An inheritance of exclusion: Roma education,genetics and the turn to biosocial solutions

Introduction

‘Roma’ is one of many contested terms, including Gypsies and Travellers, for the minority ethnic group who migrated to Europe in the early 14th century and believed to have originated in the Indian subcontinent (Liegeois and Gheorghe, 1995). Law and Kovats provide a comprehensive discussion of the absence of any consensus, ‘on which an inclusive political definition of Roma can be based’ (2018: 39). Although the largest ethnic minority in Europe, there is no reliable data on the numbers of Roma people; the European Union (EU) estimate between 10 and 12 Million Roma in Europe, of whom 6 million live in EU states (European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA)/United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), 2014). The largest populations of Roma people are to be found in Central and Eastern European countries including Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary (Migration Watch, 2013).They experience some of the worst educational outcomes of any ethnic group across Europe (European Commission (EC), 2012).

Using the example of Roma experiences of education in Europe this article suggests that a turn towards educational strategies premised on addressing genetic or biological traits is problematic. This is less an argument about the use of discredited ‘race’ science in education (Gillborn, 2016) or the efficacy of more recent and liberally framed biosocial solutions, in which changes to environment (e.g. a less stressful classroom or a healthier lifestyle), may be moulded to impact on individual gene expression to improve educational outcomes (Youdell, 2017). Rather it is an argument about the production of knowledge and its translation into policy-making and popular discourse. Noting a myriad of difficulties facing the promotion of biosocial solutions to educational inequalities, Youdell (2017) argues they may still have currency within Deleuzian (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988) understandings of assemblage (agencement); that is within a grassroots constellation of strategies and behaviours designed to improve educational opportunities. This article argues this is an unlikely outcome for Roma pupils whose lives are confined within what Liegeois and Gheorghe (1995) describe as a politics of negation in which, ‘policies towards Roma/Gypsies have always constituted, in one form or another, a negation of the people, their culture and their language’ (1995:8) by processes of exclusion, containment and assimilation. Even when such policies are intended to ‘capacitate communities’, they often ‘risk reproducing perceived differences and culturally essentialist perceptions that impede genuine autonomy’ (Cools et al., 2018: 373).

Education policies for Roma have often been characterised by the promotion of factually incorrect or misleading racist narratives (Bhopal and Myers, 2008; FRA/UNDP, 2014). The emergence of genetically imagined or biosocial solutions for Roma pupils runs the risk of reimagining the production of stigmatising knowledge about Roma to inform ill-conceived policy making that maintains rather than challenges the status quo. This article argues that where genetic studies of the Roma have influenced educational policies this has tended to reinforce widespread patterns of discrimination. More generally, the Roma experience highlights how the high cultural and economic value of some scientific knowledge creates economies in which education policy based on a deficit model persists rather than addressing systemic inequalities.

Roma, genealogies and policy

Academic scholarship exploring Roma lives in Europe has often been hamstrung within acrimonious debates about who the Roma people are (see Acton, 2004, 2016; Law and Kovats, 2018; Okely, 2017). The significance of a heritage linked to the Indian sub-continent and later migration to Europe often contrasted against accounts of socially constructed identities shaped by settlement and engagement with indigenous populations (Acton, 2004). Since the 1990s a, ‘rather extensive genetic literature on Roms’, has corroborated longstanding linguistic scholarship that, ‘proves an Indian origin, subsequent splits and the founding of groupings by limited number of ancestors and often limited mixture with outsiders’ (Bakker, 2012: 91). The focus of genetic studies of Roma has been twofold: exploring both ancestral, genealogical links to India and also genetic health disorders and potential interventions. Both strands of work are often linked; so immunogenetics research from the 1990s exploring low rates of multiple sclerosis in Bulgarian Roma populations (Kalman et al., 1991) and the prevalence of bipolar affective disorder in isolated Roma populations (Kaneva et al., 1998) is later cited in work exploring the genetic diversity and origins of the Roma (Gresham et al., 2001). Increasingly more detailed accounts of the specific regions and populations within the Indian subcontinent to which different Roma people have genetic links are emerging (Martínez-Cruz et al, 2016; Melegh et al, 2017; Mendizabal et al., 2011; Pamjav et al., 2011).

