Not Culture: Exploitation Violence, Racism, and the Manufacturing of No-Future
We Are Not ‘Day-Savers,’ We Are a People Exiled Into a Colonized Timelessness
Cumur Ülker, a Roma activist, writer, and researcher from Türkiye, takes aim at the notions of Romany 'timelessness' and 'living from day to day without a plan for the future' - and exposes the colonial and oppressive structures that informs those notions.
Abstract: This article challenges the widespread culturalist narrative that portrays Roma communities as “day-to-day” or “present-bound.” Drawing on a decolonial and socialist perspective, it reveals how states and social structures impose a colonial regime of manufactured futurelessness on Roma people through structural racism, displacement, precarity, and ontological violence. Rather than a cultural pattern, this so-called “present-bound existence” is shown to be the result of systemic oppression. The article calls for collective consciousness, organized struggle, and political self-representation as the only way for Roma communities to reclaim their future.
“We did not ruin the day; the day broke us.”
— A saying from a Romani resistance fighter
One of the most persistent judgments directed at us Romani people is the derogatory cultural reading built around the notion of “living day to day.” This interpretation claims that we do not organize for the future, do not plan, and do not think long-term. Yet when placed against the historical and contemporary realities of the Romani People, this claim is not only wrong but an ideological form of violence and manipulation.
This text examines our so-called “present-bound” existence not as a cultural behaviour, but as a form of imposed timelessness created by the state and society.
Accusing a People Whose Future Has Been Taken Away of “Living Day-to-Day” Is a Colonial Act
For centuries, we Romani people have been displaced, demonized, restricted to the most dangerous and marginal occupations, registered and surveilled, labelled as “nomadic,” “dangerous,” and “undisciplined,” ghettoized, and subjected repeatedly to displacement through urban transformation projects.
Our inability to plan for the future is not a choice but the outcome of centuries-long policies of exclusion and exploitation violence.
The colonial logic of the state has continuously destabilized our homes, neighborhoods, work, labor, and safety, rendering our sense of the future fragile, insecure, and easily destroyed.
Thus, the “day-to-day living” accusation is a violent and unjust charge directed at a people whose future has been systematically taken away throughout history.
The Romani Ontology of the “Present”: Not an Absence of Planning, but the Constant Destruction of the Life Needed to Plan
Our Romani existence is not a culture limited to the present; it is experiential knowledge of survival.
This knowledge emerges because the state and society impose and reproduce “tomorrow” as an insecure, discriminatory, and unstable terrain.
For Roman families, the fundamental question is always:
“Will they evict us again tomorrow?”
This anxiety is not cultural; it is an ontological tension born from being repeatedly uprooted.
In education, this violence appears through discriminatory school registration, the label “This child won’t study,” invisible classroom racism, exclusionary attitudes in guidance services, and children being blamed for absenteeism though they are pushed out by discrimination.
In such a system, the inability of families to create “long-term educational plans” is not cultural
deficiency—it is a direct result of education being an unsafe and violent institution for Romani people. The very space that should provide repair becomes a site where violence and exclusion are normalized.
Futurelessness in the Labour Market: The Most Precarious Work to Romans—Then the Blame to falls to Romanies Again
Discrimination and racism in the labour market—employers refusing to hire Romanies, sub-minimum wage offers, uninsured labour, moralistic and degrading attitudes towards Roman women, the refusal to send workplace shuttles to Roman neighbourhoods, invisible barriers to stable employment—push Romans into a forced “day-to-day survival” mode.
Capitalism pushes us into the most precarious forms of labour and then presents this precarity as if it were our culture. This is a racist distortion that conceals class-based exploitation.
Thus, “day-to-day work” is not a Roman choice; it is the only labour model imposed upon us.
Exclusion in Health: A System Where Even Basic Treatment Is Not Guaranteed Makes Future-Building Impossible
We Romani people experience systemic exclusion in healthcare: discrimination in registering with family doctors, the humiliation of pregnant Roman women, profiling in emergency rooms, “socially problematic family” labeling, constant address and paperwork barriers, lack of continuity for chronic illnesses, and exclusion of Roman elders from care services.
These barriers cause Romans to lose jobs, prevent our children from attending or staying in school, obstruct access to social support, and make “future planning” physically impossible.
Social Exclusion: Society Itself Narrows Roman People’s Experience of Time
The futurelessness imposed on us is not only a state policy; it is reproduced daily through social racism:
Refusal to rent homes to Roman families, exclusion from public spaces, security following and monitoring Romanies, suspicion toward Romani workers, mockery and harassment of Romani children, treating Romani communities as “vote-for-hire” during elections, and moralistic stigmatization of Romani women in public.
These forms of exclusion shrink our collective imagination of tomorrow. A people whose future horizon has been narrowed appears “present-bound,” yet this appearance is the outcome of social racism—not culture.
A Truth of Colonial Power: Those Who Steal Our Future Then Declare Us “Day-to-Day People”
From a decolonial perspective, the discourse of “living day-to-day” is a language produced precisely to hide the colonial temporal regime imposed upon the Roman People.
