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Last month Warner Bros announced plans for a Nightwing movie from Lego Batman Movie director Chris McKay, set within the evolving DC Cinematic Universe. The announcement is a logical next step for the studio, as it places a spotlight on one of the most popular characters in the Batman family. It's also news that makes a lot of fans of the character nervous, as Nightwing is one of the few positive mainstream representations of Rromani identity in popular culture. Many fans fear that this element of the character won't make it to the big screen, in the latest example of live action comics adaptations ignoring opportunities for diversity and minority representation.

We live in a time when hate speech directed at marginalized people has become too commonplace in public and political rhetoric; a time when the demonization of Muslims, immigrants, transgender people and others masquerades as a defense of security or virtue; when nostalgia for "the good old days" sanctifies a past in which marginalized people were deprived of respect, voice, or power. The fear-mongering of politicians seeps down into everyday conversation, feeding commonplace prejudices. Even so, it's still shocking to hear that sort of rhetoric presented on the stage at a comic convention by one of the industry's most high profile authors, especially at a panel discussing LGBTQ themes in Marvel's X-Men comics. Yet at last week's New York Comic Con, writer Peter David indulged in exactly that sort of hate speech, in this instance directed at one of the world's most easily and persistently scapegoated communities: the Rromani people.