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Amsterdam’s Troubling Children’s Book

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Amsterdam marked its 750th anniversary by distributing 60,000 copies of a commemorative book, Mijn Jarige Stad (“My Birthday City”), to children across the Dutch city. But what was intended as a celebratory gift has instead sparked controversy over its casual perpetuation of racial stereotypes. In this blog, Zhiqi Xu, PhD student at the International Institute of Social Studies, reflects on how unconscious bias infiltrates children’s literature and its wide-reaching impacts.

An expanded Image of the full Board Game. Image: Het Parool

On page 31, within the book’s board-game section, young readers encounter this instruction: “Ni Hao! Chinese tourists are blocking the bike path. To avoid them, go back to square 39.”

The passage, framed as playful gameplay, exposes a more troubling reality: how racial stereotypes can be seamlessly woven into educational materials, normalizing prejudiced thinking from an early age. What publishers likely viewed as harmless humour instead demonstrates how unconscious bias infiltrates children’s literature—and how such casual stereotyping can shape young minds in ways that extend far beyond the pages of a book.

 

The cover of the book. Image: Reddit
The problematic passage in question. Image: Reddit

The incident raises critical questions about editorial oversight in educational publishing and the responsibility institutions bear when shaping children’s understanding of diversity and inclusion. For a city celebrating nearly eight centuries of history, the oversight represents a missed opportunity to model the inclusive values Amsterdam claims to champion.

Who are Amsterdam’s Tourists?

The idea of Chinese tourists “blocking the bike path” paints a vivid, supposedly familiar image—but it’s not supported by data. According to the 2023–2024 Toerisme MRA report, visitors from Asia accounted for only 8% of hotel overnight stays in Amsterdam in 2023. In contrast, 54% came from the rest of Europe, 17% from the Americas, and 18% were Dutch.

Tourism growth between 2019 and 2023 was highest among European and American guests, not Asian ones. The visibility of Asian tourists is being exaggerated and weaponized through cognitive distortions like availability bias, where rare but vivid impressions are perceived as more common than they are.

From Bias to Dehumanization

In psychology, stereotypes are heuristics— mental shortcuts used to categorize and simplify. They reduce people to flattened, predictable group traits. Although they ease mental load, they cause real harm when used to navigate social life.

Children absorb stereotypes early. By age seven, many have already internalized group-based categories learned from books, media, and adults. When a schoolbook casts a specific ethnic group, in this case, Chinese, as a social nuisance, it builds implicit biases: automatic associations between group identity and negative traits.

But the path doesn’t end there. As Gordon Allport outlined in his “scale of prejudice,” stereotypes escalate. When repeated enough, they lead to objectification — seeing people not as individuals, but as representatives of a group. That group is then more easily dismissed, mocked, blamed, or even harmed, with less guilt.

The dehumanizing tone becomes especially stark when we read the other obstacles in the same game section:

  • “Een reiger heeft op je hoofd gepoept. Je moet terug naar huis (vakje 18) om je haar te wassen.”
    (A heron pooped on your head. Go back home to wash your hair.)
  • “Plons. Je probeert een mega-duif te ontwijken met je fiets, maar valt in de gracht. Je moet helemaal terugzwemmen naar start.”
    (Splash. You try to dodge a mega-pigeon on your bike, but fall into the canal. Swim all the way back to the start.)

In this context, Chinese tourists are the only human obstacle, grouped alongside animal accidents and fictional giant birds. This reinforces a subconscious lesson: some people are not peers — they are problems.

A historical pattern

The casual stereotyping found in Amsterdam’s children’s book follows a well-documented historical pattern where seemingly minor representations precede more serious discrimination. The Amsterdam book incident, while seemingly minor, fits within this broader historical context of how prejudice becomes embedded in society’s foundational institutions.

In 1930s Germany, anti-Semitic imagery and language appeared in school textbooks and public messaging years before systematic persecution began. Educational materials depicted Jewish citizens through derogatory caricatures and false narratives, gradually normalizing prejudice in the public consciousness.

During the latter half of the 20th century in America, media portrayals consistently framed Black Americans through the lens of criminality and violence. These representations helped build public support for policies that would lead to mass incarceration, with communities of colour disproportionately targeted by law enforcement and judicial systems.

Following 9/11 attacks, Muslims faced increasingly negative portrayals in media and popular culture, depicted as inherently threatening or suspicious. This narrative shift preceded and justified expanded surveillance programs that specifically monitored Muslim communities and individuals.

Scholars who study the sociology of discrimination have identified this progression as a common precursor to institutional bias: stereotypical portrayals in popular culture and educational materials gradually shift public perception, creating the social conditions necessary for discriminatory policies to gain acceptance.

East Asians, especially those perceived as Chinese, have long faced similar treatment. During COVID-19, Asians across Europe were verbally harassed and physically attacked. In Tilburg, a Chinese-Dutch student at Tilburg University, Cindy, was brutally attacked in an elevator after asking a group to stop singing a racist song: Voorkomen is beter dan Chinezen (“Prevention is better than Chinese”). She suffered a concussion and knife wounds. Before leaving her unconscious, the attackers said they would “eradicate the coronavirus.”

Cindy’s story illustrates the continuum from mockery to violence, and how normalized stereotyping can desensitize people to cruelty.

And racists don’t differentiate between Chinese, Japanese, Korean, or Vietnamese. When one is mocked, all are targeted.

Systemic Roots

Equally troubling is that, according to the publisher’s own statement, the book passed through multiple levels of review and testing—city departments, school boards, and teachers, without objection. This reflects a deeper issue: normative bias, where majority-group perspectives are mistaken for neutrality.

It’s not necessarily malice. But when no one notices, it signals a system that is not built to detect or understand minority harm.

Public reactions have further exposed this divide. Dutch media figure Tina Nijkamp publicly criticized the passage and highlighted the absence of East Asian representation in Dutch TV and media. However, some online commenters called the backlash oversensitive, arguing “it’s just a joke” or “I’m Chinese and I’m not offended.”

Psychologically, this reflects pluralistic ignorance and false consensus bias: the assumption that one’s view is universal, and the failure to recognize diverse lived experiences.

But the data contradicts these dismissals. In March 2024, the Dutch government released the first national survey on discrimination against people of (South)East Asian descent. One in three reported experiencing discrimination in the past year. Minister Van Gennip responded:

“Discrimination against people of (South)East Asian descent must stop.”

Asian-Dutch community leader Hui-Hui Pan (@huihui_panonfire) posted a widely shared critique:

“Mijn stad is jarig. Maar waarom vieren we het met racisme?”
(“My city is having a birthday. But why are we celebrating it with racism?”)

She called it “racism in children’s language.” The Pan Asian Collective, which she founded, launched a national campaign and is organizing the National Congress against Discrimination and Racism on 26 June 2025, where Utrecht University and Dataschool will present findings on Asian underrepresentation in 25 years of Dutch media coverage.

Their message: this isn’t about one book—it’s about a long, visible pattern of exclusion.

Entrenched Normalization

In response to public concern, various institutions linked to Mijn Jarige Stad began clarifying their roles. The Amsterdam Museum stated it was not involved in content creation, despite its name appearing in the book. Stichting Amsterdam 750 funded the project, but delegated execution to the Programmabureau Amsterdam 750, part of the city government. The publisher, Pavlov, initially issued a standard response emphasizing positive intent and broad involvement:

“The book was developed in collaboration with all primary schools through the Breed Bestuurlijk Overleg (BBO), and extensively tested with students and teachers from three different Amsterdam schools… We sincerely had no intention to insult or hurt any group.”

This response—focused on process, intention, and positive feedback—sidestepped the core issue: harm was done, and a line that dehumanizes East Asians passed through supposedly inclusive safeguards. The problem isn’t that one group failed; the problem is how normalized and institutionally invisible anti-Asian stereotypes remain, even in materials for children.

This is not a matter of blaming a single actor or demanding symbolic apologies. The book should be recalled, and what’s needed now is an honest reckoning — not just of the production process, but of how certain forms of discrimination are so implicit, so embedded in everyday thinking, that they go unnoticed by those involved and even by broader audiences who dismiss criticism as oversensitivity.

Yet this very invisibility is reinforced by the fragmentation of accountability. It highlights a deeper issue: when everyone is involved, no one is responsible. And when no one notices the harm, it reveals how profoundly such portrayals are normalized in our collective imagination.

From Learning to Living

From a behavioral science perspective, the issue extends far beyond questions of political sensitivity. Research demonstrates how cognitive shortcuts—the mental patterns children use to navigate social situations, become deeply embedded through repeated exposure to stereotypical representations.

Child development studies reveal that young minds absorb social hierarchies through seemingly innocuous content, internalizing messages about which groups hold value and which can be dismissed. These early lessons shape neural pathways that influence decision-making well into adulthood.

The potency of stereotypes lies not in their malicious intent but in their subtle persistence. They need not provoke outrage to encode prejudice, nor offend every reader to establish harmful categories of human worth. When children encounter these patterns repeatedly—whether in games, stories, or casual conversation—they learn implicit lessons about power dynamics and social belonging.

Educational content serves a dual purpose: it teaches explicit knowledge while simultaneously transmitting unspoken values about empathy, respect, and human dignity. A board game instruction becomes more than entertainment; it becomes a framework for understanding who deserves consideration and who can be overlooked.

The distribution of 60,000 books represents more than a municipal celebration. It constitutes the widespread dissemination of social scripts—subtle but powerful instructions that will influence how an entire generation of children perceives and interacts with others throughout their lives.

In this context, editorial choices carry profound responsibility, shaping not just individual attitudes but the social fabric of communities for decades to come.

This blog was first published by the Contrapuntal

Opinions expressed in Bliss posts reflect solely the views of the author of the post in question.

About the Author:

Zhiqi Xu

Zhiqi Xu is a behavioral scientist, psychologist, and development policy researcher. She investigates how people and communities respond to policy interventions and social change, uncovering the social and behavioral roots of transformation across contexts. Her work bridges disciplines to promote more inclusive and human-centered development thinking.