Kalaydjieva et al. (2001) suggest the ‘track record’ of genetic studies of the Roma has been problematic. In Germany during the Third Reich it was used to provide scientific evidence to support the holocaust; and the latter half of the 20th century saw an excessive focus on Indian origin narratives at the expense of addressing health issues such as genetic disorders prevalent amongst Roma communities. In a later review of genetic studies conducted in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Kalaydjieva et al. (2005) detail the founder effects that result from a small group breaking away from a larger population and note, ‘the strong evidence of the common descent of all Gypsies regardless of declared group identity, country of residence and rules of endogamy’ (2005: 1086). In terms of public health this signals the prevalence of Mendelian disorders, and the effectiveness of implementing ‘community-based carrier testing programs’ (2005: 1090). Understanding this genetic research in the context of a wider social history of European Gypsies characterised by slavery, persecution and isolation, Kalaydjieva et al. observe this narrative, ‘is the genetic image of xenophobia, the fate of an Asian people fractured and dispersed among Europeans and responding to hostility with a labyrinth of walls of endogamy’ (2005: 1092).

These debates foreground populist narratives depicting the Roma in confusing, stereotypical and racist terms (Izsák, 2015; Liegeois and Gheorghe, 1995). Across Europe generic stereotypes about Roma include their criminality, itinerancy and dirtiness; these are often reworked in particular contexts e.g. in relation to place, the romanticisation of Gypsies living simple lives close to nature in rural settings (Sibley, 1995); or gender, the sexualisation of Roma women as an exotic other (Hancock, 2008); or education, that Roma students are problematic and their culture resists formal, sedentary education (Myers, 2018).

For Roma groups, often defined by their non-territoriality (Acton, 2006; Myers, 2018), the development of genetic markers related to a national or geographical point of origin is significant. It provides evidence of the routes and roots of a migratory passage. It is potentially useful within political advocacy identifying and campaigning for rights to accrue to the Roma as a singular body of people (e.g. Ian Hancock’s (2010) work). It may be less helpful in neo-liberal political climates shaped by right-wing nationalism and populism, in which European development policies ostensibly designed to address social inequalities faced by Roma, ‘tend to socially isolate particularly the poorest among them and contribute more to governing their poverty than to improving their living circumstances’ (van Baar, 2018: 443). It may also mistakenly assume a convergence of generic interests amongst people whose lives have been shaped differently; including differences between the economic, social and political experiences of Roma in Western European countries compared to eastern Europe; different impacts derived from the initial creation and later dissolution of communist states; and, the impact of EU membership (Gheorghe and Mirga, 1997; Law and Kovats, 2018). The political response of Roma communities, intellectuals and elites has tended to reflect the divergent threats and challenges encountered at national and local level. Debates about a wider territorialism, national identity or political strategies for social change reflect these local conditions; often distinguishing between strategies to acquire generic rights associated with national citizenship or the recognition of protected characteristics of an ethnic minority (Gheorghe and Mirga, 1997).

Some individual states are seeking to impose repressive anti-Roma legislation (Izsák, 2015). In 2018, Italian Interior Minister, Matteo Salvini, received considerable popular support for a national census of Roma with a view to expelling non-Italian Roma (Kirchgaessner, 2018), a move foreshadowed a decade earlier in legislation to fingerprint all Roma living in Italy (Colacicchi, 2008). Such measures of social control are not unique to Italy (Muigai, 2011); in 2013 it was revealed Swedish police compiled a genealogical database of 4029 Roma (Reuters, 2013), and there are historic precedents of fingerprinting Roma in Hungary in the 1930s (Schmidt, 2016) and ethnic cleansing during the Nazi holocaust (Kenrick, 2010). One characteristic of European neo-liberal policy making has been the deterritorialisation or denationalisation of populations like the Roma considered problematic; they become reclassified as no longer citizens within state borders. This process of excising populations from nation states increasingly less easily defined by natural or physical borders but rather by more fluid or imaginary borders is described by van Baar (2017) as ‘evictability’.

