I don’t think (click here) I will ever forget the look on my roommate’s face when I offered her some pepernoten....
...Over the last few months, the long-simmering debate about whether black Pete is racist has grown into a full-blown controversy that has attracted the attention of the international press. In January of this year, four representatives of the United Nations High Commission for Human Rights sent a letter to the Dutch government attacking black Pete as potentially “perpetuat[ing] negative stereotypes” about African people and people of African descent, and soliciting the Dutch government’s views. The Dutch government’s response was an exercise in evasion: the government essentially said it is aware of disagreement about black Pete but views Saint Nicholas as an event for children, and that the it is “highly committed to combating discrimination on all grounds[.]” Professor Verene Shepherd, the lead author of the UN letter, added fuel to the fire by saying in a televised interview that she didn’t understand why one Santa Claus wasn’t enough for the Dutch. A black Pete fan-page on Facebook attracted more than two million “likes” in a week. In an essay published in yesterday’s New York Times, Dutch author Arnon Grunberg argues that the strong emotional support of black Pete is a symptom of “thinly disguised xenophobia” driven by “the fear of losing identity[.]”
In my own life, a micro-level version of these events played out in the pepernoten incident. The bag I handed to my roommate featured several Saint Nicholas illustrations, including some depictions of black Pete that looked a lot like the picture at the top of this blog post (which, incidentally, is the profile picture of the Facebook fan site). Needless to say, these images struck my American friend as deeply offensive. She calmly explained to me that between the big eyes, round face, exaggeratedly red lips, and large ear hoops, it would be hard to come up with a more racist caricature of a black person....
...Over the last few months, the long-simmering debate about whether black Pete is racist has grown into a full-blown controversy that has attracted the attention of the international press. In January of this year, four representatives of the United Nations High Commission for Human Rights sent a letter to the Dutch government attacking black Pete as potentially “perpetuat[ing] negative stereotypes” about African people and people of African descent, and soliciting the Dutch government’s views. The Dutch government’s response was an exercise in evasion: the government essentially said it is aware of disagreement about black Pete but views Saint Nicholas as an event for children, and that the it is “highly committed to combating discrimination on all grounds[.]” Professor Verene Shepherd, the lead author of the UN letter, added fuel to the fire by saying in a televised interview that she didn’t understand why one Santa Claus wasn’t enough for the Dutch. A black Pete fan-page on Facebook attracted more than two million “likes” in a week. In an essay published in yesterday’s New York Times, Dutch author Arnon Grunberg argues that the strong emotional support of black Pete is a symptom of “thinly disguised xenophobia” driven by “the fear of losing identity[.]”
In my own life, a micro-level version of these events played out in the pepernoten incident. The bag I handed to my roommate featured several Saint Nicholas illustrations, including some depictions of black Pete that looked a lot like the picture at the top of this blog post (which, incidentally, is the profile picture of the Facebook fan site). Needless to say, these images struck my American friend as deeply offensive. She calmly explained to me that between the big eyes, round face, exaggeratedly red lips, and large ear hoops, it would be hard to come up with a more racist caricature of a black person....