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On the Racist Humanism of Climate Action

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Mainstream climate change mitigation and adaptation policies are imbued with neocolonial discursive constructions of the “other”. Understanding how such constructions work has important implications for how we think about emancipatory and socially-just responses to the climate crisis.

In her 2016 “Edward Said Lecture”, Naomi Klein made the case that “othering” is intimately linked to the production of the climate crisis. Borrowing from Said’s Orientalism, Klein defines othering as the “disregarding, essentialising, [and] denuding the humanity of another culture, people or geographical region”. She argues that this is much needed for justifying the sacrifice zones necessary for fossil fuel exploitation, and for refusing to protect climate refugees.

In these ways, othering permits letting off the hook the neoliberal and neocolonial structures of domination that are largely responsible for climate injustice.

Constructing people as not-fully-human, not part of “us”, or as threats—internal enemies, foreign agents, terrorists, obstacles to development, and the like—is a common strategy for legitimising repression against those who resist extractivism and dispossession. Indeed, compartmentalising populations into those who need protection and support, and those who can be sacrificed for the sake of the “greater good”, is what theorists from Michel Foucault to Achille Mbembe saw as the fundamental function of racism, originating in European colonialism. Similarly, Frantz Fanon defined racism as a global hierarchy based on the “line of the human”, which created a distinction between the zone of being (the human) and the zone of not being (the sub- or non-human).

At the same time, the workings and reach of othering go beyond what Naomi Klein suggests. Discursive constructions of populations or territories as “other” are also mobilised to include them within the reach of government action and control. This is typically the case with populations or territories that are constructed as “in need of improving” that, as anthropologist Tania Murray Li has shown, have long underpinned colonial and development interventions. These constructions are no less racist and colonial than those justifying the “need to sacrifice”, yet they are intermeshed with a humanitarian or humanist “will to improve” the other, a reactivation of the imperial discourse of the “white man’s burden”.

Image 1. Mural dedicated to Edward Said, Palestine, 2016. Unknown author. Source. Wikimedia Commons

Climate Action and Othering

We claim that this ambivalent mobilisation of othering—oscillating between improvement and sacrifice—also characterises mainstream responses to the climate crisis, imbuing them with a neo-colonial and, at heart, racist ethos. Policies for mitigating climatic changes, adapting to them, or governing climate-induced migration, require prior discursive work to frame targeted populations or territories as problematic or deficient, through narratives that stress vulnerability, underdevelopment, and victimhood. At the same time, these interventions are associated with effects of dispossession, environmental destruction and the production of surplus populations and sacrifice zones, and must therefore rely on othering to justify letting such populations die.

Mitigation and green extractivism

Think of climate change mitigation, and its purported goal of shifting away from fossil fuels by aggressively expanding industrial-scale renewable energies and electric automobility. Environmental movements and researchers have demonstrated abundantly that this strategy is problematic. They denounced the dispossession effects of “transition mineral” extraction and large hydropower projects, and the “land grabbing” associated with wind and solar energy generation and biofuel plantations. Such industrial-scale solutions follow a “green extractivist” logic that aims to appropriate as much resources, energy and profits as fast as possible from a territory, irrespective of the social and ecological impacts. As such, they produce dispossession and sacrifice outcomes similar to those of fossil fuel extraction (and don’t fare a lot better in terms of CO2 emissions, as Alexander Dunlap has shown).

Compared to the old, “grey” extractivism of dirty coal and oil, such projects are cast as necessary not only for the improvement of otherwise “underdeveloped” territories and peoples, but also for saving the planet from catastrophic climate change—as research by activist and writer Daniel Voskoboynik demonstrates in the case of lithium. The more urgent and necessary the improvement, the more acceptable the sacrifice, and the more “selfish and irrational” the resistance.

Adaptation and vulnerability

Climate change adaptation is another case in point. While emanating from ostensibly disinterested concerns with the adverse effects of climatic changes upon “vulnerable” groups, it draws upon and reinforces images of the other as both in danger and potentially dangerous. This manifests itself in adaptation policy documents—for instance, by the EU—which construct Africa as a climatic “heart of darkness” of unruly environments, failed institutions, and backwards populations, ready to flood European borders with unwanted migrants.

This type of representations depoliticise vulnerability. They separate it from colonial histories and previous rounds of capitalist dispossession and neoliberal restructuring that created or exacerbated people’s “lack of adaptive capacities” in the first place; and obfuscate the historical responsibility of colonial states and capitalists in the global North for generating the majority of greenhouse gas emissions. Moreover, adaptation interventions seek to make “target” populations responsible for managing the adverse effects of climatic changes, receiving limited assistance (in the form of debt and corporate investments) conditional on their willingness to go along with a pre-packaged plan.

The “improvement” of populations and territories targeted by adaptation programmes has no room for redressing development-induced dispossession; rather, it is expected to work through the dispossession itself. As Markus Taylor shows in the case of adaptation policies in Mongolia and South Asia, urbanization and proletarianization of rural populations, which result in poverty, indebtedness and loss of access to their means of production and livelihood, are framed by the institutions like the World Bank precisely as a way of reducing small farmers’ vulnerability to climate change, while also freeing up rural space for more mechanised and capital-intensive agriculture.

Climate-Induced Migration

Discursive constructions of the climate migrant exemplify how the two forms of othering (to “sacrifice” and to “improve”) are deployed in overlapping and contradictory ways. A common way in which othering operates in this context involves the separation between “good” and “bad” migrants. For instance, Andrew Telford has shown how EU and US policy reports on climate-induced migration often represent Muslim and African migrant populations as threats, as racialised others with a potential for radicalization and terrorism.

At the opposite end of the “migrant-as-threat” trope stands the image of climate migrants as victims, which is apparently benign but nonetheless problematic. Victimisation involves representing those vulnerable to the effects of climatic change as powerless and resource-less. This disempowers communities by obscuring the adaptation strategies they already practice. At the same time, it bolsters neo-colonial imaginaries of a silenced other with no agency who, driven by desperation, “easily becomes the unpredictable, wild ‘other’ that threatens ‘us’”—in the words of geographer Kate Manzo.

Image 2. Global Climate Strike in Melbourne, Australia. September 2019. Credit: John Englart. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Othering and the Adaptation of Capital

Despite their stated aim to mitigate and adapt to disastrous climatic changes, mainstream climate policies are explicitly envisioned as avenues for furthering capital accumulation.

This is obvious in the case of industrial-scale renewables, dominated by transnational energy corporations seeking to expand their markets and diversify their production. But it also applies to the increasingly privatised and financialised business of adaptation, presented as creating opportunities for profit-making and rent extraction. For instance, a report released in September 2019 by the Global Commission on Adaptation—a private-public partnership led by the UN, World Bank and Gates Foundation—calculated that “investing $1.8 trillion globally” in climate change adaption until 2030 “could generate $7.1 trillion in total net benefits”.

What’s more, climate policies are motivated by a geostrategic concern with security. This points to a continuation of the post-WWII “development project”, which was motivated by the threat that newly decolonised populations might turn to communism or Third World anti-imperialism. While the political coordinates have changed, “climate-related development” functions to a large extent as a way of containing the “excess freedom” of surplus populations: stopping them from becoming unruly, or migrating to rich countries (in larger numbers than capital needs).

Taken together, the current choreography of policies and interventions that make up the “climate action” framework can be seen as a way to preserve global capitalist class power in the face of the ongoing climate catastrophe. Othering in this sense is central to the “post-political” governmentality of climate change, a key tenet of which is, for Erik Swyngedouw, “the perceived inevitability of capitalism and a market economy as the basic organizational structure of the social and economic order, for which there is no alternative.”

Alternatives

A central implication of all this is that plans for radical socio-ecological transformation—including Just Transition or Green New Deal frameworks—should not reproduce a colonial logic whereby peripheries (primarily) in the global South are treated as pools for resource grabbing and carbon dumping, or as sites for salvation-type interventions that dismiss frontline community action and priorities. As climate justice activists advocate, there can be no decarbonisation without decolonization.

Challenging the neocolonial and neoliberal government of climate change entails affirming the ability of the subaltern to “speak”: recognising and reasserting the “pluriversality” of “non-Western” socio-environmental knowledges and praxes should be foundational to climate justice. We must be mindful, however, that—as the Aymara theorist Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui has argued—there is more to decolonization than discursive emancipation.

Recognising ontological multiplicity must go hand in hand with the critique of material power asymmetries and global unequal (ecological) relations. Decolonizing means, primarily, giving back the land to indigenous communities and reasserting the sovereignty of formerly colonized peoples, including access to and control over natural resources and other means of production and reproduction—as part of globally connected struggles attacking the material and ideological bases of racial-patriarchal capitalism and imperialism.

This blog was originally published in Undisciplined Environments, and is based on a longer, open access article published in the journal Political Geography. The article first appeared on Bliss on 13 October 2021.

Opinions expressed in Bliss posts reflect solely the views of the author of the post in question.

Diego Andreucci is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Juan de la Cierva Social and Political Sciences Department at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona.

 

 

Christos Zografos is a Ramón y Cajal Senior Research Fellow at the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona.

Hanging by a thread: what’s right – and wrong – with the new German supply chain law meant to protect human rights

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After years of civil society campaigning against the working conditions of supply chain workers in the Global South supplying German companies and consumers, the German government recently agreed to the introduction of a human rights due diligence law. The law, supposed to force companies to ensure the human rights of these workers and affected communities in countries abroad, will likely be passed before the summer. But unless the parliament makes substantial changes, the law in its current form will not be enough to hold companies responsible. Furthermore, it fails to ensure that the voices of those affected most are heard, writes Josephine Valeske.

Credit: Solidarity Centre

In September 2012, 258 Pakistani workers were killed in a factory fire of a company that supplied garments mainly to German textile discounter KiK. In the aftermath, a survivor and three families of some of the victims filed a lawsuit against KiK under Pakistani law, claiming that the company should bear responsibility for the fire safety deficiencies in the supplier’s factory. After a legal battle of several years, German courts denied compensation since the case had lapsed according to Pakistani law.

