later, ask me what I think about keen little gadgets in the shape of dismembered women. (Guess.)
So the other night, more or less by accident, kphoebe and I ended up watching Criminal Minds together. I had read the one sentence TV guide blurb, but honestly I had more or less forgotten about that by the time I started watching. Twenty minutes twenty three seconds later, (by my chat log) we were on AIM together boggling at the bafflingly insensitive racist stereotyping, which then got worse. Karen and I on the topic of CM 413, Bloodline, below the cut.
(NB. Both Karen and I have written below in the first person. This is to confuse you.)
If you are not familiar with the show, CM follows the FBI's behavioural analysis unit (BAU) who are a special team of profilers who help track serial killers. The senior agents are Hotch (Hotchner) and Rossi, Reid is the whizz-kid, leaving Prentiss and Morgan to round out the team. Jordan is their (temporary) liaison, and Garcia is the computer geek. Everyone but Morgan and Jordan, who are Black, present as white; Garcia is very obviously white, despite her name, and its canon that she doesn't consider herself latina, the name coming from her step-dad. In general, the writing is quite good, the focus is on the team and the stresses the job places on the people who do it. The term "unsub," short for "unkown subject" is used to refer to the unknown person who they are building a profile around, until they have a name.
A quick summary of the episode, focusing on the upsetting parts, with some details that I didn't notice until I rewatched to write this entry noted in [square brackets.]
The show opens with a family, man, woman, and child, in a car driving on a rural road. They seem to be white, and working class. [The camera focuses on a clumsily made fetish doll, some pipe cleaners, scraps of cloth, wire, tiny coins and beads, dangling from the rear-view mirror.] The boy (ten years-old) admits he's a little nervous: "What if she doesn't like me?" They stop the car and get out at a house, the mother taking out a ziplock bag of colourful bits of broken glass, which she scatters on the ground. Then they break in.
In the BAU, we learn that a young girl has gone missing, her parents murdered in their beds, so the team heads out to the scene.
Back with our kidnappers, the boy offers a cup of water to the terrified young girl while his parents look on proudly. The boy says, "I'm going to call you... Elayna."
Back with the team, we learn that the girl has epilepsy.
Back with the kidnappers, we watch, with the girl, as the young boy is trained to pick pockets, practising on a dummy rigged out with bells. (I think I've read this in Oliver Twist. Pro-tip: don't use Dickens as a template for sensitive portrayal of minorities.) Our kidnapping victim has a seizure, and falls down, foaming at the mouth. Says the father, horrified, "She's defective!" and goes to get a knife, but the mother says: "We don't kill young girls." They leave her, wrapped in a blanket, in a ditch, still bound, but she struggles onto the highway and stops a car.
The girl tells the team about what she remembers. She says she heard the mother call her son "puyoolay" (my transcription) which Prentiss recognizes as "a Romanian term of endearment."
(This is the point Karen and I went "!?!")
While building a profile of the kidnappers, they are described as "Eastern European." The following conversation takes place with the local law enforcement:
Officer: "Have you ever seen anything like this before?"
Morgan: "Where a family ritualizes killing together? Definitely not."
Reid: "You know, if the family speaks Romanian, the spreading of the glass makes sense. It's an Eastern European superstition for good luck."
Officer: "So they're Romanian, we already knew that."
Reid: "Not just Romanian, we're talking about people who are *highly superstitious* and obsessed with ritual.
Rossi: "Romani"
Officer: "Romani. Gypsies."
Reid: "More accurately, someone who's perverted Romani culture."
Rossi: "They're tight-knit, nomadic, like our unsubs. Not usually prone to violence."
Reid asks Garcia to do some more searching for similar crimes: "Cross reference for small towns that have had reports of petty-theft associated with waves of Romani populations entering the area."
Garcia: "Romani?"
Rossi: "Gypsies."
Garcia: "As in Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves?"
I share her disbelief.
When delivering his profile to the local law enforcement, Hotch says, "We believe they are of Romanian descent. The breaking of the glass, and the discarding of Kate Haleman because of her epilepsy leads us to believe these are highly superstitious people, and they are playing out a very specific ritual," to which Rossi adds, "The focus of this ritual is the young girls."
