Sára Danielová: Don't answer this ad if you're Roma! Discrimination is now an ordinary part of Slovak housing ads and nobody is discussing it

Instead of getting a chance, though, Romani people are told to not even bother knocking on the landlord’s door. “Gypsies should not apply.”

Those words appear today in online classified ads for rental housing, statements made completely in public, published with impunity and without shame. These are not hints, not something to read between the lines, but the express terms of the rental offering.

To be a Romani person means being automatically undesirable. It means your name or skin color is the reason you are not entitled to a roof over your head.

Discrimination didn’t start online, and it doesn’t end there either. When it’s not a published text, discrimination hides behind the phrases everybody has learned to say: “The apartment is no longer available. It’s already been taken. We apologize.”

Landlords are startled when a Romani person comes to view a property. Some of them admit the truth about why they reject Roma: “The neighbors don’t want it. We don’t want property values in the village to decline.”

What about the value of losing our humanity, though? What’s happening in the digital space just reflects what happens in reality.

The online world has the power to show this hatred publicly, as if it were a normal part of the social order. It’s not, though.

It’s not normal that Romani people have to prove again and again that they are “appropriate” candidates for accessing normal goods and services. It’s not normal for respectable working people to fear making a call just because their name sounds too Roma.

It is also not normal for human dignity to be lost through the single sentence “Roma need not apply”. After all, housing is not a luxury.

Access to housing is a fundamental right. Without it, there is no dignity, no freedom, no future.

If the digital and the physical environment is to be a genuine space for our collaboration, then we have to ask one simple question together: For whom are we even building this society? For whom are we actually making room in this society?

Roma need not apply

The words above are the final sentence of a real estate advertisement from the Facebook group Bývanie Košice [Housing in Košice], where apartments are offered for rent. The ad is unambiguous hate speech.

The remark above is no innocent afterthought. It is the denial of human dignity, a form of collective punishment where one presumption – that you are Roma – excludes hundreds of individuals from access to housing irrespective of their behavior, their character, or their employment status.

This is frequently done with impunity, publicly and shamelessly. It is sad that such language does not meet with widespread condemnation, but is becoming the norm in classified advertising, commentaries, and everyday online communications.

Please, Roma, don’t write us!

The sentence above appeared in an advertisement to rent an apartment in Ružomberk that was publicly posted to Facebook. The author of the post describes the state of the unit in detail, its equipment and location, offering it to families with children or students, but expressly excluding an entire ethnic group.

This remark is a clear example of hate speech and violates the prohibition on discriminating against somebody on the basis of ethnicity, which applies to the field of housing, too. Moreover, in the digital space, this is becoming publicly visible, repeatedly so, and is apparently socially acceptable – which makes it all the more dangerous.

“This property is not appropriate for Roma.”

This third case from Facebook is an obvious case of how the discrimination of Romani people is not just practiced, but also openly justified and rationalized to the public. What is even worse is that this happens in digital spaces which are fully public, spaces which are meant to be accessible and fair to all.

“This property is not appropriate for Roma.” That sentence is written in an absolutely public post to the group „noAneKUPto.eu“, offering an apartment for rent.

The author goes on to say that “we are not the ones deciding this” and apparently “offers a chance” to prospective Romani tenants, but only on the condition that the Romani people prove they are “normal”. This remark creates an extremely humiliating lens through which to view the Roma, labeling them as a problem a priori and simultaneously challenging them to prove their “worth”.

This is dehumanizing, legally and morally unacceptable, and stigmatizing.

Conditions: No real estate offices, no Roma

The sentence above is how the author of another post to Facebook announces that she has two apartments for rent in the town of Myjava. The apparently commonplace offer ends with the condition that Roma be explicitly excluded as undesirable prospective tenants.

In a comment beneath this post, the author excuses her behavior: “This condition is based on my prior experiences [with Roma] and the enormous unwillingness of the neighbors in the apartment building at issue [to have Romani neighbors].” That excuse is nothing but the legitimization of this discrimination.

Shifting responsibility for such discrimination onto “experiences” or “neighbors” does not reduce the seriousness of this statement – quite the opposite, it shows how deeply anti-Romani racism has taken root in society and how normalized it is.

Discrimination as “a standard condition”

It is shocking that discrimination here is presented as a regular part of renting housing, as a legitimate condition on par with the rent itself or the size of the property. Such cases demonstrate that in the online space, the systematic exclusion of Romani people from the housing market on the basis of their collective stigmatization is underway.

Why is this a serious issue?

• This is a violation of the Act on Antidiscrimination;
• Roma are excluded from this public space before they can even express themselves;
• hatred is presented here as “the neighbors’ normal reaction” to Romani people;
• this language creates an invisible wall to keep the Roma out, a wall being built in these classified advertisements, commentaries, and status updates.