From poisoning drinking water in Peru resulting from the German car industry’s copper mines, to expelling 4,000 people from their homes in Uganda to make room for a coffee plantation, to chemical company BASF doing business with a mine in South Africa despite 34 of its workers being shot during a strike, German companies almost routinely make headlines for their involvement in wrongs that they would not be able to get away with back home. A 2015 study from Maastricht University found that Germany ranks fifth globally for the number of companies in the country involved in human rights violations abroad.

The German example provides insight into how things can go very wrong even in countries that are supposed to rank highly in terms of safeguarding human rights. It seems that here, human rights assurance is selective, linked to citizenship rather than to being human. What else could explain the failure to also look after those linked indirectly to Germany, such as through supply chains?

Unfortunately, these are not standalone incidents, but manifestations of a system in which Western retailers, always in search of the cheapest suppliers, use workers’ vulnerabilities and weak legislation in other countries to push prices ever lower. While benefiting from an unequal global labour division, they pay lip service to the interests of those affected by their business activities and shift the responsibilities for upholding human and workers’ rights to their suppliers in the Global South.

A new supply chain law agreed on by the German government is supposed to change the extent to which participants in global supply chains serving German companies are protected. Called the ‘Lieferkettengesetz’ (supply chain law), the law is supposed to ensure that German companies perform due diligence in their supply chains and that those who are guilty of human rights violations are held responsible. This law is considered progressive, as it is one of the first that looks beyond country borders to the rights of those also indirectly linked to the country. German CSOs underscored the fact that the mere decision in favour of a supply chain law is a win, but its usefulness will have to be judged by whether it actually yields any change for the affected people on the ground. The law still has to be approved by parliament, which, depending on the MPs’ susceptibility to corporate lobbying, might either strengthen it slightly or weaken it further. What’s clear is that the law in its current form will not change the lives of those toiling under precarious and unsafe conditions in distant countries.

A toothless tiger

The international legal framework is massively biased towards corporations: under ISDS mechanisms, companies can sue governments for billions for negatively changing the investment climate and even for protecting workers if that harms their expected profits. But barely any legal mechanisms can be identified that allow to hold companies accountable for human rights violations incurred in other countries where their suppliers are located.

Following increased reporting on the role of German companies in human rights violations, German civil society led by a coalition of non-profit civil society organisations (CSOs) have been lobbying for years for a human rights due diligence law that would change how workers abroad are treated. Finally, the government came to an agreement on a law in mid-February. But the CSOs faced a massive corporate lobby on the other side that maintained a stronghold over the Ministry of Economic Affairs, evidenced by the fact that the German Minister for Economic Affairs, Peter Altmaier, exchanged regular emails on first-name basis with a corporate lobbyist. The corporate lobby was able to influence the law so that in its current form it remains a largely toothless tiger. Here are some of the ways in which the current proposal is failing those it’s supposed to protect:

The law lacks a civil liability provision that enables affected people abroad to directly take legal steps against German companies for human rights violations. Instead, an agency forming part of the German Ministry of Economic Affairs will examine whether companies adhere to their due diligence duties and can fine them for the failure to do so. NGOs and unions will have the possibility to file lawsuits in Germany in the name of victims under certain circumstances, but ultimately the victims cannot take action themselves.

It is still unclear whether the law will extend to more than the first-tier suppliers, which means that a vast number of human rights abuses further down the supply chain will likely remain unaddressed. The law mandates companies to take action further down the supply chain if they have substantiated reasons to believe that there are human rights violations, but it does not define what substantiated reasons are. For example, is it enough to know that children work under horrific conditions in Congolese mines that supply raw materials for batteries, or does a German battery company need to know specific details about its individual supply chain to be compelled to act?

The law will only apply to the roughly 600 companies that employ at least 3,000 staff members from 2023, and to around 2,900 companies with more than 1,000 staff members from 2024. It therefore overlooks more than 99% of German companies that belong into the category of small and medium enterprises (SMEs), many of which are operating in high-risk sectors such as the chemical or the textile industry. Furthermore, it does not include foreign-owned multinationals that conduct business in Germany, even if a large share of their profit comes from the German market.

The law does not reflect the wishes of the German public. The final compromise is disappointing and also blatantly undemocratic, since a survey had shown that 75% of Germans were not only in favour of a due diligence law, but wanted this law to include legal mechanisms to hold corporations liable for human rights violations, which are currently absent.

To top it all off, there’s a massive elephant in the room: apart from being structured by class, nationality and income, global supply chains are racialised, with people of colour dominating the lower value-added positions and supply chains becoming increasingly white as the value-added increases. Thus, people of colour are at the receiving end of the human rights violations the law was supposed to prevent. It’s not just a form of injustice – it’s blatantly racialized injustice.

Our inputs can help shape the law

The German due diligence law in its current form may be a disappointment, but there are signs of hope: similar processes are happening in other countries and at the international level. For example, the Legal Affairs Committee of the European Parliament recently adopted a report requesting the European Commission to submit a formal proposal for a EU due diligence law that might include liability measures holding those responsible accountable at the EU level. Furthermore, the ongoing UN Treaty process, driven largely by affected communities from the Global South, aims to develop a binding legal treaty between the United Nations members to hold transnational corporations globally accountable.

And we still have the power to help change the law in its current form. So what can the public in Germany and elsewhere do while the law is still being negotiated? Stay updated about the current process on the CSO coalition’s website or Twitter account, and on the website of the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (in English). Subscribe to the Business and Human Rights Resource Centre’s multilingual newsletters to stay updated about general developments in different countries. The German CSOs will soon announce specific actions targeting parliamentarians. Finally, you can directly contact your local parliamentary representative and tell them why you think that an effective due diligence law is important.

About the author:

Josephine Valeske

Josephine Valeske holds a MA degree in Development Studies from the ISS and a BA degree in Philosophy and Economics. She currently works for the research and advocacy organisation Transnational Institute in Amsterdam. She can be found on Twitter @jo_andolanjeevi.

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Germany is a deeply racist country―stop pretending otherwise

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Antirassismus Demo Berlin

While Germany has been lauded for agreeing to take in 1,700 refugees from refugee camp Moria that recently burned to the ground, the country has been cited as a role model for its rational, yet humane stance toward refugees ever since it took in more than one million people in a single year during Europe’s so-called ‘refugee crisis’. However, within the country a different type of crisis is brewing—one characterized by deep structural and societal racism. Only if Germany and international observers shake the deceptive perception of the country as ‘welcoming’, change can finally happen, writes Josephine Valeske.

Antirassismus Demo Berlin
Anti-racism demonstration in Berlin, September 2018. The banner reads ‘Refugees welcome! Against racism and right-wing violence’. Credit:
Uwe Hiksch on Flickr

Two weeks ago, only days after a ring of right-wing extremists was discovered in the German police force in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, the police in what can be seen as a PR campaign asked Twitter users to use the hashtag #dankepolizei (‘thank you, police’) to tweet why they are grateful to the German police. The campaign backfired spectacularly. Within hours, there were hundreds of tweets using the hashtag to recount horrific instances of police violence, racial profiling, and verbal and physical abuse, many of them with an explicit focus on racism.

These instances are likely just the tip of the iceberg. Since the Black Lives Matter movement has put racism and police brutality on the public agenda in the USA, police violence has become a hotly debated topic also in Germany and elsewhere in Europe. Left-leaning voices argue that racism in the German police force consists not, as leading police officials and politicians insist, of ‘Einzelfälle’ ―individual cases, exceptions to the rule―but that it is a structural problem. Despite mounting pressure on the ministry for interior affairs to gauge the extent and urgency of the problem, the German home minister, seen as one of the most right-leaning figures in Merkel’s cabinet, has repeatedly refused to conduct a study enabling a better understanding.

Meanwhile, the ‘Einzelfälle’ keep piling up. As far back as 2011, it became known that a right-wing group calling itself ‘NSU’ (National Socialist Underground) had murdered 10 people between 2000 and 2007, nine of them with Turkish roots. The crimes had been covered up for years by regional police forces and German secret services, partially by blaming the murders on the victims’ families while making use of racist stereotypes. The extent of the state’s involvement in the NSU and the cover up is yet unknown. Last year saw at least 1,664 attacks on refugees or refugee shelters in Germany, as visualised on this map. And on 20 February this year, a right-wing extremist gunman murdered nine people with a migration background and his mother in the town of Hanau.

This is just one form of direct violence driven by racism. Several less visible forms of racism plague Germany society. The question then arises: How come such multi-dimensional racism that has persisted throughout Germany has not been in the spotlight until now?

In White Innocence, Gloria Wekker in a fascinating dissection of racism in the Netherlands argues that the Dutch self-perception as an open, tolerant culture has led to many Dutch people ignoring racism even if it is staring them in the face. In a societal equivalent of “I have a black friend, so I cannot be racist”, instances of day-to-day racism are written off by referring to the Netherlands’ multicultural society. Although Germany’s culture and history are quite different, this observation struck a chord with me. Germany is often praised for how it remembers and deals with the crimes committed under Nazi rule, and a large share of the population likes to believe that it is anti-fascist. We all spent at least a year in high school studying and condemning the Holocaust, reading Anne Frank’s diary, and visiting former concentration camps―so we are obviously enlightened and anti-racist Germans!

This self-perception is wrong and incredibly dangerous. It takes the knowledge about a historical period and its atrocities as proof of a general ‘immunity’ to racist thought and behaviour. Because we know very well what happened in the past, we surely won’t repeat this, this logic goes. But while German education and commemorative culture emphasizes this historical period, others are completely erased. Perhaps only a few German students are aware of Germany’s colonial past and the genocide of the Herero and Nama in what was once German South West Africa (today’s Namibia), for example. This intentional forgetting has been labelled ‘colonial amnesia’. The German government has yet to answer to Namibia’s call for an official apology and reparations. The point is that Germany is selectively anti-racist and that racism in fact pervades everyday life, rooted in a ‘colonial amnesia’ and denial of structural racism and islamophobia that has persisted, albeit less visibly, after the Second World War.

When it comes to Germany’s supposedly humane refugee policy, Merkel is either lauded or hated for temporarily suspending the Dublin Agreement in 2015 and granting around one million refugees the possibility to apply for asylum in Germany. Whether her decision was indeed fuelled by humanitarian motives or simply a calculated move to combat Germany’s skilled worker shortage, we will never know. The Guardian recently called this Merkel’s “great migrant gamble”, as if the lives of a million people were no more than stakes in a game that could yield positive returns.

