There is no real scientific definition of race, it's something we as a society decide on. Race is really interchangeable with ethnicity, which simply describes your culture and family background.
GRT communities may well have similar ethnic origins to other people. The Irish traveller community is, of course, Irish in origin. But then ultimately, we all do. It's just a question of how far back you want to go. But it's also not something you can just choose to join. If you sold up your house and bought a caravan and asked to join them, I very much doubt they would immediately welcome you and that wouldn't make you GRT in an ethnic sense.
Likewise, if one of them decided to buy a house and settle in one spot, they wouldn't immediately stop being GRT.
They have, for centuries, married other people from the community and lived as a group. That's enough to consider it a race - since they are an ethnic subgroup who have a specific culture, traditions, societal structure, social norms and family origins.
>Likewise, if one of them decided to buy a house and settle in one spot, they wouldn't immediately stop being GRT.
There is a group near me, they moved in, found a plot of land nearby, purchased it, completely fenced it off and moved all their caravans in. Basically a "gated" community.
Lovely people too, even if their transit pickup needs a new exhaust for when it comes back at 3am...
Romani are their own ethnic group because, well, they are. There's a lack of documented history due to their nomadic history and lack of a written or oral history, but most analysis has them originating from somewhere in or around India, they then migrated west and they're now one of the most spread out ethnic groups in the world.
Travellers aren't their own ethnic group. They're ethnically irish, but they have their own separate culture due to being isolated/ostracised in both England and Ireland.
Gypsy is a term that is supposed to refer to Romani, but in the UK is used as a catch all for anyone from a nomadic cultural group and now mostly correlates with Irish Travellers.
Yes, and perhaps more importantly - you can generally guess that someone is a traveller from their appearance, accent, cultural indicators. The same applies to Roma people.
As a result they (as a broad group) are viewed and treated differently, and tend to view themselves as distinct from, white British or other races.
By that standard I've always found it a bit odd we lump the wildly different traveller and roma peoples together but hey ho.
To shamelessly hijack a comment and answer a different question from OP - as a group they tend not to have representation in parliment. Education, literacy rates and engagement with authority generally (including voting rates) are much lower than amongst the broader population.
So here is the thing, "race" isn't like the word "chair" for example, we all know what chair means and if we don't we can look it up in the dictionary and there you that's what chair means. If you look "race" up in the Oxford English dictionary it will say a few different things but in a court of law you can't just say "ohhh but the dictionary says x", its the legal definition that matters
According to the Equality[ and Human Rights Commission: ](https://www.equalityhumanrights.com/equality/equality-act-2010/your-rights-under-equality-act-2010/race-discrimination)
[ The Equality Act 2010 says you must not be discriminated against because of your race. ](https://www.equalityhumanrights.com/equality/equality-act-2010/your-rights-under-equality-act-2010/race-discrimination)
>In the Equality Act, race can mean your colour, or your nationality (including your citizenship). It can also mean your ethnic or national origins, which may not be the same as your current nationality. For example, you may have Chinese national origins and be living in Britain with a British passport.
>Race also covers ethnic and racial groups. This means a group of people who all share the same protected characteristic of ethnicity or race.
>A racial group can be made up of two or more distinct racial groups, for example black Britons, British Asians, British Sikhs, British Jews, Romany Gypsies and Irish Travellers.
>You may be discriminated against because of one or more aspects of your race, for example people born in Britain to Jamaican parents could be discriminated against because they are British citizens, or because of their Jamaican national origins.
As you can see Race in the UK legal definition is much more than the colour of ones skin it encompass your ethnic, cultural and national background. As such GRT is as much of a "race" under the law as being "Pakistani" or even being "Welsh"
> people from the GRT communities didn’t appear to want to abide by any social norms, almost in defiance - is there a reason for this, or it just a case that lack of housing conformity spills out into other aspects of life?
Without condoning this, I would imagine that an element of it is that if your lifestyle isn't really supported by wider society then eventually you could just give up on trying.
Where do I put my rubbish, the tip won't take it unless I have a council tax bill, I'll just dump it then. How do I pay tax, I don't have an actual address to give HMRC or get a bank account. Camp sites won't let me stay more than a few days, I'll just chuck my caravan on a field then.
Again, without condoning this, I think after running in to enough of these problems you may well think, okay, sod it, I'll just do whatever I want then.
