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Zwarte Piet and the Colonial Inheritance: The Roots of Dutch Racism Denial

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The controversial painting “A Tribute to the Colonies” (1898) adorns the side of the "Golden Coach" in which the Dutch Queen annually rides, in her capacity as head of state,on the day in September (“Prinsjesdag”) in which she makes the annual budget public.  Painted 36 years after the abolition of formal slavery, it depicts contented black coolies humbly offering the fruits of their labors to the Queen and her assistants clad in ancient Greek attire–and a child among them gratefully receiving a book in return.  To the left, the queen is greeted by more formally-dressed and  respectful members of the Indonesian aristocracy.  Indonesian coolies bow lower behind them. Few visual images are so direct in their representation of the “civilizing mission” of Dutch colonialism and its hierarchies.  But for many, the link to Zwarte Piet remains anything but obvious.
The controversial painting “A Tribute to the Colonies” (1898) adorns the side of the “Golden Coach” in which the Dutch queen annually rides, in her capacity as head of state, on the day in September (“Prinsjesdag”) in which she makes the annual budget public. Painted 36 years after the abolition of formal slavery, it depicts contented black coolies humbly offering the fruits of their labors to the queen and her assistants clad in ancient Greek attire–and a child among them gratefully receiving a book in return. To the right, the queen is greeted by more formally-dressed and reservedly respectful members of the Indonesian aristocracy. Indonesian coolies bow lower behind them. Few visual images are so direct in their representation of the “civilizing mission” of Dutch colonialism–and its hierarchies. But contemporary debates over the painting’s significance and appropriateness as an ongoing symbol of state have remained caught up in a near-exclusive focus on its connection to the institution of slavery, allowing other aspects of colonialism’s broader social and ideological legacy to remain comfortably in the shadows.  Similar problems of Dutch post-colonial myopia are evident in debates surrounding the increasingly controversial holiday figure “Black Pete.”

Ethan Mark

Leiden University

Sifting through the countless negative, often aggressive and sometimes downright offensive Dutch responses to the Facebook Page “Zwart Piet is Racisme”—their numbers must be in the thousands by now, exploding exponentially with the arrival of December 5th, and they consistently outnumber supportive commentary by a margin of at least ten to one—one is struck by their similar and recurring pattern and structure.  Over and over, those who proclaim that Zwarte Piet is racist are told to “go back where they came from”; to “stop destroying a warm and innocent children’s holiday; and to “stop introducing racism where it isn’t.”  Particularly remarkable among them, however, are the following patterns:

1.  The deployment of the argument that the notion of racism is an American import which, having been exposed as unacceptable, thankfully no longer exists in the Netherlands; indeed that this very lack of racism and race consciousness is what makes the Netherlands’ warm and intimate relationship with Zwarte Piet possible and special.

2.  The fact that Dutch people of color of non-African origin (“Indos” and Surinamese “Hindus” in particular) are often among the fiercest defenders of Zwarte Piet and the notion of a racism-free Netherlands; they are also among the harshest critics of Dutch of African descent who they see as using American-style complaints about racism as a weapon to gain illegitimate social advantage.

Critical analysts of the Zwarte Piet phenomenon, for their part, continue to return to what seems an indisputable link between the historical figure of Zwarte Piet and the institutions of slavery in the 19th century and “blackface” in the 20th.  All it takes to see these, they argue, is to open your eyes and put Piet’s moment of origin (in the mid-19th century, when slavery was still alive and well in the Caribbean), image (differing from that of the conventional American “sambo” only in terms of clothing and, more recently—somewhat—in hairstyle)  and standard attributes (“agile,” “acrobatic,” “clownish,” subservient) side by side against these now universally condemned racist institutions and stereotypes.  In this perception, the Netherlands, which prides itself on being a beacon of Western tolerance, enlightenment, liberalism, and progress, appears to remain inexplicably “behind” the rest of the world in clinging to Zwarte Piet–and thus denying the undeniable.

The result is a fundamental disconnect between the two positions, in which each perceives the other as inexplicably and inexcusably closed-minded, blind, and self-righteous.  While there are of course numerous reasons for this—a sociological mapping of supporters and critics would itself yield a very rich mapping of the political fault lines of contemporary Dutch society—here I will rather focus upon specific legacies of Dutch colonialism, or rather their invisibility within the whole discussion, as one key to understanding the gap, and the location of the figure of Zwarte Piet in the Netherlands today.  Put simply I would argue that an essential aspect of the gap in mutual understanding lies in the exclusive conventional association of Zwarte Piet, among both supporters and critics, with the “New World” institution of slavery, and the racism associated with it alone.

Critics of Zwarte Piet say that he represents an undeniable legacy of racism that evolved through and out of slavery; supporters of Zwarte Piet say that they know good and well what this slavery and racism is, and that Holland’s relationship with Zwarte Piet could not be more different from it.  In so doing, consciously or unconsciously, both sides elide colonialism’s contribution to Dutch identity both yesterday and today.