German government officials have time and time again emphasised they want to “fight the causes of flight”, leading to dubious development assistance deals that typically benefit the German economy more than the receiving countries – and to the death of thousands. In March 2016, Germany was the driving force behind a deal with Turkey in which the latter country gets paid to keep refugees out of Europe, after which the number of refugees entering Germany decreased considerably. Several such deals have since been made with North African countries like Libya even after full awareness that refugees are being tortured in Libyan detention camps financed with German and EU money. Germany is also a major contributor to Frontex, the European border ‘protection’ and coast guard agency that forces refugees to rely on ever-harder routes to Europe and has reportedly pushed back refugees, which makes it indirectly responsible for the deaths of thousands of people every year in the Mediterranean Sea.

Ironically, if Germany was serious about “fighting the causes of flight”, it should probably shut down its ministry of foreign affairs and its many weapons manufacturing companies first. Looking at the number of persons driven from their homes by wars in which the US and its allies, including Germany, are involved, and at the havoc Germany’s economic policies are wreaking in the Global South, the handful of refugees Germany has ‘accepted’ from Moria seem to be no more than a tool to keep up the country’s appearance as humanitarian and welcoming. Finally, it must be acknowledged that Germany is profiting from and supporting the global division of labour that is at the root cause of systemic poverty and thus causes many forms of migration in the first place.

The first step we can take as Germans is to stop pretending that we’re doing enough and that we’re doing it well, and to critically look at and address the myriad forms of racism originating in the country. We are failing spectacularly at making Germany a safe haven for those who need safety most―and we have the moral obligation to change that.

About the author:

Josephine Valeske

Josephine Valeske holds a MA degree in Development Studies from the ISS and a BA degree in Philosophy and Economics. She currently works for the Transnational Institute and is the manager of the ISS Blog Bliss. She can be found on Twitter @josephine_on_tw.

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Fighting racism and decolonizing humanitarian studies: toward mindful scholarship

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Scholars taking notes during a lecture

Addressing racism and decolonizing humanitarian studies is urgent, and as scholars we need to step up our efforts. Partnerships between scholars and conflict-affected communities are as unequal as ever, and the disparities between humanitarian studies in the global North and global South remain large. Dorothea Hilhorst here introduces the importance of localization in humanitarian studies that will be discussed in an upcoming workshop on 20 August, highlighting the need for equal partnerships and meaningful participation, as well as continuous debate to move beyond quick fixes in addressing structural and persistent inequalities.

Scholars taking notes during a lecture
Credit: IHSA

Triggered by recent renewed attention to racism and worldwide protests urging change, the lid placed on racism in the humanitarian aid sector has been blown off. Last year’s international meeting of ALNAP concluded that inequality and discrimination in the humanitarian aid sector are a reality, and threatens its core foundation, namely the principle of humanity that views all people in equal terms. Recent weeks have seen many excellent blogs about racism in the sector and how resorting to arguments centring on capacities often obscure racist practices.

Yet racism in humanitarian studies is rarely mentioned. As scholars, we are ready to lay bare the fault lines in the humanitarian sector, but what about our own practices? It is time to address racism and decolonize humanitarian studies, too!

Turning our gaze inward

Anthony Giddens spoke of the double hermeneutic between social science and society, which co-shape each other’s understanding of the world and adopt each other’s vocabulary. In the relatively small and applied community of humanitarian studies, the double hermeneutic between academia and the field is more than discursive. Humanitarian studies can be seen to mimic many of the characteristics of its subject of research. Problems with humanitarian action are thus likely reproduced in the scholarly community that focuses on humanitarianism.

Racism-related problems with humanitarian studies can be grouped in two clusters:

First, the organization of humanitarian studies leads to a field dominated by scholars from the Global North. While scholars critically follow attempts of the sector to localize aid in an attempt to reduce racism through increasing ownership of aid processes, humanitarian studies itself may be criticized for being centred in the Global North. Adjacent domains of disaster studies and refugee studies[i] have faced similar critiques.

Research and educational institutes are mainly found in the global North, and rarely in the Global South where most humanitarian crises occur. The picture is less skewed with regards to disasters related to natural hazards, where we find many leading institutes in the Global South. However, faculties and courses dealing with humanitarianism in the Global South are scarce (see the global directory of the International Humanitarian Studies Associations for exceptions). Reasons include the dire lack of attention to higher education in donor programmes focusing on conflict-affected countries, making it almost impossible to find funding for such programmes[ii]. In 2016, at the World Humanitarian Summit, participants drafted a set of ethical commitments called for, among other things, more space for scholars and communities from crisis-affected countries (IHSA, 2016). Three years later, signatories admitted to a lack of progress which they largely attributed to structural disincentives for collaboration in their universities.

Moreover, relations between northern and southern institutions rarely attain the nature of equal partnership[iii]. The best many southern universities can usually hope for is to become a poorly paid partner that has no say in the agenda of the research and whose role is limited to data gathering. The possibility of co-authoring may not even be mentioned. I have followed closely how a gender and development institute in DRC, built around four women PhD holders, could easily find work as a sub-contractor for research, but once they developed their own agenda and proposals, donors were not interested and preferred to rely on Northern NGOs or UN agencies.

The picture becomes even direr when we take into account ethics dumping, when risks are offloaded on local researchers. Many universities in the north have adopted restrictive measures and don’t allow researchers to work in ‘red zones’. These researchers then rely on remote research and use local researchers to collect the data. One scholar told me at a conference how frustrated he was that his university did not allow him to enter a conflict area. He took residence at the border where he could regularly meet his research assistants, who gathered his data at their own risk. His frustration concerned his own impossibility to engage with the research, not the fate of these assistants! He had not considered involving the researchers in the analysis or inviting them as co-authors.

Second, methodologies and the ethics of relating to the research participants whose lives we study are problematic. Humanitarian studies is seen to be extractive, blighted by 1) a culture of direct data gathering through fieldwork and interviews at the expense of secondary data, leading to overly bothering crisis-affected communities with research; 2) a lack of feedback opportunities to communities, who see researchers come and go to obtain data and rarely, if ever, hear from them again; and 3) the assumption that participatory methods are not possible in conflict-affected areas because it is feared that social tensions will be reproduced in the research process. It is also assumed that people facing precarity and risks may have no interest in deep participation in research.

Deep participation does not mean quick and dirty participation in data gathering, such as participation in focus-group discussions where researchers can quickly move in and out of the lives of communities. Meaningful interactive research involves partners and participants as much as possible in every stage of the research[iv]. There have, however, been positive examples of participatory research in crisis-affected areas[v], and it is time that we build on these experiences and advance this work.

Thus, racism and decolonization debates have implications for methodology. Pailey critically noted that ‘the problem with the 21st-century “scholarly decolonial turn” is that it remains largely detached from the day-to-day dilemmas of people in formerly colonised spaces and places’. Similarly, Tilley[vi] argued that decolonization means ‘doing research differently’ – equally and collaboratively.

Of course, there are also reasons for caution with participatory methods that may be more pronounced in humanitarian crises. First, social realities are, in many ways, influenced by (governance) processes happening elsewhere, beyond immediate observation. Second, participatory methods may be prone to identifying outcomes that reflect the biases of the research facilitators (facipulator effects) and/or political elites participating in the process. Third, participatory processes risk feeding into existing tensions and creating harm. Research in crisis-affected areas may entail more risks and tends to be more politicized compared with other research.

It is therefore important to build on positive experiences while maintaining a critical dialogue on the possibilities of participatory research in humanitarian studies. As scholars, we need to work hard to break down the disincentives, to work towards equal partnerships, and to develop more participatory methodologies that treat conflict-affected communities as competent and reflexive agents that can participate in all aspects of the research process.

The environments of humanitarian studies are highly politicized and complex, and there are no quick fixes for our collaborations and methodologies. Thus, while stepping up our efforts, we also need to rely on the core of the academe: continuous debate and critically reflection on how we can enhance partnership for ethical research in humanitarian studies.

Inspired? Join the IHSA/NCSH webinar on Thursday 20 August, 11-12 CET.

This blog was written at the start of a 5-year research programme on humanitarian governance, aiming to decolonize humanitarian studies. The project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, project 884139.

[i] Sukarieh, M., & Tannock, S. (2019). Subcontracting Academia: Alienation, Exploitation and Disillusionment in the UK Overseas Syrian Refugee Research Industry. Antipode, 51(2), 664–680.

[ii] In 2016, at the World Humanitarian Summit, participants drafted a set of ethical commitments that called for, among other things, more space for scholars and communities from crisis-affected countries (IHSA, 2016). Three years later, signatories admitted to a lack of progress, which they largely attributed to structural disincentives for collaboration in their universities.

[iii] Cronin-Furman, K., & Lake, M. (2018). Ethics Abroad: Fieldwork in Fragile and Violent Contexts. PS – Political Science and Politics, 51(3), 607–614. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1049096518000379

[iv] Voorst, R. van and D. Hilhorst (2018) ‘Key Points of Interactive Research: An Ethnographic Approach to Risk’. In A. Olofsson and Jens O. Zinn Researching Risk and Uncertainty. Methodologies, Methods and Research Strategies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, pp 53-77

[v] Haar, G. van der, Heijmans, A., & Hilhorst, D. (2013). Interactive research and the construction of knowledge in conflict-affected settings. Disasters, 37(SUPPL.1), 20–35. https://doi.org/10.1111/disa.12010

[vi] Tilley, L. (2017). Resisting Piratic Method by Doing Research Otherwise. Sociology, 51(1), 27–42. https://doi.org/10.1177/0038038516656992

About the author:

Dorothea HilhorstDorothea Hilhorst is Professor of Humanitarian Aid and Reconstruction at the International Institute of Social Studies of Erasmus University Rotterdam. She is a regular author for Bliss. Read all her posts here.