This is the point where they have to take some accountability, the UK and Ireland (and others I'm sure) don't have an option to live as travellers unless you're settled in park homes or whatever, therefore to live in these countries there are certain rules and if you don't abide by them you should have the option to leave, there can't just be infinite criminality (the behaviours you mentioned, not any other stereotypes)
GRT is an umbrella term like BAME. Within that you have a spectrum from distinct ethnic groups all the way to something more akin to a cultural lifestyle, and everything in between. There is no hard line on what does and doesn't describe a distinct race but it is somewhere along this spectrum.
Roma are a distinct ethnicity who originate who can be traced back genetically to India and have been travelling for centuries, gradually spreading out across Europe. There is even a Romani language that is closer to Hindi than most European language, though I don't think it is spoken much if at all in the UK. They are well recognised as an ethnic group.
Meanwhile you have Irish Travellers, who have been itinerant for centuries and are nowadays considered a distinct ethnic subgroup. They are ethnically Irish but have a distinct culture from centuries of travelling around. There are also Scottish Travellers I believe.
Mixed in with that you also have other travellers, such as those who run travelling funfairs. They aren't an ethnic group per-se, but have a degree of cultural identity.
On the parliament point, there are no such thing as seats for specific ethnicities or anything like that. So their representation is through voting wherever they are registered as with others.
The GRT community isn’t homogeneous; there are some big distinct groupings within that. Some of those groups fall under something closer to ethnicity, due to many many generations of community intermarriage - others don’t. But one of the reasons they get grouped together in this way is that the outer world doesn’t pay much attention to those distinctions and treats them all similarly.
Race is an invented concept, and one of the things it’s useful for is tracking the ways in which people are discriminated against. If mainstream society discriminates against a whole set of groups as one, even if those groups only share some characteristics with each other, it can (sometimes) be useful to address the issues they’re facing collectively.
I am partially Roma, originally from Hungary. The Roma are truly a race, originating from the same area, speaking the same language, even though it has many dialects. I only know about 50 words, but when I moved to the UK and met people from India or Bangladesh, I was surprised to learn that the language is very similar. The language spoken by the travellers of the British Isles, Shelta, is very different, based on that I don't think they are related to us. But I also met with British people who consider themselves Roma, and not travellers, and claim that their forgotten language sounded like Indian.
There is no real scientific definition of race, it's something we as a society decide on. Race is really interchangeable with ethnicity, which simply describes your culture and family background. GRT communities may well have similar ethnic origins to other people. The Irish traveller community is, of course, Irish in origin. But then ultimately, we all do. It's just a question of how far back you want to go. But it's also not something you can just choose to join. If you sold up your house and bought a caravan and asked to join them, I very much doubt they would immediately welcome you and that wouldn't make you GRT in an ethnic sense. Likewise, if one of them decided to buy a house and settle in one spot, they wouldn't immediately stop being GRT. They have, for centuries, married other people from the community and lived as a group. That's enough to consider it a race - since they are an ethnic subgroup who have a specific culture, traditions, societal structure, social norms and family origins.
>Likewise, if one of them decided to buy a house and settle in one spot, they wouldn't immediately stop being GRT. There is a group near me, they moved in, found a plot of land nearby, purchased it, completely fenced it off and moved all their caravans in. Basically a "gated" community. Lovely people too, even if their transit pickup needs a new exhaust for when it comes back at 3am...
Romani are their own ethnic group because, well, they are. There's a lack of documented history due to their nomadic history and lack of a written or oral history, but most analysis has them originating from somewhere in or around India, they then migrated west and they're now one of the most spread out ethnic groups in the world. Travellers aren't their own ethnic group. They're ethnically irish, but they have their own separate culture due to being isolated/ostracised in both England and Ireland. Gypsy is a term that is supposed to refer to Romani, but in the UK is used as a catch all for anyone from a nomadic cultural group and now mostly correlates with Irish Travellers.
Aren’t they quite distinct? Like many have Irish ancestry and the Roma people come from somewhere near India?
Yes, and perhaps more importantly - you can generally guess that someone is a traveller from their appearance, accent, cultural indicators. The same applies to Roma people. As a result they (as a broad group) are viewed and treated differently, and tend to view themselves as distinct from, white British or other races. By that standard I've always found it a bit odd we lump the wildly different traveller and roma peoples together but hey ho. To shamelessly hijack a comment and answer a different question from OP - as a group they tend not to have representation in parliment. Education, literacy rates and engagement with authority generally (including voting rates) are much lower than amongst the broader population.
