Zwarte Piet #68 't Heerlijk avondje is gekomen

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Op zaterdag 6 december 2014 02:39 schreef ZetaOS het volgende:

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Laten we de Egyptenaren hier maar even buiten houden, ik bedoel natuurlijk de echte bos negers.

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Op zaterdag 6 december 2014 07:13 schreef Megumi het volgende:
Maar recente gebeurtenissen in de VS en de documentaire zo zwart als roet zetten je wel aan het denken. Ik denk dat er wel wat moet veranderen aan de Piet.

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Op zaterdag 6 december 2014 08:46 schreef Iblardi het volgende:

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Waarom zijn gebeurtenissen in de VS relevant voor de Nederlandse situatie?

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Op vrijdag 5 december 2014 22:42 schreef voetbalmanager2 het volgende:

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In Amerika maken ze zich nu vooral druk om daadwerkelijk racisme. Met tevens wel wat verstrekkender gevolgen als een paar mensen die 'zich gekwetst voelen'.

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Op zaterdag 6 december 2014 02:14 schreef theunderdog het volgende:

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Het is maar waar je lol in hebt.

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Op zaterdag 6 december 2014 02:36 schreef Bram_van_Loon het volgende:

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Een nuchter antwoord.

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Op zaterdag 6 december 2014 09:46 schreef voetbalmanager2 het volgende:

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Vanaf 26 tot 30 min.
http://nos.nl/uitzending/1313-uitzending.html

Die 5 minuten van je tijd zijn het zeker waard

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Op zaterdag 6 december 2014 10:40 schreef Kosmoproleet het volgende:
Het slotje die je weet dat zal komen

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Two years ago, I was a freelance reporter on the island of Curacao, a former Dutch colony and a territory once key to the European slave trade in the New World. Within a few months, I began making friends, picking up some Dutch and Papiamento (the local, Creolized language) and absorbing a bit of the culture. Before arriving there, I had been aware of the Dutch holiday tradition of Sinterklaas (something like Santa Claus) and his mischievous helper-slave Zwarte Piet (or Black Pete). I knew that many white Dutch loved to dress up as Zwarte Piet by painting their faces black and their lips bright red and donning curly wigs. I thought I was ready to face this character, who is bumbling, mischievous and dimwitted, but nevertheless kind to children.

Nothing could have emotionally prepared me, however, for my first encounters with Zwarte Piet in the flesh.

From late November to early December, I felt as though I was in a colonial “Twilight Zone.” It was like having a front-row seat to a three-week-long minstrel show, with the capital city of Willemstad as the stage. Sure enough, people dressed themselves in brightly colored costumes, painted their faces black and their lips bright red and donned coarse-haired Afro-wigs. Zwarte Piet blackfaces were on the covers of chocolates, ice cream advertisements and gift-wrap packaging. There were Zwarte Piet specials at the mall. I was struck by how deeply embedded Zwarte Piet was in the Sinterklaas tradition and how integral that annual tradition was to what it meant to be Dutch. I found it hard to process the cruel irony that an island that was founded on the trafficking of African slave labor and that was 80 percent black also participated in the Zwarte Piet charade.

I became anxious about going out for those weeks. Blackface was everywhere. There is something especially humiliating to walk about in a world where my skin and hair could be someone’s “costume” for a day. (A Dutch man jokingly told me that my natural hair looked like Zwarte Piet’s. I didn’t find that funny at all.) It got to the point where I preferred to stay home. I wasn’t particularly inclined for social outings, especially when any questions I had about Zwarte Piet were met with defensiveness (“It’s just innocent children’s fun. Do you hate children?”), outright hostility (“It’s not our fault you have low self-esteem about being black”) or even name-calling (“Aren’t you being racist for saying Zwarte Piet is racist?). Frankly, it was a damaging experience. I couldn’t wait for Dec. 5 to arrive so that I wouldn’t have to see Zwarte Piet again. There wasn’t enough pepernoten or kruidnoten in the world that could have made me stomach this tradition.

A Zwarte Piet appears in a Sinterklaas parade in Willemstad, Curacao, in 2012. (Karen Attiah/The Washington Post)

While Curacao celebrated Sinterklaas and Zwarte Piet, people from other former Dutch colonies, such as St. Martin, told me that those countries are less tolerant of Zwarte Piet because they are more influenced by the United States and surrounding islands. Curacao is a bit more isolated and in many ways is under a much stronger influence from the Netherlands in its political affairs and its educational system — despite its official status as an autonomous country. So I’m not surprised that the Sinterklaas tradition was so strong there. Colonial ties can be hard to shake.