Beyond individual state borders M’charek et al. (2014) describe the emergence of a ‘phenotypic other’ in which observable characteristics are constituted through the legal and technological management of DNA and genetic data by the state. Using the example of different EU databases, they note the tendency for these processes to criminalise and discriminate on the basis of race at the technological borders of nations. Similarly Amoore (2006) describes how understandings of ‘biometric borders’ have become commonplace, in which ‘the body itself is inscribed with, and demarcates, a continual crossing of multiple encoded borders - social, legal, gendered, racialized and so on’ (2006: 337). Surdu and Kovats argue Roma identity has been ‘fabricated by scholars, experts and bureaucrats’ (2015: 7) to encompass people previously known as Gypsies within a political dialogue. The capacity for nation states to encompass biological understandings of race within social and cultural reframing of ethnicity makes the non-territorial otherness of Roma a particular vulnerability when borders are defined in terms of bodies. Roma are configured as an unwanted mobile population stripped of rights and duties associated with citizenship; understandings of Roma culture, including ‘mobility’, are consistently misinterpreted within educational policies (D’Arcy, 2017; Myers 2018).

Roma, education and genetics

Across Europe, educational opportunities for Roma have been systemically blighted by the association of characteristics and traits about Roma often based on centuries old stereotypes (FRA/UNDP, 2014). Such stigmatisation bears little relation to actual lives but is readily supported within political and media discourses (Kroon et al., 2016; Richardson, 2014). Surveying 20 years of research, Lauritzen and Nodeland (2018) note that Roma education is often problematised in deficit terms and that cultural problems are prioritised over socio-economic issues. Aikman et al. (2016) also note the tendency for educational researchers and policy makers to promote deficit models of education in which, ‘nomadic peoples are referred to as “hard to reach” with formal education and in need of being educated into sedentary ‘modern’ ways of life’ (2016: 314). The characterisation of Roma as a ‘hard to reach’ community often fails to reflect the visibility and accessibility of many communities characterised in part by an imagined mobility or ill-defined nomadism (Law and Kovats, 2018; Myers, 2015).

A range of common concerns has been identified across European countries including Roma pupils not attending school or only attending in earlier years (Rosário et al., 2017); achieving less well than non-Roma pupils (FRA/UNDP, 2014; Wilkin et al., 2010); not progressing into Higher Education (D’Arcy and Galloway, 2018); experiencing bullying or racism from other pupils and teachers (Bhopal, 2011a); being taught in a culturally insensitive fashion and consequent loss of Roma culture (Bhopal, 2011b; Myers et al. 2010); and, education policy and practice that misrepresents Roma identity and interests (Bereményi and Carrasco, 2015; Myers, 2018). EU membership requires national states to implement laws ensuring compulsory education for school-aged children. However, the EC’s own National Roma Integration Strategies require states to meet a significantly lower threshold of only ensuring, ‘that all Roma children complete at least primary school’ (EC, 2011: 5); a target the EC themselves identify as remaining largely unmet (EC, 2012).

Race, genetics and cultural capital

Throughout the 20th century, genetic studies linked the Roma with a range of undesirable traits, most notably resulting in the death of hundreds of thousands of Roma in the Nazi holocaust (Kalaydjieva et al., 2001; Kenrick, 2010). Less well-documented are similar exercises in discredited ‘race’ science conducted elsewhere in Europe; the lasting credibility accorded to criminalisation based on a genetic identity post-1945; and, more recent European adoption of similar categorisations as a means of managing Roma populations across Europe (Aubry, 2010; Kotljarchuk, 2018; Robel and Herold, 2010). Narratives about desirable genetic traits often emphasise the value and significance of having a white skin rather than a black one. Despite the apparent absurdity of such narratives, Miller (2017), discussing ethics and race, notes their commonplace occurrence, ‘in the most beaten treads of theoretical and folk wisdom regarding bodies and value’ (2017: x). Miller describes the biblical genealogies of Noah’s son Ham whose embodied criminality is passed on generation after generation. The account of Ham’s crime is obscured and never addressed, but the repetition of his original sin evokes ‘an inexhaustible number of criminals, each one absolutely guilty for the entirety of the original act’ (p. 142). The gene pool of Ham is a curse in which race and ethics collide to determine the bad characteristics and dispositions of one group of people, which in more modern times finds its echo in the Althusserian ‘hailing’ of subjects (Althusser, 1971).