Garcia, having investigated, has discovered a string of similar murders, parents killed, daughter missing, going back to 1909, leading the team to conclude that this is a generational pattern, and they discover that a hair found on the blanket left with the abandoned girl belongs to one of those girls, abducted in 1971. By this point, the viewer doesn't really need the team to explain, but they exposit about Stockholm syndrome.
Reid: "The Romani are a closed society, the unsubs simply twisted and distorted traditions to become entirely insular."
Morgan: "Abducting the children keeps the bloodline pure."
When they find the destroyed RV, abandoned by the kidnappers, they notice bits of tinfoil.
Reid: "Tinfoil. Kate Haleman remembers being in a closet surrounded by 'clothing and tinfoil.'"
Morgan: "Shopflifters use tin-foil to line their bags and get through security alarms."
Rossi: Makes sense. a lot of Romani make their living as petty thieves."
Reid: "Also explains the bells she heard. Kate says she heard the sound of bells, followed directly by the father talking to the son. I think that's probably what the mannequin's for. School of seven bells.
Morgan interprets: "Dress a mannequin, line a suit with seven bells. If you can pick his pocket without a bell ringing, you're ready to work the crowd."
Police-dude: "So we know how they make their money."
Reid: "That's not all we know. These unsubs are guided entirely by ritual."
In the end, they find the family, along with the girl they kidnapped to replace Kate Haleman, but they catch the mother on tape, whispering to her son, "Don't tell them about your brothers." Switch to dimly lit scene of family in car, father asking son: "Are you ready?"
Specific reasons why this is offensive, beyond the obvious:
The show seems to have partially confused the Romani with Romanians. The Romani are a migrant culture whose traditional way of life is increasingly legislated against by countries who do not want persons entering and exiting their countries without a trail of paperwork. Romani is an indo-european language. You can find it on this chart under "Indo-Aryan-->Western Indic," near Gujarati. Romanian is an Indo-European langauge. You can find it on the same chart under "Romance," near Corsican. There are Romani in Romania, but there are Romani all over the world. Although they might easily have come from Romania before they came to America, if these Romani have been in America for a century, why would they have held on to Romanian as the language that represented keeping their culture, rather than Romani?
The oldest libel about the Roma is that they steal children. In fact, the Romani often have their children seized by state authorities.
The Romani are a marginalized group. They get very little representation that does not hark from periods when they were simultaneously romanticized and reviled. Although the show does play lip service to the idea that these are *perverted* Roma customs, it doesn't really underline that these groups aren't actually Roma - Romani is not a language learned by many outside the culture, so even if these are some evil-bad offsprigs of a much larger group of people, it's still very creepy.
Moreover, we never see any non-serial-killing Roma in this episode - nor do we see them, so far as I can recall, in the entire series thus far. To expand: Criminal Minds has had white serial killers and black serial killers and Hispanic serial killers. It has also had bystanders, cops-of-the-week, victims and white and heroes from all those groups.
In the Criminal Minds first season episode "The Tribe", a mass-murder takes place and is set up to resemble "Native American" ritual. The local Apache community are investigated. Several of the community members are shown - the leader, Jane Bear, and several schoolchildren. One of them, John Blackwolf, is the reservation cop, and the cop-of-the-week (and also under suspicion for the murders).
It turns out that the ritualised murders are not genuine Apache rituals at all - they've been faked by a racist and ignorant white cult leader who wanted to incite a race war. John Blackwolf assists with the investigation, and, with the white CM team leader Hotch, prevents an attack upon the schoolchildren.
Now, there's some stereotyping going on with the depiction of Blackwolf - he carries a knife instead of a gun, he gives the odd cryptic Apache saying - but he is clearly shown to be a good guy (and prominent Native Rights activist) who doesn't always agree with the main characters but is not going around randomly butchering people.
If this episode had pushed the same cultural appropriation theme here, it could have done something like that - showing the BAU contacting real Roma and asking if anyone had hung around trying to pick up the customs, perhaps. Instead, it comes across as racist and icky.