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When outright racism triggers migrant precarity: Britain’s Windrush Scandal and the need to move beyond arguments on legality by Anna Cáceres

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Windrush Protesters 2018

[Versión en español abajo]

In 2018 Britain once again made news headlines, this time for the Windrush scandal that saw scores of British citizens with migration backgrounds wrongly detained and deported. Almost all were migrants from Commonwealth countries who had migrated to Britain after the Second World War and because of a series of policy changes starting in 2012 were no longer recognized as citizens by 2018. The scandal is important for two reasons. First, it demonstrates the importance of viewing ‘citizenship’ as a fluid, and indeed socially constructed, category, rather than a binary legal designation. Second, it shows how racism, when coupled with racially exclusive constructions of national identity, can be a more important trigger for migrant precarity than legal status.

The UK’s increasing flirtation over the last decade with right-wing populist discourses on migration has been well-documented and came to a legislative climax with the passing of a migration policy package known as the Hostile Environment (HE) by the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition in 2012. HE policies ostensibly sought to increase the ‘voluntary return’ rate of undocumented migrants in the UK, but in effect acted to flip the burden of proof in migration cases. Whereas previously it was up to migration enforcement officials to prove the undocumented status of an individual, HE ensured that it was now up to an increasingly random array of non-specialist civil society actors to police the migration status of their fellow residents. Such actors came to include employers, benefit officers, healthcare providers, and landlords.

It was not until 2018, when The Guardian exposed the treatment of legal migrants under HE, that criticism started to gain real traction and several internal investigations were launched. Central to this coverage was a portion of British residents known as Windrush Migrants (WM)—Commonwealth citizens who migrated to the UK between 1948 and 1973. This group was severely and systematically swept up in the HE despite having the legal right to reside in the UK.

In essence, the HE acted to reintroduce migration-related precarity into the lives of WMs, individuals who had lived in the UK for decades and no longer viewed themselves as ‘migrants’. In the literature on precarity, it is emphasised that migrants experience both traditional socioeconomic precarity—i.e. low-pay, inherently unstable work—and migration-specific forms by virtue of being non-citizens. Problems with legal status, ‘deportability’, and everyday discrimination are all common examples. However, the focus on ‘citizenship’ is limiting, as it is typically defined as a binary legal construct: one either is, or is not, a citizen.

WMs pose a unique example of a group who were citizens and then became non-citizens. Here, the history of Windrush migration is exceedingly important: most WMs had equal citizenship status to British-born residents at the time of their arrival. The passage of the British Nationality Act of 1948 had granted citizenship status, including permanent residency rights, to all subjects of the Commonwealth. These rights were progressively stripped back with the passage of several immigration acts in the 1960s and 1970s, which began differentiating between Brits born on mainland Britain and those born outside of it.  By the time the Immigration Act of 1971 came into force in 1973, individuals from the Commonwealth had been downgraded from ‘British citizens’ to ‘foreign immigrants’. The case of WMs thus shows that citizenship is a fluid category, which can and is reconstructed as suits the needs of the politics of the day.

Even more importantly, citizenship as experienced by WMs was in the eyes of the beholder: white British residents. All of the WMs who were swept up in HE policies had a legal right to reside in the UK, and indeed would have been eligible for full British citizenship, had they even been aware that they didn’t have it already. Many individuals reported feeling stunned by their sudden designation as ‘undocumented migrants’ and indeed even felt betrayed by a country they perceived to be their own. Thus, Paulette Wilson, born in Jamaica but resident in the UK since 1968, had the following to say:

“I don’t feel British. I am British. I’ve been raised here, all I know is Britain. What the hell can I call myself except British […] I’m still angry that I have to prove it. I feel angry that I have to go through this”.[1]

Two things were at play in facilitating the reclassification of WMs as illegal outsiders under the HE. First was a shocking ignorance of the history of migration to Britain and the policies that governed it. Whilst this is not surprising when discussing the myriad members of the public who were being asked to police migration, specialists at the Home Office itself appeared to be blissfully unaware as well.

This collective amnesia about the legal rights and cultural significance of WMs was facilitated by the second factor: structural racism. By asking British residents to trigger immigration checks of their fellow residents, HE opened the floodgates for the harassment of ethnic minorities based entirely on non-specialist judgements of who ‘looks foreign’. That WMs were systematically perceived as ‘foreign’, despite having all the trappings of long-term residents—cultural knowledge, fluency in English, local accents etc.—is a reflection of racially exclusive construction of the British identity in popular memory.

This is to say that in cultural discourses, the historic presence of, and indeed significant impact made by non-white individuals in Britain has been written out at a systematic level. We see this in the all-white casts of British WWII films. We see it, too, in the violent hostility to Britain’s first black female MP, Dianne Abbott, who in a parliamentary career spanning over 30 years has been on the receiving end of the most abuse received by any female parliamentarian. Finally, we see it in a national History curriculum, which in the limited areas where migration is even mentioned does so in the context of ‘race relations’, effectively glossing over the agency of these individuals in favour of reconstructing the perpetually foreign migrant victim.

Windrush migrants present a uniquely fertile case study for migration scholars of all disciplines because of what it reveals about the interplay between citizenship and racism. More importantly however, the injustices of HE have flourished in a climate of wilful ignorance. The more scrutiny this case receives, the better.

[1] Amelia Gentleman, The Windrush Betrayal: Exposing the Hostile Environment (London: Guardian Faber, 2019), P.40.

Selected literature:

Gentleman, Amelia, The Windrush Betrayal: Exposing the Hostile Environment (London: Guardian Faber, 2019).

Olusuga, David, Black and British: A Forgotten History (London: Pan Macmillan, 2016).

Paret, Marcel and Gleeson, Shannon, ‘Precarity and agency through a migration lens’, Citizenship Studies (2016), Vol.20, issues 3-4, pp.277-294. 

Williams, Wendy, ‘Windrush Lessons Learned Review’, Independent Review for the House of Commons (March 19, 2020) [online] Available from: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/windrush-lessons-learned-review [Accessed on, April 1, 2020].

Anna CarceresAbout the author:

Anna Cáceres is currently finishing her ResMA in Migration History at Leiden University. Her research focuses on migration and the British public healthcare system since WWII. She is particularly interested in the historic roots of contemporary migration discourses and the role – or lack thereof – of history in national identity.

 

Title Image Credit: Steve Eason on Flickr. The image has been cropped.

Cuando el racismo abierto produce la precariedad de inmigrantes: el escándalo de Windrush en el Reino Unido y la necesidad de sobrepasar el enfoque sobre legalidad por Anna Cáceres

En el 2018 el Reino Unido estaba de nuevo en los medios, esta vez por el escándalo de Windrush que vio a cientos de ciudadanos Británicos con antecedentes migratorios incorrectamente detenidos y hasta deportados. Casi todos eran inmigrantes de países de la Mancomunidad[1] que habían inmigrado al Reino Unido en los años siguientes a la segunda guerra mundial, pero que en 2018, bajo nuevas políticas introducidas a partir del 2012, no eran más reconocidos como ciudadanos Británicos. El escándalo es importante por dos razones. Primero, demuestra la importancia de concebir al “ciudadano” como una categoría fluida y construida socialmente, en vez de una designación binaria legal. Segundo, demuestra cómo el racismo, cuando se encuentra mezclado con construcciones de la identidad nacional que son racialmente exclusivas, puede ser un catalizador para la precariedad de inmigrantes más importante que el estatus legal.

En la última década, el creciente alineamiento del Reino Unido (RU) con los discursos populistas de derecha sobre la inmigración ha sido ampliamente documentados, y llegando a su clímax legislativo con la aprobación de políticas sobre la inmigración llamado el Ambiente Hostil (AH) por la coalición Conservadora- Liberal Demócrata en el 2012. Las políticas del AH aparentemente buscaban aumentar la tasa de ‘retorno voluntario’ por los indocumentados, pero en actualidad sirvieron para invertir la carga de prueba en casos de migración. Mientras antes era la responsabilidad del oficial migraciones aprobar el estatus indocumentado de las personas, AH aseguró que ahora una jurado aleatoria y no especialistas de miembros del público,   estaban a cargo de vigilar el estatus migratorio de sus compañeros residentes. Este jurado llegó a incluir empleadores, oficiales a cargo de subsidios estatales, proveedores de servicios médicos, y propietarios.

No fue hasta el 2018, cuando The Guardian expuso el tratamiento de inmigrantes legales bajo el AH que las críticas ganaron verdadero apoyo y varias investigaciones internas fueron iniciadas. Una de las piezas centrales de esta cobertura mediática fue una porción de residentes Británicos conocidos como los Inmigrantes del Windrush (IW) – ciudadanos de la Mancomunidad que llegaron al RU entre el 1948 y el 1973. Este grupo fue severa y sistemáticamente marginalizados por el AH, aunque tenían el derecho legal de permanecer en el RU.

Esencialmente, el AH sirvió para reintroducir una situación de precariedad de inmigrante a las vidas de los IW, personas que llevaban décadas viviendo en el RU y ya no se veían como ‘inmigrantes’. En la literatura sobre la precariedad, se pone énfasis en que los inmigrantes sufren una forma de precariedad atada al estatus de ser inmigrantes, además de la precariedad tradicional, económica – es decir sueldos bajos, y empleo inestable –  a causa de no ser ciudadanos. Dificultades legales, la posibilidad de ser deportados, y la discriminación cotidiana son todos ejemplos comunes de la precariedad de los inmigrantes. Sin embargo, el enfoque sobre la ‘ciudadanía’ es limitante, porque en general la ciudadanía está definida como una designación binaria y legal: uno es, o no es, un ciudadano/a.

Los IW son un ejemplo único de ciudadanos que fueron convertidos en no-ciudadanos. Aquí, la historia de la inmigración del Windrush es sumamente importante: El Acto de la Nacionalidad Británica del 1948 dió estatus legal equivalente a los residentes natales del RU, incluyendo derechos de residencia, a todos los sujetos de la Mancomunidad, y entonces también a la mayor parte de los IW. Estos derechos fueron poco a poco revocados con el paso de varias políticas de inmigración en los años 1960s y 1970s, que empezaron a diferenciar entre británicos nacidos en RU y los nacidos afuera. Cuando llegó a promulgarse el Acto de Inmigración del 1971 en el 1973, las personas de la Mancomunidad ya habían sido degradadas de ‘ciudadano Británico’ a ‘inmigrante extranjero’. El caso de los IW demuestra que la ciudadanía es una categoría fluida, que se puede y es reconstruida para servir los intereses políticos del día.

