Permanence of Anti-Roma Racism

Margareta Matache is a lecturer in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and the co-founder and the director of the Roma Program at the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights, Harvard University. She is also a member of the O’Neill-Lancet Commission on Racism, Structural Discrimination, and Global Health and co-editor of Time for Reparations: A Global Perspective (2021) and Realizing Roma Rights (2017). With over 25 years of experience in organizational leadership, policy advocacy, social change interventions, and academic work, Dr. Matache has dedicated her career to understanding, framing, and addressing anti-Roma racism and other systems of oppression.

• Foreword, by Angela Kocze; 1 Introduction; 2 A Positional Exploration of My Family History; 3 Roma People: Who Can We Become?; 4 An Examination of Roma People’s Structural Oppression (Ofitsialo Telćhudipen); 5 Geneses of Anti-Roma Racism; 6 Placing the Origins of Anti-Roma Racism in the Global Scholarship on Racisms and Systems of Caste; 7 Telaveriaripen (Racialization) and Gadjoness; 8 Telaveriaripen: Patterns in the Racialization of Roma People; 9 Absolute Racialization: Kin Racializing and Dehumanizing Processes; 10 Organized Killings as Law; 11 Bodily Violence; 12 Organized Erasure of Roma History and Culture; 13 Dur-rigate-dinipe – Apartness; 14 Gadjikane Politics and Policymaking; 15 Epilogue: Letter to My Nephew on the Menace of Gadjoness; Postscript

“Margareta Matache’s magisterial book on the complex dynamics of vicious anti-Roma racism and the rich history of Roma resistance is powerful and profound! In fact, she has written an instant classic that creatively and persuasively brings together theory, history, politics and personal lived experience in a unique and unprecedented way! And as a Black freedom fighter, she is my genuine comrade and colleague!”Cornel West, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Professor of Philosophy & Christian Practice, Union Theological Seminary“While Margareta (Magda) Matache’s The Permanence of Anti-Roma Racism: (Un)uttered Sentences is many things—genealogy, theoretical intervention, historical archive, and ethical call—a central argument gives it a special urgency: Matache demonstrates that anti-Roma racism is not a marginal feature of European modernity but one of its constitutive logics, with profound implications for health, rights, sovereignty, and decolonial futures. Beyond its specificity to Roma and Romani peoples, the book offers one of the most important recent analyses of racialization, structural violence, and dehumanization in Europe and beyond. One of the book’s great strengths is Matache’s ability to welcome readers from adjacent fields while simultaneously challenging foundational assumptions about race, colonialism, enslavement, and humanity itself…. While Matache documents the permanence of anti-Roma racism with devastating clarity, the book simultaneously insists that racial formations and their material drivers are historically produced, and thus ultimately transformable. That tension, and Matache’s insistence on the possibility of a radical Roma futurism, may be one of the text’s greatest gifts—not only to Roma studies but to contemporary struggles toward decolonization, liberation, and collective survival.”Bram Wispelwey, Harvard University in Health and Human Rights 28/1 (2026): 203, 205.“This new book is comprehensive and covers vitally important ground for researchers, instructors, and students. It is a very timely publication, especially considering the political environment we are now in with laws being proposed in several states to ban discussion of race.”Jacqueline Bhabha, Director of Research, François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights, Harvard University“This book will remain with the readers, and it will also encourage them. Neatly arranged in 15 headlines, it acts as a faithful guide to accountability.”Suraj Milind Yengde, W.E.B. Du Bois Senior Fellow, the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, Harvard University“This book will no doubt become foundational for scholars in multiple disciplines, from sociology and history to law, public policy, and human rights. But it also holds significance beyond the academy. It is a text that speaks to Roma communities and their allies, to policymakers, educators, and activists—anyone concerned with equity, justice, and the honest reckoning with the past.”Angela Kocze, Assistant Professor of Romani Studies, Chair of Romani Studies Program, and Academic Director of the Roma Graduate Preparation Program at Central European University"This is the book our ancestors have been waiting for. It would be an understatement to say it deserves wide readership—it belongs in the canon of European literature. Matache’s work reveals the complex facets of state-sanctioned Romani subordination, its subsequent erasure and its continued misframing. In this book, she reclaims the narrative—and it could not be more timely."Alexandra Oprea, Romani Feminist Scholar and Attorney