Hartigan (2008) details how hard scientific evidence of race determined genetics at the turn of the 21st century on closer examination reveals itself to be an interpretation or translation of genetic ‘populations’ into more readily understandable, (in populist and policy terms), but ultimately inaccurate, race categories. This is not necessarily evidence that race is socially constructed, but rather using Latour’s (1999) arguments about translation and what constitutes persuasive science, Hartigan outlines this as a process of the production of knowledge. He suggests there is a recognisably distinct difference between the evidence about genes being deployed, its translation into public forums, and, public understandings of what constitutes ‘race’

‘reality’ is not the final arbiter that resolves these controversies; rather, what counts as real is partially constituted or reconstituted in the course of such disputes. (Hartigan, 2008: 180)

A similar process of translation of knowledge can be identified within scholarship, policy and popular discourse about the Roma. Some work by social constructionists has suggested ‘Gypsy’ identity was effectively ‘invented’ by the 18th century historian Heinrich Grellman (Acton, 2004). This invention creating the illusion of a racialised genetic, ethnic group characterised by nomadism and criminality requiring policy interventions. Public discourses and state policy have historically deployed strategies linking racist identity traits to measures of control. For example, the earliest policy referring to Roma in the UK, the Egyptians Act of 1530, overtly links identity to criminality and itinerancy. Since then, European states have adapted measures to manage Roma identity reflecting social change. Following increasing industrialisation and suburbanisation, legislation is introduced to control the spaces the Roma occupy across Europe, in which knowledge about their characteristics of mobility and criminality remain a constant feature (Bhopal and Myers, 2008; Lucassen, 1993; Mayall, 1997; Myers, 2018). This partly explains the emphasis of studies of genetic disorders amongst Roma people, being cited within academic writing focussed on Indian origins to counter social constructionist accounts.

Most recently the social constructionist perspective has been reconfigured to argue that Roma identity has been reimagined or interpreted by an expert political class to reconfigure traditional stereotypes of ‘Gypsies’ within a new nomenclature, that of ‘Roma’ (Surdu, 2016; Surdu and Kovats, 2015). Surdu’s (2016) account, that Roma are a real group of people but one who are defined by a political class, has been significantly disputed for failing to acknowledge the self-ascribed identities of Roma who do identify as such; for reinforcing stigmatising narratives about Roma ethnicity by ascribing them to inventions of (Roma and non-Roma) elites; and, failing to acknowledge the significance felt for primordial ancestral accounts related to the Roma (Mirga, 2018).

The translation of knowledge produces cultural capital that has a high value within economies of cultural capital specifically (Bourdieu, 1986); not least because there is a scarcity value to such knowledge. The credibility of scientifically legitimised knowledge of genealogical ancestries and identities defined by genetic accounts is heightened, because its production is restricted to small numbers of scientists. Such cultural capital has its own generative impetus; creating fictional accounts that in turn reinforce the value and significance of the scientific originators of that knowledge. For Roma such economies generate populist knowledge such as stereotypes of criminality, dirtiness, itinerancy, musicality, closeness to nature and illiteracy, to scientific genealogical knowledge. A racist discourse of Roma identity is given credence through genetic science and DNA that identifies the passing of traits and characteristics intergenerationally.