The worst part is that as far as I can see, there is absolutely no reason for this storyline to involve the Roma at all. Small family cults roaming around kidnapping children and killing their parents WITHOUT the Roma connection is just as believable, and much less disgusting.
(NB. Both Karen and I have written below in the first person. This is to confuse you.)
If you are not familiar with the show, CM follows the FBI's behavioural analysis unit (BAU) who are a special team of profilers who help track serial killers. The senior agents are Hotch (Hotchner) and Rossi, Reid is the whizz-kid, leaving Prentiss and Morgan to round out the team. Jordan is their (temporary) liaison, and Garcia is the computer geek. Everyone but Morgan and Jordan, who are Black, present as white; Garcia is very obviously white, despite her name, and its canon that she doesn't consider herself latina, the name coming from her step-dad. In general, the writing is quite good, the focus is on the team and the stresses the job places on the people who do it. The term "unsub," short for "unkown subject" is used to refer to the unknown person who they are building a profile around, until they have a name.
A quick summary of the episode, focusing on the upsetting parts, with some details that I didn't notice until I rewatched to write this entry noted in [square brackets.]
The show opens with a family, man, woman, and child, in a car driving on a rural road. They seem to be white, and working class. [The camera focuses on a clumsily made fetish doll, some pipe cleaners, scraps of cloth, wire, tiny coins and beads, dangling from the rear-view mirror.] The boy (ten years-old) admits he's a little nervous: "What if she doesn't like me?" They stop the car and get out at a house, the mother taking out a ziplock bag of colourful bits of broken glass, which she scatters on the ground. Then they break in.
In the BAU, we learn that a young girl has gone missing, her parents murdered in their beds, so the team heads out to the scene.
Back with our kidnappers, the boy offers a cup of water to the terrified young girl while his parents look on proudly. The boy says, "I'm going to call you... Elayna."
Back with the team, we learn that the girl has epilepsy.
Back with the kidnappers, we watch, with the girl, as the young boy is trained to pick pockets, practising on a dummy rigged out with bells. (I think I've read this in Oliver Twist. Pro-tip: don't use Dickens as a template for sensitive portrayal of minorities.) Our kidnapping victim has a seizure, and falls down, foaming at the mouth. Says the father, horrified, "She's defective!" and goes to get a knife, but the mother says: "We don't kill young girls." They leave her, wrapped in a blanket, in a ditch, still bound, but she struggles onto the highway and stops a car.
The girl tells the team about what she remembers. She says she heard the mother call her son "puyoolay" (my transcription) which Prentiss recognizes as "a Romanian term of endearment."
(This is the point Karen and I went "!?!")
While building a profile of the kidnappers, they are described as "Eastern European." The following conversation takes place with the local law enforcement:
Officer: "Have you ever seen anything like this before?"
Morgan: "Where a family ritualizes killing together? Definitely not."
Reid: "You know, if the family speaks Romanian, the spreading of the glass makes sense. It's an Eastern European superstition for good luck."
Officer: "So they're Romanian, we already knew that."
Reid: "Not just Romanian, we're talking about people who are *highly superstitious* and obsessed with ritual.
Rossi: "Romani"
Officer: "Romani. Gypsies."
Reid: "More accurately, someone who's perverted Romani culture."
Rossi: "They're tight-knit, nomadic, like our unsubs. Not usually prone to violence."
Reid asks Garcia to do some more searching for similar crimes: "Cross reference for small towns that have had reports of petty-theft associated with waves of Romani populations entering the area."
Garcia: "Romani?"
Rossi: "Gypsies."
Garcia: "As in Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves?"
I share her disbelief.
When delivering his profile to the local law enforcement, Hotch says, "We believe they are of Romanian descent. The breaking of the glass, and the discarding of Kate Haleman because of her epilepsy leads us to believe these are highly superstitious people, and they are playing out a very specific ritual," to which Rossi adds, "The focus of this ritual is the young girls."
