Confronting blackface

Abstract

Recently, the Netherlands witnessed an agitated discussion over Black Pete, a blackface character associated with the Saint Nicholas festival. This paper analyzes a televised panel interview discussing a possible court ban of public Nicholas festivities, and demonstrates that participants not only disagree over the racist nature of the blackface character but also over the terms of the debate itself. Drawing on recent sociolinguistic work on stancetaking, it traces how panelists ‘laminate’ the interview’s participation framework by embedding their assessments of Black Pete in contrasting dialogical fields. Their stancetaking evokes opposing trajectories of earlier interactions and conjures up discursive complexes of identity/belonging that entail discrepant judgments over the acceptability of criticism. The extent to which a stance makes explicit the projected field’s phenomenal content, it is argued, reflects the relative (in)visibility of hegemonic we-ness.

Crisis and bias: Exploring ethnic prejudice among Chinese‐Dutch children before and during the COVID‐19 pandemic

“…This may be explained by the continuous societal debate in the past few years in the Netherlands about the figure of Black Pete (portrayed by White people in blackface) in a national children's festival (Sinterklaas; Lemmens, 2017), which was also covered by the national news broadcast specifically aimed at children (NOS Jeugdjournaal, 2019) and often watched by children in schools. A majority of the White Dutch population disagreed with the assertation of the protesters that Black Pete is racist and a colonial reenactment, and these discussions have led to more anti‐Black racism in public debates (D'hondt, 2020; Polkamp, 2020). This continuous societal debate may have influenced the evaluations of the Black outgroup among all children living in the Netherlands, including Chinese‐Dutch children.…”