Nevertheless, dear Nederlanders:Overt celebrations of blackface characters such as Zwarte Piet do not belong in the 21st century. Zwarte Piet, under the guise of entertainment, is a modern-day commodification of blackness as caricature, the mockery of blackness for profit and mirth. I stress profit, because Sinterklaas and Zwarte Piet no doubt command big business every year in the Netherlands.

Zwarte Piet simply cannot be divorced from the historical participation of the Netherlands in the trafficking of black labor across the Atlantic. “But he is loved by the children,” Dutch people would tell me. And therein lies the danger: The Zwarte Piet celebrations reinforce, year after year, that to be loved and black in Dutch society is to be subordinate and inferior, an object of mockery.

The defense of Zwarte Piet as a Dutch children’s tradition ignores (perhaps willfully) that Zwarte Piet is a common Western stereotype of people of African descent, just like Sambo in the United States, or Hergé’s depictions of black people in “Tintin in the Congo,” during the time period when the end of slavery and the beginning of the European colonial project necessitated white European supremacy as justification. Zwarte Piet cannot be considered in a vacuum outside of this particular history, nor should the tradition be divorced from the context of inequalities that exist in former Dutch colonies or contemporary racism and xenophobia that persist in the Netherlands against people of color. Dutch politicians such as Geert Wilders engage in openly anti-immmigrant rhetoric. Of the Netherlands’ 16 million people, people from the Caribbean comprise 0.9 percent, people from Suriname 2.1 percent, and Turkish and Moroccans a combined 4 percent. Up to half of respondents to a study from these communities report that they regularly face substantial discrimination in the Netherlands.

In recent years, more international attention and protests have put the Sinterklaas tradition in the spotlight. Last year, the United Nations sent Verene Shepherd to investigate the tradition. In a report to the Dutch government, she said that the “Black Pete segment of the Santa Claus tradition is experienced by African people and people of African descent as a living trace of past slavery and oppression.” She reminded the Dutch government of its obligations under U.N. conventions to respect the rights of minorities. The special team was met with harassment, threats and calls from politicians that they would rather that the Netherlands pull out of the U.N. than end the Black Pete tradition. A few weeks ago, 80 protesters were arrested in Gouda over the issue. Ninety-two percent of Dutch say that they don’t associate Zwarte Piet with slavery, and 91 percent oppose any changes to his appearance.

Do I believe that every person who celebrates the holiday is racist? Of course not. But traditions can be, if they were born during a time when people of color were relegated to being lower-class citizens and especially if they perpetuate that prejudice. Traditions can change, slowly. I do hope that one day the Netherlands will join the rest of the modern world and leave Zwarte Piet, a colorful relic of an overtly racist history, in the past where he belongs.

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Op zaterdag 6 december 2014 10:53 schreef voetbalmanager2 het volgende:

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Ik vier, evenals half Nederland, vanavond pas pakjesavond. Geen slotje tot het laatste pakje uit is gepakt .

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TheEconomist twitterde op vrijdag 05-12-2014 om 15:14:12 Dutch attitudes towards Zwarte Piet are shifting http://t.co/8V00PYg6CG #econespresso http://t.co/tKB5qGL5kc reageer retweet

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WHEN I was growing up in Amsterdam in the 1970s, the phenomenon of Santa Claus was relatively unknown. Christmas was celebrated without Santa and mostly without gifts. St. Nicholas — Sinterklaas in Dutch — was the man with the presents.

If one had the good fortune to be Jewish, one received presents not only on Dec. 5, the eve of Sinterklaas’s name day, but also at Hanukkah. Only in recent years has Santa Claus, who comes on Dec. 25, made his rise to stardom in Holland, and today a Dutch child — or a Dutch adult for that matter — no longer has to be Jewish to cash in twice in December.

Sinterklaas arrives from Spain by steamboat in late November, travels farther on horseback, climbs onto roofs and on Dec. 5, known as “Pakjesavond,” drops presents through the chimney with the help of the Black Petes, a crew of dark-skinned helpers wearing large earrings who cavort and entertain and, as Dutch parents often tell their children, owe their blackness to chimney soot.

Black Pete and Sinterklaas also conspire to form a punitive team. In the traditional holiday songs, Sinterklaas brings gifts for good boys and girls; naughty children get a spanking with Black Pete’s bundle of twigs.