What both sides so often overlook—or refuse to recognize—is that we see in the figure of Zwarte Piet the reflection, combination and incarnation of not one, but two fundamental types of racism.  Overwhelmingly dominant in the discussion is “New World” or slavery-based racism.  The second, more subtle and less well-understood inflection of racism, is what we might call “Old World” or colonial racism.  For conventional critics of Zwarte Piet, it appears difficult to see or acknowledge that there is a genuine difference between the two racisms and their social logics.  Conversely for Zwarte Piet’s supporters—who always insist that there is only one form of racism, i.e. slavery-based racism, and that poor Piet has nothing to do with it—it appears practically impossible to acknowledge a fundamental similarity and linkage between them.

In brief, slavery-based racism was, and is, the product of a system of complete and unchallenged white domination. Its logic and worldview were, and are, relatively simple and stark:  There are two races, white and black.  One is born to rule, the other to serve.  Its essence can be seen in the insidious “one drop” principle operative in old American law:  One drop of “black blood” and you’re black.

Colonial racism, on the other hand, was and is based on a situation in which colonial rulers, who represented an ethnic minority (“whites”), were compelled to compromise with a local (non-“white”) ethnic majority in order to maintain their power.  It therefore relied and relies on a strategy of divide and rule, a systematic mix of exclusion and (at least the promise of) inclusion.  Here there is thus necessarily not only “white” and “black”; there is also a whole bunch of “grey” in-between.  In the former Dutch colonies of the Netherlands Indies and Suriname—but also according to local circumstances in those of Britain, France, Belgium, the US, and elsewhere (including Japan)—people of color who were useful to whites and “behaved themselves properly” could be granted the status of “honorary whites,” or at least “secondary whites.”  Within this context, in dealings between “whites” and “honorary whites,” the existence and legitimacy of racism was formally denied.  For those outside of the European fold, meanwhile, racism remained the order of the day (and, in many cases such as the Netherlands Indies, the law of the land). The result was—and remains—a situation that allows white people to deny racism because they could, and can, always point to people of color to whom they accord honorary white status (or, at least, who they claim to treat and perceive as equals, practices of informal racism notwithstanding).  For their part, the “honorary whites” found themselves in a position in which they had—and still have—the greatest investment in a colonial status quo that favored them over other “colored people.”   At the risk of over-simplification for the sake of brevity, it can be argued that this helps to explain why it is members of these “middleman” groups that often become both the biggest racists (towards those further down the status ladder) and the biggest racism-deniers (towards white people) of all—and often remain so today.

The history of Europe and the Americas involves a complex interplay and intersection of these two types and lineages of racism.  The Dutch position in this history is, like those of the other empires, a distinctive mix.  The East India Company played a unique and central role in the building and enriching of the early modern Dutch empire through both the institution of the Atlantic slave trade to the West and the exploration, exploitation and colonization of the Indonesian “spice islands” to the East.  The East Indies subsequently became, by far, the greatest imperial source of Dutch investment and return both material and psychological.  While on a conscious level the Dutch today are typically lacking in knowledge of their colonial past as a whole, in Dutch history, economy, demography, and national consciousness it was surely the experience of the Netherlands Indies that loomed—and still looms—much larger than the rest of the empire.  The repatriation of some half a million “Indische Nederlanders” to the Netherlands after the Second World War was of a scale dwarfing other, more recent postcolonial immigration waves.  Correspondingly, it can be argued that in today’s Netherlands, the legacies of colonial or “Old World” racism remain stronger in their social and ideological effect than those of slavery or “New World” racism.  Even in their “West Indian” colonies, Dutch colonialism saw a mix of the two forms/systems of racism as defined here, as the VOC not only established and perpetuated slavery but also initiated a flow of  non-African colonial subjects, in particular South and Southeast Asians, to pursue opportunities as colonial middlemen—essentially what I describe above as “honorary whites.”

At the level of Dutch consciousness of racism, meanwhile, the cultural power of the United States and its specific history of racism—one dominated by slavery and slavery racism—acts as a double-edged sword.  The global visibility of the US and its experience in recent decades as a both a place of abject racism and a struggle against it has genuinely inspired in Holland, as elsewhere around the world, a rejection of racism as seen in the US.  At the same time, US power and its resultant global monopolization of the meaning and understanding of racism serves as a convenient shield against an acknowledgement and examination of the more complex and often more subtle forms of “home-grown” racism in Europe and elsewhere, in particular those that are the inheritance of a complex history of colonialism.

The Zwarte Piet of the Dutch imagination embodies these very contradictions, representing a complex and dynamic hybrid of two histories and heritages of racism that are deeply interrelated and connected but not reducible to one another.  As such Zwarte Piet virtually invites misrecognition from both supporters and critics alike.   There can be no doubt that Zwarte Piet is Racism.  But here I might suggest adding an (imaginary) “s” to the word “racism” as a mnemonic device.   For if we hope to expose Zwarte Piet for what he is, we need to first recognize and acknowledge his distinctive nature and location in the Dutch racial imaginary, his slippery maneuverability in the ideological space between slave and “honorary white”—and the complex histories that lurk behind the simplicities of denial and denouncement.


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