This article was first published in Romanian, on www.contributors.ro
If there is one thing I’ve learned over the last 20 years in Romania it is to not generalise. Although generalising is fun and it seems to make sense of the world, it results in a narrowness and rigidity of thought that can turn into prejudice. And prejudice can have all sorts of negative consequences. If you generalise about a population it is a statistical certainty that there is a large number of that population behaving differently to how you have described. For many years I heard Romanian people telling me that the Rroma people don’t know how to work the land and don’t like to go to school so we made a documentary film called The Land is Waiting which portrays a family of 10 Rroma kids, all of whom work the land and study hard for school and university. (more…)