So here is the thing, "race" isn't like the word "chair" for example, we all know what chair means and if we don't we can look it up in the dictionary and there you that's what chair means. If you look "race" up in the Oxford English dictionary it will say a few different things but in a court of law you can't just say "ohhh but the dictionary says x", its the legal definition that matters According to the Equality[ and Human Rights Commission: ](https://www.equalityhumanrights.com/equality/equality-act-2010/your-rights-under-equality-act-2010/race-discrimination) [ The Equality Act 2010 says you must not be discriminated against because of your race. ](https://www.equalityhumanrights.com/equality/equality-act-2010/your-rights-under-equality-act-2010/race-discrimination) >In the Equality Act, race can mean your colour, or your nationality (including your citizenship). It can also mean your ethnic or national origins, which may not be the same as your current nationality. For example, you may have Chinese national origins and be living in Britain with a British passport. >Race also covers ethnic and racial groups. This means a group of people who all share the same protected characteristic of ethnicity or race. >A racial group can be made up of two or more distinct racial groups, for example black Britons, British Asians, British Sikhs, British Jews, Romany Gypsies and Irish Travellers. >You may be discriminated against because of one or more aspects of your race, for example people born in Britain to Jamaican parents could be discriminated against because they are British citizens, or because of their Jamaican national origins. As you can see Race in the UK legal definition is much more than the colour of ones skin it encompass your ethnic, cultural and national background. As such GRT is as much of a "race" under the law as being "Pakistani" or even being "Welsh"
> people from the GRT communities didn’t appear to want to abide by any social norms, almost in defiance - is there a reason for this, or it just a case that lack of housing conformity spills out into other aspects of life? Without condoning this, I would imagine that an element of it is that if your lifestyle isn't really supported by wider society then eventually you could just give up on trying. Where do I put my rubbish, the tip won't take it unless I have a council tax bill, I'll just dump it then. How do I pay tax, I don't have an actual address to give HMRC or get a bank account. Camp sites won't let me stay more than a few days, I'll just chuck my caravan on a field then. Again, without condoning this, I think after running in to enough of these problems you may well think, okay, sod it, I'll just do whatever I want then.
This is the point where they have to take some accountability, the UK and Ireland (and others I'm sure) don't have an option to live as travellers unless you're settled in park homes or whatever, therefore to live in these countries there are certain rules and if you don't abide by them you should have the option to leave, there can't just be infinite criminality (the behaviours you mentioned, not any other stereotypes)
GRT is an umbrella term like BAME. Within that you have a spectrum from distinct ethnic groups all the way to something more akin to a cultural lifestyle, and everything in between. There is no hard line on what does and doesn't describe a distinct race but it is somewhere along this spectrum. Roma are a distinct ethnicity who originate who can be traced back genetically to India and have been travelling for centuries, gradually spreading out across Europe. There is even a Romani language that is closer to Hindi than most European language, though I don't think it is spoken much if at all in the UK. They are well recognised as an ethnic group. Meanwhile you have Irish Travellers, who have been itinerant for centuries and are nowadays considered a distinct ethnic subgroup. They are ethnically Irish but have a distinct culture from centuries of travelling around. There are also Scottish Travellers I believe. Mixed in with that you also have other travellers, such as those who run travelling funfairs. They aren't an ethnic group per-se, but have a degree of cultural identity. On the parliament point, there are no such thing as seats for specific ethnicities or anything like that. So their representation is through voting wherever they are registered as with others.
The GRT community isn’t homogeneous; there are some big distinct groupings within that. Some of those groups fall under something closer to ethnicity, due to many many generations of community intermarriage - others don’t. But one of the reasons they get grouped together in this way is that the outer world doesn’t pay much attention to those distinctions and treats them all similarly. Race is an invented concept, and one of the things it’s useful for is tracking the ways in which people are discriminated against. If mainstream society discriminates against a whole set of groups as one, even if those groups only share some characteristics with each other, it can (sometimes) be useful to address the issues they’re facing collectively.
I am partially Roma, originally from Hungary. The Roma are truly a race, originating from the same area, speaking the same language, even though it has many dialects. I only know about 50 words, but when I moved to the UK and met people from India or Bangladesh, I was surprised to learn that the language is very similar. The language spoken by the travellers of the British Isles, Shelta, is very different, based on that I don't think they are related to us. But I also met with British people who consider themselves Roma, and not travellers, and claim that their forgotten language sounded like Indian.
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They are an ethnicity, there's only one race - the human race.