So there's this thing I've been bumping my head against recently. It's one of those cultural differences that may not have a truly right or wrong answer, or side, or anything like that. It may be varying shades of gray and it's something I can deal with in the long run but it's also something I've been bumping my head on.
It's the Dutch holiday tradition of Sinterklaas. Sinterklaas, also known as St. Nicholas, is not unfamiliar to me. However his little helpers, who fill many of the same job descriptions as Santa's elves, were unfamiliar at least in this guise. I'd heard brief references to Black Peter in the stories I'd heard so I expected something similar, and it sort of is. He's called Zwarte Piet here, and there's more then one of him. Not a problem in and of itself really. When I started getting a tad uncomfortable was when I realised that Zwarte Piete is generally played by white actors in blackface. That's when the fact that there's more then one and they're the "little helpers" started to make me uncomfortable too.
None of the locals see any of this as a problem either. The fact that some people do find it racist is making the news here. Has been for several weeks in fact. And the locals get very upset when their tradition is called racist and protest that it isn't, it's just an old holiday tradition. I wasn't sure what to think for a little while, because it comes across as racist to me and I was having trouble seeing how the people here couldn't see that, so I took a bit of time to try and puzzle it out.
The first thing to realise is that this is the most Caucasian country I've ever been in. I'd never seen so many blond and blue eyed children in one place before I went to the school to pick up the kids, and most of the parents look much the same. There are two families that I've seen who aren't White. One is Black, the other Asian. This may not be as true in the bigger cities, but the Netherlands still strikes me as a predominantly White country. This is not a bad thing but it means that there are some perspectives that won't be heard simply because they aren't there. The other thing to keep in mind is that, while the Netherlands certainly participated in the slave trade it wasn't legal in the country itself, so my impression is they didn't do much of the re-shaping and re-working that other countries had to go through to reach a certain level of equality. They may not have needed to. The end result of that (from my perspective) is that they literally don't see the racist connotations in the imagery of Zwarte Piet. It doesn't occur to them that some people will look at the master/servant relationship between St. Nick and Zwarte Piet, note the skin colours, and also see a master/slave dynamic. And for someone who's grown up in a country still struggling with institutionalised racism and next door to another country dealing with much the same thing it sticks out like a sore thumb.
Maybe I'm being too sensitive (I won't think I am, obviously) and maybe I've got it all wrong. As I said before, this is something I can deal with. But I can see it from the perspective of those who think it is racist and when I try I can see it from the Dutch perspective too, and no matter which way I look at it I get a little twitchy.
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