Skip to content

Category: Netherlands

Keeping Promises For Students Who Leave ISIL

isil

For the most part, western countries who try to prevent their citizens from moving to Syria or Iraq to join ISIL use police force. Now, a Dutch politician wants to cut off student grants and social security payments if they receive evidence that they have joined ISIL but pledges to reinstate their grants if they choose to leave ISIL and come back to live in the Netherlands. I wrote about it for Quartz.

Comments closed

Black Pete, I’ll See You Next Year.

1280px-Sinterklaas_tekening

Today, the Dutch author Arnon Grunberg wrote an op-ed piece in the New York Times – maybe just in the International New York Times, but I’m not sure – where he talks about his love of Sinterklaas and his country’s fear of losing its identity.

He wrote:

The truly disturbing thing is the aggression conjured up by this public debate, the thinly disguised xenophobia that roiled to the surface when attempts were made to make Black Pete less black.

In a world where multiculturalism is becoming the norm, the Netherlands, as well as many other EU member states increasingly feel like they have to artificially alter their cultural mindset to agree with the political correctness of the times.

But the issue isn’t really about appeasing the international community. There are several Dutch citizens who do not come from white ancestry, and whom wearing blackface unquestioningly offends.

Grunberg wrote that many Dutch children, in the days leading up to Sinterklaas, ask whether dark-skinned people in their neighborhood are just Black Petes dressed in normal clothes. It’s juvenile racial profiling.

This stereotyping doesn’t just stop at children. Adults, at an attempted pro-Black Pete rally in The Hague, formed a mob around a dark-skinned woman who was merely an on-looker. The police had to extract her.

As for me, a dark-skinned person living in the Netherlands, I’m off to France to celebrate a toned down version of Sinterklaas: St. Nicholas’s namesake day. Au revoir, Pays-Bas. Maybe you’ll be less controversial next year.

 

Leave a Comment