Roma communities are facing strengthening prejudices and hostility in contemporary European societies and Hungary is no exception. Openly racist extreme right associations become increasingly popular and even the mainstream media is fraught with overt anti-Roma accounts. The aim of my thesis is to unfold tensions deeply- rooted in the Hungarian society that strongly contribute to the proliferation of aggression targeted towards the Roma. In order to contextualize these tensions, I examine anxieties about Hungarian identity raised by an ongoing civilizing process that produces modern, cultivated western subjectivities by marking eastern societies as inferior. My basic assumption is that Hungary is mimicking this civilization to produce a developed identity by inscribing backwardness upon the Roma. I explicate this process on two levels. First, I analyze discursive practices that produce aberrant Roma subjectivity. In addition, I examine the ways in which agents of the Hungarian state are involved in racist differentiation; not only by perpetuating racist discourses, but also via concrete policies and practices that I demonstrate through the gentrification of Budapest.