Aún más importante, la ciudadanía experimentada por los IW era condicional y dependía de la aprobación del observador: en este case los residentes blancos del RU. Todos los IW afectados por las políticas del AH tenían un derecho legal a permanecer en el RU, y hasta hubiesen sido aptos para solicitar la ciudadanía británica completa, si se hubieran enterado que ya no la tenían. Muchos de ellos reportaron un shock terrible al darse cuenta que de repente estaban designados como indocumentados, y hasta se sentían traicionados por un país que percibían como el suyo. Así, Paulette Wilson, nacida en Jamaica pero residente en el RU desde el 1968 dijo lo siguiente:

“No me siento británica. Soy británica. Fui criada acá, todo lo que conozco es Gran Bretaña ¿Qué diablos puedo decir que soy sino Británica? […] Todavía estoy enojada que lo tengo que demostrar. Me siento enojada que tengo que pasar por esto” .[2]

Dos factores facilitaron la reclasificación de los IW como extranjeros ilegales bajo el AH. El primero fue una escandalosa ignorancia sobre la historia de la inmigración al RU y las políticas que la rigieron. Mientras esto no es sorprendente cuando consideramos la miríada de miembros del público que fueron reclutados para vigilar la inmigración, miembros del ministerio del interior también aparentaron estar felices con su ignorancia en el tema.

La amnesia colectiva sobre los derechos legales y la significancia cultural de los IW estaba facilitada por un segundo factor: el racismo estructural. En pedir que los residentes Británicos inicien investigaciones migratorias contra sus compañeros residentes, el AH abrió las puertas al acoso de minorías étnicas basado exclusivamente en el juicio de no-especialistas en quien “parecía extranjero”. Que los IW estaban sistemáticamente percibidos como “extranjeros”, aunque tenían todas las características de residentes de largo plazo – conocimiento cultural, fluidez en el inglés, acentos locales etc. – es un reflejo de la construcción popular de una identidad Británica que es racialmente exclusiva.

En los discursos culturales en Gran Bretaña, existe una amnesia colectiva sobre la presencia histórica, y el impacto significante creado por personas no blancas. Esto los vemos en los repartos completamente blancos de las películas Británicas de la segunda guerra mundial.  También lo vemos en la hostilidad violenta dirigida a la primera parlamentaria negra del país, Dianne Abbott, que en una carrera que ha durado más de 30 años ha recibido más abuso que cualquier otra mujer parlamentaria. Finalmente, lo vemos en un currículo nacional de historia, que en los pocos lugares donde se menciona la inmigración, se hace solo en el contexto de las “relaciones raciales”, efectivamente encubriendo la voluntad de estas personas en favor de reconstruir un inmigrante perpetuamente victimizado.

Los IW presentan un caso únicamente fecundo para investigadores de la inmigración de todas disciplinas por lo que demuestran sobre el intercambio entre ciudadanía y racismo. Aún más importante, las injusticias del AH han florecido en un ámbito de ignorancia intencional. La mayor atención que se le dé a este caso, mejor.

[1] La Mancomunidad de Naciones es una asociación de países que formaban la mayor parte del imperio Británico. Se inauguro en el 1926, cuando empezaron las primeras holas de descolonización y ha sido una forma de mantener influencia británica en estos territorios.

[2] Amelia Gentleman, The Windrush Betrayal: Exposing the Hostile Environment (London: Guardian Faber, 2019), P.40.

Literatura Seleccionada

Gentleman, Amelia, The Windrush Betrayal: Exposing the Hostile Environment (London: Guardian Faber, 2019).

Olusuga, David, Black and British: A Forgotten History (London: Pan Macmillan, 2016).

Paret, Marcel and Gleeson, Shannon, ‘Precarity and agency through a migration lens’, Citizenship Studies (2016), Vol.20, issues 3-4, pp.277-294. 

Williams, Wendy, ‘Windrush Lessons Learned Review’, Independent Review for the House of Commons (March 19, 2020) [online] Available from: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/windrush-lessons-learned-review [Accessed on, April 1, 2020].

Anna CarceresBio de la autora:

Anna Cáceres está terminando su  ResMA en Historia de Inmigracion en la Universidad de Leiden. Su investigación se concentra sobre la inmigración y el sistema de salud pública en el Reino Unido a partir de la segunda guerra mundial. Está particularmente interesada en las raíces históricas de los discursos actuales sobre la inmigración y el rol – o no, como sea el caso – de la historia en construir la identidad nacional.

 

Crédito de la imagen del título: Steve Eason en Flickr. La imagen ha sido recortada.

Revindicating the Black Power Movement by Bob Brown and Ana María Arbeláez Trujillo

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Ana María Arbeláez Trujillo in conversation with Bob Brown, organizer of the All-African People’s Revolutionary Party (GC)

Since the 1960s, the leaders of the Black Power Movement have fought tirelessly to challenge institutional racism, to reclaim and reinterpret the history of black people and for the right to establish and change the terms to define them and their relationships with society. Committed to this long legacy and revindication of black history, longtime activist and researcher Bob Brown visited the ISS in February 2020 to participate in an event titled  “Black Power and the Politics of Liberation, in comparative perspective”. He talked about the origins of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense and the larger Black Panther Movement worldwide. We conversed afterward. Here is what he had to say.

Can the current presidential campaign make a difference for black people?

I have not been involved in any political campaign since the 1990s. I see no candidate right now who I can support. I do not think that conventional politics, right or left, is the way forward for the US. American society has, for centuries, deliberately and systematically excluded black people from political participation. We need more than regime change. What we need is a transformation in the values and the ideology upholding the racist political system.

The possibilities for black people to seize power through electoral politics in the US are virtually nonexistent. Obama was a black figurehead in a white racist and sexist system, which structurally limited what he could do. He could be the best guy in the world, but he implemented racist and sexist policies.

When we focus on the colour or the gender of the candidates, we are looking at individuals when we should be looking at the system. It is not only about having black people or women in power; it is about recognizing and addressing the racist and gendered dynamics within the institutions.

So, do you believe that politics have transformative potential?

Yes, everything is political, but I only believe in politics with revolutionary objectives and values. I helped Harold Washington to take the Mayor’s office in Chicago. He never controlled it. He fought to control the Democratic Party in Chicago. Unfortunately, he died within four years. We had revolutionary plans; we had the Black Panther clinics and many other ideas.

Politics can be changed, even if it is minimal and incremental. If nothing else, we got Obamacare. Obama did not create it, but it was passed during his time. The program has had a positive effect in our community, especially for older people like me who cannot afford health care and for young people who were previously not insured. That is incremental change. The Black Panther Party started programs for feeding children; these programs were and are also being funded by the government.

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Bob Brown and Ana María Arbeláez Trujillo in conversation. Credit: Martin Blok

And what about academia: how do you see the role of academia in social change?

Academia is very problematic right now. The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense is predominantly regarded as an entertainment industry in academia. You don’t know how many people write books, articles, and PhD dissertations about it. When I read them, I laugh because they all reproduce the same lies.

First, I go to the index, and I see how many times the word ‘race’ and ‘class’ are mentioned. Yes, it is included one or two times, but the authors undermine, or are not aware of, their interconnection and role.

Another example is that academics are saying that Fred Hampton was killed because he was feeding children. That is not true. We did not only fight for black people; we also struggled for a different and true interpretation of history. So, if some people in academia are perpetuating the same old lies, then we must fight against those lies.

Do you think that social media have contributed to making social movements more horizontal? For example, is the Black Lives Matter movement more horizontal than the movement in the 1960s?

I have a problem with this concept of the horizontal versus the vertical. There is nothing leaderless in our culture, historically or currently. That is an illusion and ideological concept with which I don’t agree. I have a problem with those academics who are teaching that, because they are telling people something that is not true. How is the Black Lives Matter movement a leaderless organization when the Democratic Party and related forces are funding and controlling it?  They were potentially one of the most progressive movements in the country. Where are they now and what are they doing? I have a problem with the sector of the movement that says that they are a leaderless organization. That may be their ideal, but they are not there yet and never will be.

Black Lives Matter is not a monolithic or revolutionary movement. You cannot say that when the Ford or Soros Foundations offer funds to ten to fifteen of these organizations. They own the leadership of most of the movements in our community and around this country. Even if the Black Lives Matter people are not leaders, George Soros is. All we have to do is to follow the money trail. That shows confusion, and that is not a leaderless movement.

What do you think about the current focus of the media on white environmental activists?

The environmental movement is not white. It is a people’s movement with 7+ billion members worldwide. The overwhelming majority of the people worldwide are not white. The most funded and public version of it is white, but that is, again, a product of institutional racism.

This perception of the environmental movement being white has passed through generations, but it is wrong to say that. If you look from the invisible to top-down, it looks white. But you have to go through history. There are black people like Ben Chavis, Damu Smith and Connie Tucker. They coined the term “environmental racism” and were leaders of the “environmental justice movement.” Al Gore, the so-called leader of the green movement, brought “environmental justice movement” into the White House and coopted it. It is therefore disrespectful and racist to say that the environmental movement is white.

About the authors:

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Bob Brown is the co-founder and ex-member of the Chicago Chapter of the Black Panther Party (March 1968 to March 1969) and author of several books, including his most recent Malcolm X and Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael). He is currently a member of the A-APRP (GC).

perfil PID (2)Ana María Arbeláez Trujillo is a lawyer, specialist in Environmental Law and holds an Erasmus Mundus Master in Public Policy. She works as a researcher for PID Amazonia, a civic society platform to address deforestation in the Colombian Amazon. Her research interests are the political economy of extractivist industries, environmental conflicts, and rural development.