Garcia, having investigated, has discovered a string of similar murders, parents killed, daughter missing, going back to 1909, leading the team to conclude that this is a generational pattern, and they discover that a hair found on the blanket left with the abandoned girl belongs to one of those girls, abducted in 1971. By this point, the viewer doesn't really need the team to explain, but they exposit about Stockholm syndrome.
Reid: "The Romani are a closed society, the unsubs simply twisted and distorted traditions to become entirely insular."
Morgan: "Abducting the children keeps the bloodline pure."
When they find the destroyed RV, abandoned by the kidnappers, they notice bits of tinfoil.
Reid: "Tinfoil. Kate Haleman remembers being in a closet surrounded by 'clothing and tinfoil.'"
Morgan: "Shopflifters use tin-foil to line their bags and get through security alarms."
Rossi: Makes sense. a lot of Romani make their living as petty thieves."
Reid: "Also explains the bells she heard. Kate says she heard the sound of bells, followed directly by the father talking to the son. I think that's probably what the mannequin's for. School of seven bells.
Morgan interprets: "Dress a mannequin, line a suit with seven bells. If you can pick his pocket without a bell ringing, you're ready to work the crowd."
Police-dude: "So we know how they make their money."
Reid: "That's not all we know. These unsubs are guided entirely by ritual."
In the end, they find the family, along with the girl they kidnapped to replace Kate Haleman, but they catch the mother on tape, whispering to her son, "Don't tell them about your brothers." Switch to dimly lit scene of family in car, father asking son: "Are you ready?"
Specific reasons why this is offensive, beyond the obvious:
The show seems to have partially confused the Romani with Romanians. The Romani are a migrant culture whose traditional way of life is increasingly legislated against by countries who do not want persons entering and exiting their countries without a trail of paperwork. Romani is an indo-european language. You can find it on this chart under "Indo-Aryan-->Western Indic," near Gujarati. Romanian is an Indo-European langauge. You can find it on the same chart under "Romance," near Corsican. There are Romani in Romania, but there are Romani all over the world. Although they might easily have come from Romania before they came to America, if these Romani have been in America for a century, why would they have held on to Romanian as the language that represented keeping their culture, rather than Romani?
The oldest libel about the Roma is that they steal children. In fact, the Romani often have their children seized by state authorities.
The Romani are a marginalized group. They get very little representation that does not hark from periods when they were simultaneously romanticized and reviled. Although the show does play lip service to the idea that these are *perverted* Roma customs, it doesn't really underline that these groups aren't actually Roma - Romani is not a language learned by many outside the culture, so even if these are some evil-bad offsprigs of a much larger group of people, it's still very creepy.
Moreover, we never see any non-serial-killing Roma in this episode - nor do we see them, so far as I can recall, in the entire series thus far. To expand: Criminal Minds has had white serial killers and black serial killers and Hispanic serial killers. It has also had bystanders, cops-of-the-week, victims and white and heroes from all those groups.
In the Criminal Minds first season episode "The Tribe", a mass-murder takes place and is set up to resemble "Native American" ritual. The local Apache community are investigated. Several of the community members are shown - the leader, Jane Bear, and several schoolchildren. One of them, John Blackwolf, is the reservation cop, and the cop-of-the-week (and also under suspicion for the murders).
It turns out that the ritualised murders are not genuine Apache rituals at all - they've been faked by a racist and ignorant white cult leader who wanted to incite a race war. John Blackwolf assists with the investigation, and, with the white CM team leader Hotch, prevents an attack upon the schoolchildren.
Now, there's some stereotyping going on with the depiction of Blackwolf - he carries a knife instead of a gun, he gives the odd cryptic Apache saying - but he is clearly shown to be a good guy (and prominent Native Rights activist) who doesn't always agree with the main characters but is not going around randomly butchering people.
If this episode had pushed the same cultural appropriation theme here, it could have done something like that - showing the BAU contacting real Roma and asking if anyone had hung around trying to pick up the customs, perhaps. Instead, it comes across as racist and icky.
The worst part is that as far as I can see, there is absolutely no reason for this storyline to involve the Roma at all. Small family cults roaming around kidnapping children and killing their parents WITHOUT the Roma connection is just as believable, and much less disgusting.