Destroying Anti-Roma Hate Speech, One Brick At a Time

 

(Michael, Łukasz, Kasia Balas)

 

The Roma (also known as Romani) community represents one of the most marginalized minority groups in Poland, and is one of the greatest recipients of both on- and offline hate speech. Admittedly, however, our group was not thrilled to have anti-Romani hate speech as our project topic for our social media campaigns. Immediately, we saw two major challenges:

1.)    Although they experience some of the most hate speech, the Roma people account for less than 0.01% of the Polish population. Connected to this fact, the most recent nationwide research on hate speech showed that most Polish youth and adults think of Roma as insignificant; they hear and see a considerable amount of this hate speech on social media and in everyday interactions, but do not find such comments or beliefs as problematic. 

2.)    Given that the Roma community is largely unique to European – particularly Eastern European – culture, it would be difficult to build a multi-national audience for our campaign. Outreach to any networks or social media participants in the United States, for example, would likely yield poor results due to very limited knowledge of the Roma population. 

These concerns left more questions than answers: What type of effective campaign could we create given the previously mentioned challenges? How were we going to build an active following, and who would they be? How much could we actually accomplish with less than one week to brainstorm, implement and evaluate the results of our campaign? 

In other words, we simply didn’t know what to do.

Fortunately, however, all three of our group members were bursting with creativity. In fact, one of our greatest challenges was simplifying our ideas to actually accomplish something meaningful within the six-day time parameter. We started with abstract metaphors such as connecting the removal of hate speech in society to doing laundry. We even thought of doing short videos, photo shoots, and a small press event inviting Polish media (yes, we thought that big). 

Ultimately, we narrowed our ideas down, and “Bez Murow” (Without Walls) was born. Our theme focused on how hate speech builds walls of divisiveness and injustice – similar to the ghetto walls that once contained some of the Roma people during the Holocaust. Using the motif of brick walls, the campaign aimed to raise awareness about this particular injustice and to challenge Poles to destroy the walls of hate. Given the aforementioned challenges, we decided to make the campaign specific to Polish citizens. It was designed to be a purely online effort using a Facebook page and memes showing primarily young Facebook users the unethical and frequent use of anti-Roma hate speech. 

Our logo would include a heart – similar to that of the No Hate Speech Movement already present in Poland – featuring the Roma flag inside of it (seen above). The first meme used the brick wall thematic concept in the background, while also showing the hateful comments about Roma that Poles search for on Google (many use the politically incorrect and offensive term of “Gypsie,” producing search suggestions and results such as “Gypsies are thieves,” “Gypsies are dirty,” etc.) – similar to a concept used by a UN Campaign against sexism. The rest of our memes took on the forms of presenting research data about anti-Roma hate speech in Poland using the latest report on the subject. 

Within the first two days, we reached our project goal of obtaining 1,500 views on our Facebook page for Bez Murow. After more outreach to anti-hate speech groups as well as buying Facebook page promotions, we reached over 36,000 views and engaged over 2,000 people in likes, comments, and shares of our various posts. We even took our message to the streets of Warsaw, chalking our Facebook page website on sidewalk along with our campaign tagline “Bez Murow”, and passing out pamphlets displaying our memes.

We were quite pleased with the results, along with the discussions and interactions – both supportive and non-supportive – that occurred on our Facebook page. With more time, however, we would focus greater attention on making our memes more personable and provocative to share and go viral, and consult more members of the Roma community in Warsaw for constructive input and collaboration. We believe that the minorities being affected should take the most ownership over efforts such as these; thus, we hope that the few Roma NGOs we connected with will take our research and ideas and use them to their own advantage to defeat the walls of hate in Poland, one brick at a time.