#roma tree

[tumbling-dyce]

Pines of Rome

The streets of Rome - Cecchignola. Lubitel 166 Universal on Redscale XR 120 film.

[calicirro]

VILLAGE

riva del garda, italy

fujifilm x-h2

XF10-24mmF4 R OIS WR

camarón

ISO 3200 | 36 mm | 1.3 ev | ƒ 4.5 | 1/250 s

red spire

ISO 1600 | 36 mm | 0.3 ev | ƒ 11 | 1/800 s

cowboy

ISO 1600 | 36 mm | 0.3 ev | ƒ 10 | 1/800 s

10.8.2023

[francescointoppa]

Ailanti in città (Ailanthus altissima (Mill.) Swingle, Simaroubaceae)

[madbirdwoman]

[haciaelmar]

ripe | Leica M3 | Fuji T64 | 2012

[simplypaola]

Il Cupolone

[vforvaggelis]

Villa Borghese

[djuvlipen]

Did you hear about the Pilar barbie situation on TikTok where it was a white women lying about being Romani and created a whole make-up business off the lie 😭

GIRL omg 💀💀 gossiping about Pilar is one of my favourite activities...

She has a lot of lore so I'm going to walk you through all I can remember

For the people who don't know her, Pilar was an American tiktoker who made videos about Romani issues (this is the only remaining picture of her I found on tiktok)

From what I remember, she was already there in 2020 during COVID times when I became active on Romani internet. I don't even remember when she got really popular, it must have happened gradually or something but she was one of the biggest Romani 'internet activists' alongside Florian and Brooke (in the early days).

Sometimes she also dressed more 'traditional'

which... really just looks like she was putting on a costume. anyway I don't have more recent pictures from her tiktoks as she suspended her account but the way she wore a headscarf and golden jewellery to try and emulate being Romani was already pretty messed up and unnecessary, as a lot of Romani women dont wear either of these things in the first place

I don't remember what group she was originally claiming to be from, but that's the point, she kept changing it. Except that she did so over a very slow period of time and by making only vague references about her heritage so it was hard to catch on. Anyway, over the past 4 years I have heard her say she was:

Russian Romani

Polish Romani

Crimean Romani

Gitana/Spanish Romani

Sinti

Manush, to be even more specific

Mixed Eastern European Romani + Manush

And that is all I specifically remember but I wouldn't be surprised if she also had a kalderash or lovari arc at some point 💀 anyway, after a while I started noticing things weren't adding up and her heritage was very vague and that was weird. Not to be mean, but she is also American, and I always feel way, way more cautious when it comes to American Roma than European Roma, Romani racefakers are almost always American because no European in their right mind would think it's cool to pretend to be romani 😭😭

Anyway, what really made it for me was the stuff she used to say on tiktok. Some of it was just blatantly not true. I almost lost my mind during her Sinti arc because she said stuff like "Sara e Kali isn't a big religious figure for Sinti people", "Sara e Kali isn't a catholic romani figure", and then she also pretended to have ties to some famous Sinti people when i know for a fact that is not possible... But I can't say more about that because that would be too doxx-y... She also said some more bs about Sinti people and I corrected her in the comments and she tried to follow me and it was so cringe

Then I also knew she was toxic because she would harass Romani women on tiktok and I remember at least one instance when she insulted a European Romani woman by saying, "you claim to be Romani but you dress like a hoe, you're just a gadji because Romani women respect ourselves by covering up"....

Two other things that didn't sit right with me was her clntent. She would talk a lot about anti Roma racism in Europe, which was great, she would talk about news no one else talked about. But she had a very guilt-trippy and angry way to talk about it that made it look like she was overdoing it and mocking the way antiracist activists talk, just to get engagement. It didn't feel genuine. And also, she would put ads for her make up brand and Cosplays of her as Wanda Maximoff between tiktoks about pogroms and police brutality. It all looked like a scam and like she was doing some traumaporn just for people to buy her stuff

And she also bullied Brooke so hard that she never came back on Tiktok, even though she (Brooke) had been the OG Romani tiktoker, had even been featured in Romea (a Romani newspaper), and was genuinely half Romani. And why? Because she is white passing? That's stupid, Pilar was allegedly white passing herself

(the way so many Romani tiktokers turned their back against Brooke was super disgusting btw, I don't know her personally but from what I've heard she is a very nice person)

Anyway, by 2022 I knew for sure Pilar was lying. That year I got in touch with other Romani girls and women online and we discussed it and they also all knew that Pilat was lying. Her being a racefaker was pretty much an open secret, at least among (chronically) online Romani people. Except that none of us could call her out, because she was very popular and extremely toxic. I can't even tell you how toxic she was. She had a circle made up of other American Romani women and they bullied tons of Romani people online, and guess what these romani people had in common!

Most of them were women

Most of them had a complicated family history

A lot of them were white passing (really tho, being white passing seems to be a problem ONLY when you are a woman. white passing Romani men never receive any hate)

A lot of them were LGB

And these American Roma bullied them, made a lot of them suicidal (seriously, I've heard several accounts of Pilar's bullying victims becoming suicidal), because they allegedly weren't 'romani enough'.

So, obviously, neither me nor any of my friend could call her out because we weren't nowhere as popular and we were all LGB romnia.

But then came FLORIAN. Literally the only person who could put a stop to her shenanigans. Ngl, I think only Florian, a straight, American Romani man with a big platform could have stopped her. And I am so glad he did, because she really made being Romani on the internet very stressful. I was so scared she would come to Tumblr one day lmao. Anyway, I have a lot of bones to pick with Florian but that was his biggest W. Here is his tiktok btw:

[eopederson]

Scudo con quercia e stemma papale, Basilica di San Lorenzo, Roma, 2019.

[plantey]

mossy tree 💚

[wgm-beautiful-world]

ROME

[simgerale]

in the latest segment of Hero, Villian, Princess, and Astronaut...

[hsundholm]

Victory Bridge Sunset by Henrik Sundholm Via Flickr: Sunset at Ponte Vittorio Emanuele II in Rome, Italy.

[art3mus]

Giardino degli Aranci on Aventine Hill 1/31/2024

[unmatto]

Torpignattara, Roma, 2023

[llamasgotoheaven]

The way people don’t understand genetics history or geography is so apparent when people on Twitter bicker about whether southern and or eastern Europeans are white