One cannot escape during Sinterklaas season in the Netherlands.
No single Dutch child is spared of Blackface, a racist stereotype imposed not only by those who profit from it in a strictly commercial sense, that is frantic sale à la Christmas (Blackface films, Blackface costumes, Blackface sweets, Blackface dolls, Blackface gift wrap), but also by those who benefit from white supremacy and finally by those who do not, but are deeply unaware of it or purposefully turn a blind eye.
In our attempts to enter dialogue with schools and after-school-care institutions in Amsterdam, we have departed from a shared concern with the education of (our) children, a task in which parents have the primary responsibility, and educational institutions have an important role to play. Most Amsterdam primary school and after-school-care policy documents give a prominent place to ‘respect for diversity’ as they are declaredly aware of their role in fostering the ‘development of a child’s positive identity.’ In this way they ‘support the child to find her/his place in the world.’ But then, if so, what is Blackface doing at school/after-school-care?
Zwarte Piet is a racialised representation of ‘the Black,’ shaped in the XIX century –still times of the European empires – when it was introduced to the Sinterklaas festivities in the Netherlands, a much older tradition dating back to the Middle Ages (Nederveen Pieterse 1998). The Dutch Blackface is therefore a product of the European imperial enterprise; it is a representation of the black African as joyful in ‘its’ docile servitude to the white European, analogous with the North-American Minstrel Shows and the British Golliwog (Nederveen Pieterse 1992). This representation exists with and because of the history of mass enslavement of Africans (Luckhardt), a commercial enterprise that counted with the participation of the Netherlands and contributed to its riches; a riches that shaped the city of Amsterdam (Hondius). But imperial colonisation was not simply a system of economic exploitation, as it was a complex machinery of white supremacy put in motion to enable and perpetuate such exploitation. The fabrication of the joyful black servant was a fundamental element in the functioning of this machinery.
As much as conservative historians argue that any evaluation of history is anachronistic (for ‘we cannot apply a contemporary gaze to historical phenomena’) it is a historical fact that not everybody found slavery acceptable even at ‘its own time,’ and research that dares looking beyond the historical canon reaching to the voices, deeds and experiences of those that countered slavery, confirms that. One does not need to condemn yesterday’s slavery on the basis of today’s moral values but on the basis of an inclusive historical canon. But to simplify matters, we object to Blackface with the values of today, the ones other people and institutions affirm to cherish and uphold.
Today the Netherlands are composed by a great diversity of peoples and one of the aspects of this diversity is the fact that a black person is a Dutch citizen and a Dutch child who experiences her/his childhood alongside and hopefully (but not probably) together with children of other colours. This child has the right to receive an education whereby s/he is not confronted with a racialised representation of her/himself. Children of other colours have the right to receive an education that enables them to understand that all peoples are equally worth. This will prepare them for life and community in the bigger world. For now the school and after-school-care have a big place in their small world. They establish what is right and wrong, and it is wrong to provide a seal of approval to a racialised stereotype that will feed name-calling and a twisted understanding of the world around.
The mother who hears that her black child was jokingly called Zwarte Piet holds her child tight, her stomach turns upside down: indignation, revolt and/or subjugation as no one can escape Blackface in the Netherlands anno 2012. But we must. All children have the right for respect, for unguarded fun and for a better world.
Patricia Schor
