene seems almost impossible.
About Ilie Dumitrescu
I recently watched a video in which Pompiliu Popescu, the former doctor of the national football team, talked about Ilie Dumitrescu and about an almost invisible difficulty that the great football player carried throughout his youth.
The national doctor recounted that Dumitrescu “had an internal struggle of his own, a whole struggle of his youth with himself to change his condition” and that “his Roma condition hung very heavily on his mentality to change it, to deny it, to always become something else”.
Dumitrescu was one of the great footballers of the Golden Generation. He played at Steaua, at Tottenham Hotspur, at West Ham United. He scored against Argentina after probably the most beautiful phase of collective play in the history of our football.
And yet, for years, he fought with what Pompiliu Popescu was telling, with a condition that is part of being human, not some guilt.
There are many other examples of great personalities. Some of them I will relate in this article.
But let's go back a bit to the case of Ilie Dumitrescu.
Once again: we are talking about one of the greatest footballers that ever existed in Romania. A man who played the final at Steaua, then in the Premiere League, an offensive player who scored in the World Championship, who was part of the generation that produced one of the few forms of genuine collective pride in a Romania that emerged confusedly and violently from communism.
And yet, behind that public success was a silent struggle with his own identity, his own origin and his own place in a society that accepted his performance but was not always ready to fully accept the man.
An episode with the sociologist Nicolae Gheorghe
Listening to Pompiliu Popescu, I immediately thought of Barbilian and the sociologist Nicolae Gheorghe.
It seems forced to link all three – an avant-garde poet, a sociologist-activist and a great football player – but between them there is the same Romanian story about identity, success and the social price of difference.
Everyone reacted differently to the same pressure: Barbilian raised the stick, Dumitrescu took the fight inside and tried to become “something else”, and Nicolae Gheorghe turned the identity question into an intellectual and political obsession that he carried until the end of his life.
Perhaps no one described this tension better than Nicolae Gheorghe himself, when he said: “The first time I found out I was a Gypsy was when someone told me that.”
Imagine hearing “well, you're a gypsy!”. In this apparently simple sentence there is almost the entire drama of Roma identity in Romania: the fact that, often, identity is not first experienced as belonging, but as a social label from the outside.
Later, Gheorghe would formulate perhaps one of the hardest questions about the Roma condition: “Why is the first to decide that he is a Gypsy is someone else, and not him?”.
Success that erases nothing
All these people – Barbilian, Dumitrescu, Nicolae Gheorghe – basically responded to the same social pressure. For many Roma who succeed, success does not remove the stigma. Don't destroy it. It just refines it and moves it from the brutal zone of direct insult to a more sophisticated and harder-to-prove zone: constant suspicion, constant evaluation, the feeling that you always have to be a little better than others to receive the same minimal level of acceptance.
Today, the question is no longer “well, why are you a Gypsy?”, as a stranger asked the young Nicolae Gheorghe in the 60s.
Today, the question is more elegant, more discreet and better socially hidden. But the meaning remains much the same: how much of who you are can be accepted without disturbing?
Romania relatively easily accepts the exceptional rum – the brilliant athlete, the exotic artist, the spectacular musician, the picturesque actor.
What continues to produce anxiety is everyday rum, which no longer demands admiration or exoticism, but simple equality and institutional normality. It is the engineer, the driver, the teacher, the worker, the minister, the doctor, the judge who does not want to be tolerated as an exception, but recognized as an equal.
No one chooses how they are born. Choose what you become. As far as he is allowed.
But for a Roma in Romania, with all the sedimented prejudices and with all the inherited socio-economic conditions, the road to performance requires at least double the effort compared to that of a non-Roma with the same starting point (or, at least, this is a belief that I have often heard among Roma communities). Not because the Roma are less capable, but because the system makes them run with weights on their feet on a track that others travel relatively freely. This is, in simple terms, the definition of social inequity.
569,000 Romanian citizens declared their Roma identity
Nothing speaks to this collective anxiety better than the enormous gap between the census and reality. Officially, approximately 569,000 people declared their Roma ethnicity in 2021. Unofficially, estimates by the Council of Europe and the World Bank consistently speak of 1.5 to 2 million Roma in Romania.
This difference is not statistical. It is deeply sociological, psychological and political.
Hundreds of thousands of people consciously choose not to officially exist as Roma.
Not because I don't know who I am, but because I know very well what this assumption can produce. They learned it from the family, from the school, from the neighborhood, from the looks of others and from all those small mechanisms of social discipline that circulate for generations in Roma families: don't say you're Roma, speak correctly, don't attract attention, be better than others if you want to be accepted.
Nicolae Gheorghe was talking about exactly this tension when he said that Roma “juggle with identities”, constantly trying to find a balance between acceptance and social survival.
Barbilian raised the cane at Capșa almost a century ago. Ilie Dumitrescu spent his youth trying to change his condition. Nicolae Gheorghe turns his identity into a question without a definitive answer. In 2021, hundreds of thousands of people choose statistical silence. Between all these moments lies, in fact, the entire history of our collective failure to build a normal relationship with the Roma identity.
“Roma political representation has often remained captive in a toxic combination“
Majority racism and historical stereotypes are not the only ones responsible for the public image of the Roma. Some of those who claim to represent them are also responsible.
In recent decades, Roma political representation has often remained trapped in a toxic combination of clientelism, victimization and political mediocrity.
Leaders compromised by criminal scandals, primitive discourses or feudal reflexes spoke symbolically on behalf of an entire community. But they did not fight stereotypes about Roma, but on the contrary, they confirmed and strengthened them through every public appearance.
This is where the rift comes from, which is rarely talked about: many educated and professionally integrated Roma no longer want to be associated with this representation. Not because she denies her identity, but because she refuses to caricature it.
Paradoxically, some choose identity invisibility precisely because they are neither in the image produced by the majority, nor in the one produced by those who claim to represent them in the Romanian Parliament. Embedding Roma representation with a lifetime parliamentary mandate on reserved seats does not contribute to progress. On the contrary, it is a key ingredient for resignation.
Nicolae Gheorghe warned from the last years of his life that the Roma movement risks becoming captive in an “industry of victimization”, where “miserabilism” produces more legitimacy than the construction of autonomous communities and credible leaders.
That's why I always return to Ion Barbu
Roma identity continues to be negotiated in Romania between shame, spectacle and electoral benefit. And the solution does not come only from changing the majority, nor only from changing the Roma political representation. It comes from both simultaneously – and it takes a kind of courage that we have yet to see collectively assumed by either side.
Barbilian raised his cane at Capşa not just out of pride or anger, but because he instinctively refused to let anyone else define his identity, explain it, manage it or reduce it to a socially acceptable caricature.
Maybe Romania will truly become a mature society on the day when a man can simply say that he is Roma without turning it into a show, or shame, or a social survival strategy. Without raising the cane to be believed and without keeping silent for fear of being punished.