Title Image Credit: Martin Blok

 

COVID-19 | Europe’s far right whips out anti-migrant rhetoric to target refugees during coronavirus crisis by Haris Zargar

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The explosion of the coronavirus has dramatically brought about fresh challenges for refugees, asylum seekers and migrants. With countries adopting stringent measures to contain this pandemic, including rigid border controls, the outbreak will not only have a huge impact on those driven out of their countries by crisis situations, but may create another refugee tragedy that may be worse than what has been experienced before.

The global response to the spread of the virus formally known as COVID-19 has been shaped by the complexity of national political interests and hardened immigration policies. Xenophobic rhetoric about how migrants and refugees are potential carriers of the deadly virus and pose a health threat has already become a central theme for right-wing populists in Europe, who advocate for cracking down on immigration.

As Steven Erlanger aptly noted in an article for The New York Times, COVID-19 is not only proliferating, but is also “infecting societies with a sense of insecurity, fear and fragmentation”. The possible outcome in the aftermath of the pandemic, therefore, may be a further polarization of societies and ‘othering’ of refugees and migrants.

This will likely jeopardize their rights and future course, setting in motion a new wave of xenophobic and racial politics bolstering far-right groups in many countries as a result. And this global health emergency may allow governments to implement temporary immigration and health-related measures that could systematically target refugees, asylum seekers, and migrants on the pretext of containing the spread of the virus.

Politicians across the European Union (EU) have already begun to exploit the COVID-19 outbreak by levelling suspicion at refugees and migrants. Ultra-nationalist Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán blamed migrants for the spread of the virus in Hungary: “We are fighting a two-front war, one front is called migration and the other one belongs to the coronavirus. There is a logical connection between the two as both spread with movement.”

In Italy, currently the most affected European country with the highest death toll outside China, right-wing political leader Matteo Salvini whipped up anti-immigration rhetoric by suggesting that migrants from Africa may have brought the virus with them. Greece’s nationalist government has cited the risk of COVID-19 infection as its reason for pressing ahead with a contentious plan to build “closed” camps for asylum seekers trapped on the Aegean islands of Lesbos and Chios.

In the Balkans, Croatian Health Minister Vili Beroš said migrants represent a ‘potential’ risk of spreading the virus, while Serbia’s far-right parties have threatened to expel about 6,000 migrants who are residing in the country. Far-right groups in France, Germany and Spain have called for suspending the Schengen agreement that allows passport-free travel among 26 member states in the EU. Border closures and tighter travel restrictions have been used as preventive measures during previous public health emergencies. Following the outbreak of diseases such as the Zika virus in 2016, Ebola in 2014, and H1N1 influenza in 2009, many countries imposed tight travel restrictions.

The World Health Organization has warned that trying to tighten border security will not work and may even impede the global fight against the spread of COVID-19. “We cannot forget migrants, we cannot forget undocumented workers, we cannot forget prisoners,” said WHO executive director and public health specialist Michael Ryan. “The only way to beat [coronavirus] is to leave no one behind.”

Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF, or Doctors Without Borders) has also urged Greece to immediately evacuate refugees and migrants from overcrowded camps on its islands owing to the high risk of COVID-19 spreading swiftly among people living in squalid conditions. The organization said that it would be impossible to contain an outbreak in such camp settings and that it had not yet seen a credible emergency plan in case of an outbreak.

Recent humanitarian situations such as the ongoing civil war in Syria have highlighted how the destruction of critical healthcare infrastructure in a country can contribute to the emergence of infectious and communicable diseases. With fears growing over the excessive strain on public healthcare services owing to the coronavirus outbreak and an inability to cope with the rising number of infected people, the health implications for refugees may be profound.

This article is part of a series about the coronavirus crisis. Read all articles of this series here. This is a shortened version of an article originally published by New Frame.

HarisAbout the author:

Haris Zargar is a PhD researcher looking at links between land reforms, social movements and armed insurgencies in Indian-controlled Kashmir. He has been a journalist for the past nine years, writing on the intersection of politics, conflict and human security. He worked as a political correspondent based in New Delhi with leading Indian new outlets including The Press Trust of India and The Mint. He holds degrees in Journalism and Development Studies from the University of Kashmir, and the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London.

Image Credit: EYE DJ on Flickr

Brexit tales of discontent: the revenge of Empire by Helen M. Hintjens

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Nobody knows what happens after UK general elections on 12 December 2019: Brexit, a referendum on Irish unity, on Scottish independence, or a No-Deal exit from the EU?  In 1977, Tom Nairn in The Break up of Britain warned that during “extreme difficulties and contradictions, the prospect of break-down or being held forever in the gateway… may lead to… nationalist dementia for a society” (p. 349). The election taking place this week will decide whether the ghosts of imperial ancestors win the day, or whether younger generations can save the UK from its divided self.

Crisis? Which one?

Uncertainty over Brexit is wreaking havoc on the Brits. Those who want to remain in the EU are in despair; those who want to leave are angry. Most are sick of it. Britain’s collective mental health, already poor before Brexit, is worsening dramatically.

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Illustration 1: anti-depressant prescriptions in England: another opioid crisis.

In 2012, the Jimmy Savile scandal erupted, resulting in a public crisis in confidence in the British establishment. The public enquiry under then-PM Teresa May into “Historic Child Sexual Abuse” involved serious charges against MPs, celebrities, and royals. The crisis recently resurfaced when Prince Andrew gave a BBC interview on his Epstein connection. He was soon forced to withdraw from UK public life. The Savile crisis is almost forgotten, yet in 2012, John Simpson in The Guardian called this “the worst crisis I can remember in my nearly 50 years at the BBC”. Brexit is now the second “worst crisis in 50 years” in less than a decade.

Myths and lies

Some see the 2016 Referendum result as based on myths and lies. The language of war—betrayal, surrender—gained currency. More recently, the Labour Party accused Johnson  and his rich friends of planning a ‘Big Short’ on a No-Deal Brexit. Pro-Brexiteers accuse Remainers (termed ‘Remoaners’) of thwarting the “will of the British people”. Tory MPs who are pro-Remain have been thrown out of the Conservative Party. Support for Brexit remains in rural, small-town and post-industrial England, despite the dire warnings of Operation Yellowhammer [1]. In London, Bristol and Birmingham, and across Scotland and Northern Ireland, the majority wants to Remain. Welsh opinion has moved towards Remain, or even Independence.

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Illustration 2: Humour is essential

This joke sums up the dilemma for smaller UK countries: “An Irishman, a Scotsman and an Englishman go into a bar. The Englishman wants to leave, so they all have to leave”. Brexit humour abounds, and it helps a little, but only a little.

Macho English Nationalism

On Gender and Brexit, Aida Hozic and Jacqui True comment whilst “men took up 85% of the press space and 70% of television coverage”, during the Brexit campaign, “women [became]… visible as actors… to ‘clean-up’ the mess left by their male counterparts” (p. 276). Women and men voted similarly on Leave-Remain. Young people were notably more pro-Remain than their elders. Commenting in Third Text, Finlayson comments: “Farage’s Brexitism… opposes the small, ordinary, decent, local and familiar to the big, distant and untrustworthy”, showing a ‘little Englander’ mentality harking back to Empire. Pro-Brexit rhetoric centres on ‘guts’ and courage: “…phrases [that] invoke boyhood stories of wartime bravery against the odds and of standing up to boarding school bullies” (pp. 602-603), and tales of the Empire.

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Illustration 3: Brexit and Dangerous Jingoism

Outdated imperial values are dangerous. Both racist and sexist, such values risk renewing sectarian violence in Northern Ireland. The murder of Labour MP Jo Cox and UK-wide spike in hate crime since the Referendum leaves minorities fearing the future. And small-minded English nationalism merely intensifies Scottish, Northern Irish, and Welsh nationalism. The 12 December 2019 elections are crucial.

Algorithms and Rule by Nobody

In today’s networked age, algorithm-based ‘filter bubbles’ limit social media users’ suggested content to their existing comfort zone. Guardian investigative journalist Carole Cadwalladr found that the Leave campaign defeated Remain by using such filtering algorithms effectively [2]. Causing suspicion of his motives, Boris Johnson recently refused to allow the publication of a parliamentary report on Russian social media interference in UK elections.

Pro-Brexiteers also frame Brexit as revolt against ‘faceless Brussels bureaucrats’, echoing Hannah Arendt’s ‘Rule by Nobody’. Yet EU neoliberalism could give way to UK financial deregulation, a danger with the UK constitution now collapsing. Abandoning compromise also means Britain could break into three or four national units. Sectarian and anti-minority violence would likely accompany this break-up.

End Thoughts

Nairn warned the Brits—especially the English—of the danger of rooting around in their imperial past for renewed nationalist identity symbols: “… once these well-springs have been tapped there is no real guarantee that the great forces released will be ‘controllable’” (p. 349). As minorities in the UK live in fear of the future, Brexiteers need constant reminding that words can be mortally dangerous. We are now in Karl Marx’s vision in The Eighteenth Brumaire where “[t]he tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living… [drawing]… from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history”. Rather than plunge back into its imperial past, and end up divided, it is hoped the UK electorate will vote to remain in the EU. The question now will be whether the EU will want us!

At a Research in Progress Seminar 12 December 2019 ‘BREXITLAND FAIRY TALES’, Helen Hintjens will elaborate on some of the points in this blog. 13.00-14.00, ISS. This happens to be on the same day as the UK national parliamentary elections!

[1] The latest Operation Yellowhammer document was released on 2 August 2019. It predicts shortages of medicine, “risk… panic buying… [which could] exacerbate food supply disruption”, “[u]rgent action… to ensure [continued] access to clean water”, “[the disruption of] [la]w enforcement data/information sharing UK-EU”, and “[p]rotests and counter-protests… across the UK” alongside “… a rise in public disorder and community tensions”.
In Northern Ireland “growth of the illegitimate economy” especially in cross-border areas“.
[2] https://www.spectator.co.uk/2019/11/exclusive-dominic-cummingss-secret-links-to-russia/
Cadwalladr also in:  https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/may/17/dark-money-democracy-billionaires-funding
Image Credit Main Photo: Williams Murray Hamm on Flickr

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About the author:

Helen Hintjens is Assistant Professor in Development and Social Justice. She publishes on asylum policies and on post-genocide reconciliation in the African Great Lakes region, and Rwanda in particular.