The deployment of capitals within social structures is a means by which the status quo is both reinforced and reproduced through the work of institutions and social fields that condition and reproduce habituses, those individual’s characteristics and dispositions, shaped by past experience and engagement within social life (Bourdieu, 1990; Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992). Knowledge about the Roma has a high capital value: it informs policy making or produces a TV format. That knowledge however is not produced on a level playing field; it is foregrounded in the reproduction of embodied characteristics of the Roma as a nomadic, criminal other with a history of disengagement from education. It is cultural capital that shapes life trajectories through the naming of Roma ethnic identity within policy making that is a response to the identification of those characteristics as problematic.

Gillborn describes a contemporary reimagining of discredited scientific arguments about racial hereditarism as a ‘strategy of racial inexplicitness’ (Gillborn, 2016: 367) in which race itself is not named and new iterations of racist science can be distanced from discredited but similar work such as eugenics. Gillborn suggests

The new geneism adopts a colorblind, meritocratic and celebratory tone whereby ‘race’ is rarely mentioned at all and the supposed ‘advances’ are hailed as good news for everyone. (p. 366)

Conclusions

Within the field of Roma studies, genetic research is problematic on many levels, not least because it is routinely used to make arguments about identity rather than address the knowledge of genetic disorders it has produced. This article readily acknowledges it is engaged in just such practice. There is perhaps an inevitable relationship between genetic studies of the Roma and populist discourses about inherited genetic traits that readily transition into policy including educational policy. These historic discourses have portrayed Roma in racist, negative terms; and, from before the Second World War until the present have shaped education for many Roma children. Such discourses and related policy have widely been recognised as requiring change across Europe but with little evidence that change is likely to happen in the near future.

Also, within Roma studies there is some irony for social constructionists and primordialists alike when the hard science of genetics proves a point about origins, but is simultaneously deployed to suggest a flawed ethnicity. This becomes more problematic if used as the evidence for biosocial interventions taking precedence over social and economic changes to improve Roma educational outcomes. If, for example, an educational strategy of fixing individual bodies through dietary supplements took priority over economic programmes to redistribute wealth more equitably between Roma and non-Roma people, which would clearly be a retrograde measure.

Surdu (2016) argues there is a coherency within the discourses of academics, experts, journalists and policy makers that shapes commonly held understandings of the Roma and Roma ‘issues’. That consequently bodies of knowledge about the Roma remain unchallenged or unchallengeable; this seems an unavoidable conclusion when tracing the histories of educational policy and outcomes for Roma in Europe. On past evidence, the Roma will continue to be classified as inheritors of genetic characteristics that mark them as inferior in educational settings. When arguments are made that genetic research, through educational interventions, can improve educational outcomes and social mobility; that is laden with a promise of a significant change and the potential to challenge old orthodoxies. This is a promise embedded in populist knowledge that imbues scientific knowledge with high capital values when it maintains pre-existing social structures. It is not knowledge that influences economies by addressing social inequalities or structural change. The effect of such economies is to reproduce deficit models of education in which old racisms about the Roma are newly minted within the currency of contemporary scientific knowledge.

The capital value of knowledge about the Roma is still largely created by non-Roma people and this includes both the hard science of knowledge about genetics and the translation of that knowledge within populist and policy discourses. This translation of knowledge reproduces a range of racist stereotypes about Roma that have endlessly reproduced a status quo in which resources and opportunities remain inequitably distributed. The transfer of knowledge, including knowledge about genetics, within different economies (political, economic and social) generates greater social, cultural and economic capital for non-Roma people. Within the multifaceted strands of relationships that bring together nations, policy makers, schools, pupils and parents, biosocial educational strategies pose a range of problematic concerns for the Roma, linking discourse about Roma identity to means of social control. In a Europe where borders are increasingly understood in terms of fluid boundaries between social positioning rather than territoriality, the promise of biosocial education strategies are reminiscent of policy designed to reproduce rather than challenge inequalities. Identifying or classifying Roma pupils as a phenotypic ‘other’ mirrors previous education policy that, using the evidence of genetics, has either excluded or segregated Roma pupils within schools. There is a nagging doubt that within the social relations of assemblage used to justify biosocial solutions is the reconstitution of a populist and ill-informed knowledge about Roma.