[Nettime-nl] Zwarte Piet(en) in The Guardian

[Patrice Riemens <patrice@xs4all.nl>]

origineel:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/nov/14/black-pete-scandal-dutch-silent-sinterklaas



Black Pete: the scandal we Dutch can’t stay silent about any more
Joost de Vries
The Guardian, Wed 14 Nov 2018

Is November’s Sinterklaas festival a vestige of slavery or benign? It’s 
part of a debate about our culture we simply can’t escape


Last month in the city of Leeuwarden, in the north of the Netherlands, 
34 people – mostly men – stood trial, charged with one of the oddest 
crimes in recent history. The crime had been committed a year earlier. 
Here are the circumstances: in mid-November, as the tradition has it, 
Sinterklaas, or Saint Nicholas, was due to arrive in Dokkum, a nearby 
town in the region of Friesland. Each year children flock to see the 
Sint (Saint) come off his boat – it’s a highly popular televised event. 
And each year, more and more activists set out to protest against the 
tradition.

What they protest against is not Sinterklaas himself – who rides a grey 
horse called Amerigo and hands out presents on his birthday. No, the 
problem is Black Pete. Originally Black Pete was to Sint what Luca Brasi 
was to Don Corleone: his muscle man, his enforcer. In the olden days, if 
children had behaved badly during the year, Pete would give them “the 
switch”. Or worse, he would stuff them in a sack and take them away. An 
elderly white man plays Sinterklaas. Pete is played by a white man too, 
dressed in minstrel clothing with his face painted black.

Anti-racism activists see Black Pete as a prime example of how racism 
and traces of slavery are present in the ordinary traditions of Dutch 
culture today. In recent years people of colour have started speaking 
out, detailing how often they’ve been compared to Black Pete, jokingly 
or otherwise, and how offensive that is. Meanwhile, self-proclaimed 
pro-Black Pete activists have said that getting rid of Black Pete, or 
changing him, would be tantamount to selling out Dutch national 
identity.

In the Leeuwarden court, the defendants were pro-Black Pete activists. 
Last year they had waited for the buses with the anti-Black Pete 
activists to arrive on a narrow stretch of a main road – and then they’d 
managed to block the entire road with their cars. Now they were charged 
with obstructing the right to free protest.

At the trial, several Black Pete supporters were dressed up in the 
colours of the region, with Frisian flags and wooden clogs – as if to 
underscore their cultural roots. Hundreds of local Frisians came out to 
support them. In the end, the defendants were sentenced to between 80 
and 240 hours of community service. They bore their punishments proudly, 
like battle scars.

The trial came across as another illustration of what’s become a chronic 
national controversy. Just as Sinterklaas is a landmark tradition in the 
Netherlands, so too now is the debate about Black Pete. It took us quite 
a while to realise there’s something off about the character. Not until 
a decade ago, when foreign media started writing about this, did it 
become apparent that Black Pete might not be “just a funny folkloristic 
character” but in fact a blatantly racist stereotype.

The pro- versus anti- debate has a touch of the Dreyfus affair about it, 
with both sides being overheated and even sometimes aggressive. The 
pro-Pete side rejects the notion that Pete embodies a slave; instead 
they see him as Sint’s friendly helper. The anti-Pete side points out 
that the relationship between white master and black servant is nothing 
but colonial.

The pro-Pete side claims that Pete isn’t black at all – his face is 
covered with soot only because he goes up and down chimneys to bring 
gifts. The anti-Pete side asks: in that case, why the racist caricature, 
the curly hair, thick red lips and big golden earrings? The pro-Pete 
side will say: he’s a tradition, get used to it. The anti-Pete side will 
say: Dutch society is no longer a homogeneous white society, get used to 
that.

One of the go-to arguments of the pro-Black Pete side is that 
quarrelling about it ends up spoiling the entire celebration for 
children. But if this were really about the children, surely the Black 
Pete supporters would have paid more attention to a report published two 
years ago by the children’s ombudsman. It clearly states that many 
children of colour find the Black Pete season very troubling: during 
those weeks they’re more often confronted with racial slurs, usually by 
other children who call them Black Pete and poke fun at them.

In a sense this debate isn’t necessarily typical of the Dutch; it’s the 
type of debate that’s going on all over Europe. Every country surely has 
its own awkward, outdated tradition – where every effort to update it, 
or to make sure it is offensive to no one, is met with fierce 
resistance. Nor is this entirely a question of the left versus the 
right. Leftwing people are easily found on the pro-Pete side. It is more 
a question of being able and self-confident enough to cope with change, 
or of being so insecure that you want to cling on to the past, because 
the future is a jump into the unknown.

In his book Nixonland, about the rise of Richard Nixon and his “silent 
majority”, the American historian Rick Perlstein writes that the 
president had a gift for “looking below social surfaces to see and 
exploit the subterranean truths that roiled underneath”, and he 
understood that “the future belonged to the politician who could tap the 
ambivalence – the nameless dread, the urge to make it all go away; to 
make the world placid again, not a cacophonous mess”. Times are changing 
faster then ever. With new technologies and social media, those 
transformations jump up at us constantly – there’s no escaping them. So 
the urge to make it all go away becomes even greater.

The silence of the silent majority is the problem – much more so, 
perhaps, than the excitement of those pro-Black Pete activists brought 
to justice. A large majority of the population seems to keep its 
thoughts to itself. Yet it’s impossible to have a dialogue with someone 
who keeps quiet and then only speaks out at the ballot box, producing 
election results no one sees coming.

Sinterklaas is expected on 17 November in Zaanstad, north of Amsterdam. 
The Dutch public broadcaster has announced that Black Pete would look 
different this year – with “only soot” on his face and no earrings. The 
one good thing that’s come out of the entire debate is that it forces 
each of us to work out what our ideas are, what kind of culture we want 
to live in, and what defines a country. Black Pete should belong to the 
past. We should know better than to hang on to a tradition with racist 
undertones. As a society, we need to take a hard look at ourselves, and 
think about what future we want.

• Joost de Vries is a Dutch author
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