Race and the Pitfalls of Emotional Democracy: Primary Schools and the Critique of Black Pete in the Netherlands

Abstract

A centrepiece of the Dutch festival of Sinterklaas, the blackface character Black Pete, has met with growing contestation in the past decade over its caricatural representation of people of African descent. Attacks on this national “happy object” elicited a host of majority responses that converged in professing non‐racism. As the celebration is primarily thought of as a children's festival, schools across the Netherlands had to decide whether to maintain, alter or suppress the Black Pete character. This article considers the spatial politics of race that informed school decisions about the festival. We show geographical variation in the distribution between change and non‐change. However, we find that both strategies were justified in the name of respect for “black feelings”, even as majority calls for mutual tolerance between proponents and opponents of Black Pete normatively portrayed multicultural society as conflict free and ultimately strove to disarm anti‐racist critique by framing it as anti‐democratic.

Creating an audience: Experiences from the Surinamese slave registers crowdsourcing project

“…2018). Finally, we took the precaution of beginning our public campaign in January, to avoid becoming entangled in the often virulent Black Pete debate in the Netherlands, which reaches its peak in early December every year (Hilhorst and Hermes 2016, Rodenberg and Wagenaar 2016, Coenders and Chauvin 2017.…”

Never Having Been Racist

“…Although the blackface character has been decried since at least the mid-20 th century for stereotyping black people through its appearance and character traits (Helsloot 2005), such criticism was met with derision for decades. Serious consideration to abandon the figure only surfaced nationally after 2012, as charges that "Black Pete is racism" began to circulate more widely and gained international echo (Helsloot 2012;Coenders & Chauvin 2017). In response to the intensified challenge, defenders of the tradition have insisted that Black Pete is an innocent figure and sought to preserve the blackface character in the country's Sinterklaas celebration.…”

“…The Sinterklaas holiday is imagined to provide all the Dutch with joy -at least those who are truly members of the nation. The supposed togetherness of everyone celebrating with everyone turns all, including the Dutch nation itself, into potential happy objects for one another (Coenders and Chauvin 2017).…”

“…Yet, conservative paranoia obscures the role of idealized multicultural self-images in the reproduction of racial domination and the politics of happiness that supports it (Ahmed 2010;Hage 1998). Indeed, normative celebrations of ethnic and cultural diversity can serve to symbolically erase racial domination and deflect anti-racist critique by creating a false equivalence between the "feelings" of groups holding vastly unequal positions in the racial order and by demanding "mutual respect" between artificially neutralized "opinions" (Coenders and Chauvin 2017). Paul Römer, the director of the public broadcaster NTR which produces the Sinterklaasjournaal, thus justified the introduction of "soot Petes" as a reasonable, democratic compromise validated by the rising number of viewers in 2014:…”

“…Unsurprisingly, the focus on respecting "black feelings"-while presenting them as mistaken-was mirrored by calls for mutual tolerance between the proponents and opponents of Black Pete. By portraying multicultural society as free of conflict, these calls resulted in framing persistent anti-racist critique as disrespectful of "white feelings" and thus ultimately as anti-liberal and anti-multicultural (Coenders and Chauvin 2017). The director of the public broadcaster NTR discussed the show's coming season in the spring of 2016 following that line of argument:…”