I grew up in a predominantly white neighborhood, and every November, whenever I would come across someone from Suriname — in those days, most black people in Amsterdam were from Suriname, a former Dutch colony in South America — I feared that I had run into a Black Pete in plain clothes.

Until recently, Black Pete was uncontroversial. Not because the Dutch are particularly racist, but because Sinterklaas, like the royal family, is sacred in the Netherlands, perhaps because of a dearth of other, specifically Dutch traditions. A matter, in other words, of conservatism.

Such traditions are even more important today, given the view that, in order to safeguard the Dutch national identity, homegrown culture and folklore must not be tampered with — a view expressed primarily, though not exclusively, by the extreme right wing Party for Freedom, run by Geert Wilders.

But just as the defense of traditions has grown stronger, so has the criticism that Black Pete is a racist holdover from the Netherlands’s colonial past. In January the United Nations High Commission for Human Rights sent a letter to the Dutch government stating that Black Pete perpetuated the image of people of African descent as second-class citizens and constituted a “living trace of past slavery.”

The Dutch government responded by saying that it regarded the Sinterklaas tradition as a children’s celebration, that it was aware of the differences of opinion concerning Black Pete, but that it was highly committed to combating discrimination in all forms.

Both letters received publicity only in October of this year, when the public debate over Black Pete resurfaced.

Emotions were running so high that a popular singer, Anouk, who is white and had called for the abolition of Black Pete, received numerous insults and threats via social media. A plan for a Sinterklaas parade with a proposed compromise, Green Petes, had to be canceled after threats were made against its planners.

In The Hague, the seat of government, a demonstration was organized for the preservation of Black Pete, while a pro-Black Pete Facebook page received two million likes almost immediately. Even the nation’s highest-circulation newspaper, De Telegraaf, agreed that the United Nations letter constituted interference in the Netherlands’s domestic affairs.

In a debate in Parliament, Mr. Wilders’s party asked the minister of education, culture and science whether she shared the view held by some that “Dutch traditions” should be made subordinate to “multicultural drivel.” Not to be outflanked, both Prime Minister Mark Rutte and the mayor of Amsterdam recently spoke up in defense of Black Pete, albeit with reservations. Sinterklaas, Mr. Rutte said, would not be Sinterklaas without Black Pete.

Of course, there were Dutch people who saw things differently, and there were many with no opinion either way. Yet the general tenor among the Dutch public was that “they” should keep their mitts off “our tradition,” an opinion you can hear in any number of variations on any street corner. By “them” people mean the United Nations and “unnatural” Dutch citizens, by both birth and naturalization, who want to put an end to this admittedly dubious tradition.

The Black Pete debate underscores how deep within the Netherlands’s prosperous and safe society lies the fear of losing identity, undoubtedly fueled by globalization, migration and the notion that the European Union is gradually doing away with the European nation state.

During the triumphal entry of St. Nicholas into the Netherlands this year, a national happening whereby a sort of street theater is performed on the children’s behalf, the Black Petes were in attendance once again, albeit this time with less ostentatious golden earrings. For security’s sake, the saint himself was accompanied by armed Petes in bulletproof vests.

The truly disturbing thing is the aggression conjured up by this public debate, the thinly disguised xenophobia that roiled to the surface when attempts were made to make Black Pete less black. A civilized person, after all, could say: “Personally, I don’t have much of a problem with Black Pete, but if others do, well, then, why don’t we make him Green Pete or Blue Pete?”

But no. To my utter amazement, at least two million Dutch people have taken the stance: “Black Pete, c’est moi.”

Which once again goes to prove that national identity often boils down to distasteful folklore.

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Op zaterdag 6 december 2014 17:43 schreef voetbalmanager2 het volgende:
Denk dat de Amerikanen zich beter bezig kunnen houden met racisme in eigen land. Dat racisme is tenminste echt en gaat wel wat verder dan het vieren van een kinderfeest.

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Op zaterdag 6 december 2014 17:45 schreef voetbalmanager2 het volgende:
'Haat Zwarte Piet', staat met grote zwarte letters op de deur en ramen van het filiaal op het Haarlemmerplein geschreven. De filiaalmanager heeft zijn winkel inmiddels weer schoongemaakt. Hij is verontwaardigd over deze actie: 'Het is gewoon een kinderfeest.'

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Op zaterdag 6 december 2014 17:43 schreef voetbalmanager2 het volgende:
Denk dat de Amerikanen zich beter bezig kunnen houden met racisme in eigen land. Dat racisme is tenminste echt en gaat wel wat verder dan het vieren van een kinderfeest.