This system of violence and denial:
steals our spaces,
renders our labor precarious,
excludes us from education,
blocks us in healthcare,
surrounds us in society,
and then attributes the consequences of these structures to Romani “culture.”
By doing so, it legitimizes ontological denial and enables the continuation of cultural genocide.
This is not only unjust—it is an ideological strategy designed to prevent our political subjectivation.
The question is not why we Romanies cannot build a future, but who has dismantled our future.
Against Manufactured No-Future: Collective Consciousness and Organized Struggle
Our “present-locked” existence is not the result of culture but of a systemic regime of futurelessness created by the state, capital, and society. This regime can only be dismantled through collective consciousness, shared memory, and organized struggle.
Romani historical experience shows us:
Our future becomes real only when we build it together.
Collective awareness—within families, neighborhoods, associations, women’s networks, youth initiatives, cultural spaces—forms the resistance line against the mechanisms that steal our
tomorrow.
Thus, the task is not only to expose discrimination, but to rebuild the future as a collective right.
This requires an organized path in three essential areas:
1. Building Collective Consciousness: Shattering the “Culture” Myth
A collective consciousness that rejects all narratives attributing Romani futurelessness to culture allows us to see and demonstrate our true power.
Such consciousness makes visible:
not lack of education, but barriers to accessing education;
not unemployment, but the labor markets closed to us;
not precarity, but the exploitation imposed upon us;
not stereotypes, but the state policies that produce them.
Organized struggle then exposes not the “supposedly flawed culture,” but the system that manufactures violence and exclusion.
2. Organized Struggle: Romans Creating Their Own Political Representation
The future is built only by an organized people. What Roman People need is not mere cultural defense but a political line.
The components of this line must include:
• Neighborhood-level and later municipal-level Roman assemblies
• Roman women’s organizations (since futurelessness hits women the hardest)
• Roman youth collectives
• Legal defense and rights-monitoring networks
• Collective educational support systems (to prevent school dropouts)
• Unions or collectives of Roman workers resisting precarity
These structures force the state to engage with Roman People not as a “cultural problem” but as a political subject.
3. Praxis: Concrete Ways to Break No-Future
Reclaiming the Roman future is not merely theoretical; it requires concrete action.
For our ontological and epistemological struggle, collective forms of praxis must include:
• Creating networks to monitor discrimination in schools
• Mechanisms to document racism in job applications
• Rapid-response groups against neighborhood demolitions
• Public protest practices for rights-based demands
• Protection networks for Roman women facing discrimination in healthcare
• Cultural and political events that break the invisibility of Roman youth
• Mechanisms for rapid anti-racist response in media and social media
These actions are not about “saving the day,” but about fighting for an equal, free, and democratic tomorrow.
The Power That Breaks Futurelessness Is the Organized Strength of the Roman People
The claim that we Romanies “live day-to-day” is not cultural; it is the outcome of a systemic regime of futurelessness imposed by the state, capital, and society.
This system does not simply produce discrimination—it controls and exploits Romani time, labour, space, and subjectivity.
Thus, the issue is not our intentions or individual efforts. The issue is our capacity—as Romani People—to organize as a political force.
The future can only be reclaimed through collective will.
Our future will not be built by charity projects, folklorized cultural events, state-managed “participation tables,” or election-time promises.
What will build our future is our ability to create our own name, our own voice, and our own forms of organization.
This organization will grow through:
neighbourhood assemblies,
autonomous solidarity networks created by Roman women,
youth reclaiming public space,
Romani workers organizing against precarity,
families taking collective stance in schools,
resistance lines built against exclusion in healthcare.
The system that steals our future will be broken only through such collective will.
Action is not only protest:
Action is defending the neighbourhood.
Action is not leaving a child alone at school.
Action is exposing racist behaviour at work.
Action is revealing the face of violent state policies.
Action is transforming solidarity from “culture” into a political stance.
This collective struggle is the only force that will free the Romani People from the grip of the present and reconnect us to tomorrow.
Because our “present-bound existence” is not fate—it is the product of a system that wants it to look like fate.
And that system will crack the moment we Romani People organize.
By Cumur Ülker
I am Cumur Ülker, a Roma activist, writer, and researcher from Türkiye. My work focuses on
structural racism, antigypsyism, and the colonial regimes of manufactured timelessness imposed on Roma communities across Europe. In my academic production, I center decolonial theory, political subjectivation, collective memory politics, and the ontological experiences of marginalization within Roma communities.
My aim is not only to expose the multiple forms of exclusion imposed on Roma people, but also to help build political structures and struggle-based frameworks capable of transforming these conditions. I work in solidarity with Roma organizations, women’s collectives, and youth initiatives; producing multilingual analyses, field-informed texts, and resistance-oriented political perspectives that strengthen the visibility and legitimacy of Roma epistemologies within academic and public
spheres.
My research is grounded in a decolonial framework that understands Roma people not as a cultural category, but as a historically oppressed yet highly transformative political subject. My goal is to contribute to constructing a collective line of resistance against all colonial and racist structures that seek to steal the future of Roma people, and to strengthen the capacity of Roma communities to speak, act, and exist as political subjects in their own right.