 

 

Terrorism not in my name by Tariq Modood

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Muslims are now at the centre of two forms of terrorism. On the one hand, acts of terror carried out in the name of Islam and/or to defend a Muslim population by fellow Muslims. And on the other, acts of terror by white supremacists carried out in the name of western, Christian, or European civilisation. How should one respond to terrorism carried out in one’s name?

I put aside for now forms of state terrorism such as those carried out by the US-led alliance in Iraq, by Israel, by the Assad regime in Syria, or by China in Sinkiang, for example, because they deserve a separate discussion.

The first thing to note on the two kinds of terrorism I am interested in is that, globally speaking, the overwhelming majority of the victims are Muslims (just think of Pakistan and countries such as those in which groups like ISIS operate). I shall, however, confine myself to western or white-majority countries. In other words, I am thinking of attacks such as those carried out on the London transport system in 2005 and on Muslim worshipers in Christchurch, New Zealand in 2019 – where Muslims are a minority and also a minority – albeit not an insignificant one – of the victims.

There are a number of interesting questions that can be asked about the two kinds of violence mentioned at the top of this blog. For example, the two seem to have some kind of causal or reactive connection and one could explore that aspect and wonder if both are set to increase as they feed off and copy one another. One may also ask about the role of religious identity, especially as there seems to be two different dynamics at work. In the case of Islamist-inspired violence, the relationship with religious identity seems direct, even if based on deviant interpretations of Islam. In the case of the Christchurch killer, a direct appeal to Christianity seems to be at best civilizational rather than faith-based; its relationship to religious identity is that it is explicitly in the name of opposition to a specific religious identity, namely Islam, or more precisely to a hatred of Muslims, in other words, Islamophobia.

My question here is: how should those who share the relevant generic named identity (eg., being Muslim, being white, being a Westerner) respond to the violent evocation of their identity by perpetrators of violent crimes? And, further, can there be a basis of cross-arching unity through such responses and bi-sided condemnations?

Since 9/11 many western (and other) Muslims have been numerously asked to condemn Islamist acts of atrocities. While all or nearly all do so, some Islamists and left-wing Muslims also object to non-Muslim fellow citizens asking them to do so. They bristle against the assumption that they might be supportive of such atrocities and ask why is the condemnation sought only from Muslim citizens. Isn’t the desire for public condemnation by their fellow citizens a kind of collective suspicion of all or most Muslims, which is only one step short of collective blame, which would be racist?

Requiring rituals of public condemnation of jihadi terrorism by co-citizens just because they are Muslims may indeed be Islamophobic. But perhaps Muslim co-citizens not spontaneously – without being asked to – distancing themselves from Islamist terrorism shows a diminished civic identity? Or perhaps not?

One test of this, or at least an opportunity to reflect on it, presents itself with the growing white supremacist terrorism. Should white citizens – in virtue of being white and co-citizens – feel obliged to say anything to groups victimised by such terrorists? Are Muslims or other relevant minorities owed a condemnation by co-citizens? Does it matter that such condemnation by white people would reassure and express solidarity with their Muslim co-citizens? Is the requesting of white people to make such a condemnation or the spontaneous making of it by them an acceptance of collective blame and the not making of it, siding with racism and Islamophobia?

While we should not overlook that western Muslims live under a burden of suspicion and stigmatisation with constant pressure to conspicuously exhibit they are good citizens in a way that most white people do not have to, we should all indeed strive to be good citizens. Zealous witch-hunting of Muslims is not good citizenship; but nor is not spontaneously attending to one’s co-citizens fears and anxieties and cultivating forms of solidarity.

Given that the two kinds of attacks that I have been discussing here are likely to grow at least in the short and medium-term and that they are meant to divide communities and citizenries, can bi-sided ‘not in my name’ condemnations rather than the silence of ‘nothing-to-do-with-me’ be the appropriate response of citizens and political leaderships?

This article was originally published on openDemocracy and is part of a series on Global Extremes.

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About the author:

Tariq Modood is Professor of Sociology, Politics and Public Policy and Director of the Centre for the Study of Ethnicity and Citizenship at the University of Bristol and a Fellow of the British Academy. His latest books include Multiculturalism: A Civic Idea and Essays on Secularism and Multiculturalism (2019). He recently held a seminar about ‘Accomodating Religious Diversity in Secular Institutions’ at the ISS.

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, under the GREASE project (grant no. 770640) and the BRaVE project (grant no. 822189).

The opinions expressed in these blog posts are the sole responsibility of the authors. The European Union is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information or opinions contained herein.

 

 

 

The battle for Zwarte Piet: Everyday racism in the Netherlands by Dorothea Hilhorst

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Every year around this time, a major cultural and identity clash emerges in the Netherlands as proponents and opponents of Sinterklaas (the Dutch version of Santa Claus) clash over Zwarte Piet, his black servant. However, instead of leading to resolution, debates on Zwarte Piet have become increasingly marked by violence and intolerance, as some fiercely defend this tradition, while others call for change. What is the debate all about, and how can it provide us with insights on everyday racism in the Netherlands and beyond?

As a child growing up in a Dutch, white suburb, my favourite tradition in the Netherlands has always been Sinterklaas. It is our variation of Santa Claus, but our Sint gives the children presents on the occasion of his birthday on 5 December. Three weeks before the big day, Sint arrives by steamboat in the Netherlands and during the three weeks’ stay he visits schools, families, and hospitals to meet children. Before going to bed, kids place their shoes near the chimney or door. They sing the traditional songs about Sinterklaas, and add a root or water for Sinterklaas’ horse. In the middle of the night, Sinterklaas’ servants – so the story goes – would enter through the chimney and place sweets or presents in the shoes.

THE ISSUE WITH ZWARTE PIET…

As a child, Sinterklaas was the highlight of my year, and I was never aware of the racist character of the tradition. Sinterklaas is surrounded by servants that are black. Although there are many myths about the origin of Zwarte Piet, it is not difficult to see remnants here of the Dutch history riddled with slavery. The representation of Zwarte Piet, a servant with exaggerated racial traits, including shiny black skin, kinky hair, and fat red lips, is perceived by many as reproducing racial stereotypes and as a form of everyday racism. For the last ten years, the discussion on Zwarte Piet has escalated to become a principal battleground of what it means to be Dutch in the twenty-first century.

In 2014, a UN research team concluded that Zwarte Piet was indeed racist, and the report noted that the committee was shocked to find how ignorant Dutch society is about its history with slavery. The e-mail account of one of the researchers, Jamaican professor Verene Shepherd, had to be temporarily closed due to extensive hate mail from Dutch people who felt that one of their most precious traditions was being attacked.

ZWARTE PIET REIMAGINED?

While protest against Zwarte Piet is growing in the Netherlands, it is important to note that the tradition is not under attack. Nobody wants to ban the tradition of Sinterklaas, protesters just want a minor adaptation to Zwarte Piet. The proposed alternative is Roetveegpiet: a person of unspecified ethnicity that is blackened by the soot from inside the chimneys through which Piet supposedly enters the houses. This alternative seems simple and doable, yet the Netherlands continues to be utterly divided over the matter. When HEMA – a popular store – announced in 2015 that it was changing its December displays to the Roetveegpiet, it quickly had to backtrack because of a consumer boycott and security threats received by HEMA personnel.

In 2017, when Sinterklaas’ arrival by steamboat took place in the province of Friesland, a number of people blocked the highway to stop anti-Zwarte Piet demonstrators from holding a peaceful protest. The people who blocked the highway have recently been convicted by a court to several weeks of community service, but fail to understand why and show no remorse or regrets.

This year, 2018, the arrival of Sinterklaas was accompanied in many cities by violent attacks on peaceful protesters against Zwarte Piet. Apparently, the core of those coming to the defence of Zwarte Piet is now formed by football hooligans that take joy in throwing cans and other objects at the protesters. Dozens of the hooligans have been arrested. While extremist hooligans are the most visible part of the pro-Zwarte Piet movement, surveys show that in the society at large the support for Zwarte Piet is declining, but that he can still count on majority support among the population.

For this reason perhaps, the Dutch government so far has refused to intervene in the debate, claiming this is not a political, but a socio-cultural issue. Only last week, the leader of the Christian party Christen Unie that forms part of the current government coalition publicly announced his support for Roetvegenpiet.

It is quite incredible how Zwarte Piet has become the epicentre of the stormy discussion on how the Netherlands has to relate to itself in times of diversity and migration. Accusations of racism on the one hand and treason on the other entrench antagonism in the battle for or against Zwarte Piet.

RESISTING EVERYDAY RACISM

At ISS, everyday racism is a major topic of analysis. One of the things that I’ve learned from our international students is that something can be racist with or without intention. When somebody is reprimanded after telling a nasty joke about black people, the usual defence is, “Oh, but I never meant that to be racist, and, by the way, I have many black friends.”

But even without the intention of racism, a joke can be racist in the sense that it reproduces prejudice about minority groups with a different skin colour or a non-majority ethnic background. And even without racist intention, these friends may still find it unpleasant to hear the jokes.

How can this insight help us in the Zwarte Piet debate? Could Zwarte Piet critics believe that the large majority of Zwarte Piet lovers have no racist intentions? And could Zwarte Piet defenders then acknowledge that Zwarte Piet is nonetheless a hurtful expression of everyday racism?

1974 2 VAN DE DRIE MEISJES.
The author (on the right) with her sister in the 1970s.

In November 2013, the ISS community sent a letter to Erasmus University’s Rector Magnificus to raise the issue of the celebration of Sinterklaas and the everyday racism it represents. The letter was a response to an invitation (which just had a picture of Zwarte Piet) to celebrate Sinterklaas on the Erasmus University campus in Rotterdam. Authors of the letter called for the recognition and appreciation of principles of tolerance on which the ISS strives to be built and requested that the university starts to consider alternative forms of representation to overcome the racial stereotyping from the celebration of Sinterklaas. The letter was signed by 52 members of the community.

Picture Credit: MysterieusVP

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About the author:

Dorothea Hilhorst is Professor of Humanitarian Aid and Reconstruction at the International Institute of Social Studies of Erasmus University Rotterdam.