The Zwarte Piet discussion was not something I really thought was valid until I saw the cartoon images that went along with it. And I dont like to talk about these things because I dont want to make it difficult for caucasians to be around me without feeling as though I am constantly bringing up difficult subjects but its also important. Historically, apparently, Zwarte Piet was based on the devil who would punish the bad kids. As with most European symbology, that which is evil is dark, to show the fear of the unknown, night, the dangers thereof -- perfectly acceptable and evolutionarily valuable cultural memes. The problem comes along when the convenient association of stereotypes mixed in with the idea of evil. Here you have a people that look like the thing your cultural memes have taught you to find fearful and grotesque. Not only that but the baseness, evil, barbaric, ungodly, ignorant foreigners, the colour of the darkness that is so naturally feared, are commodified. It then becomes a confluence of factors that make it easy to create an offensive stereotype that weaves its way into tradition. But if you have no idea about the history, it is easy to think people are nitpicking. However, imagine if a population had no idea what Nazi symbology resembled but they had met soldiers who had shown them the salute and the swastika and the moustache and they had adopted the practice. In their innocence, they are still participating in an unwelcome glorification of a time of great human suffering. We would try to explain to these people that this tradition is offensive to some people. And the fact is that the Zwarte Piet is worse than that. I dont really mind blackface the way people do it today, thats whatever. If somebody gets blacked up for halloween so long as its only skinpaint and not the lips and all that, I dont care. But the Dutch played such a huge, destructive role in slavery that there really should not be such a casual dismissal of Zwarte Piet as just a white person covered in charcoal. He could have smudges on his face. He doesnt have to have the big red lips, the thickly curled hair and the gold hoop earrings because thats a different imagery that you are ignorantly calling a charcoal-covered white person. Its clumsy backtracking, its rewriting history. Its not nearly as serious but its the kind of justification that in other cultures leads to holocaust denial. IM NOT SAYING THAT PRETENDING ZWARTE PIET IS REALLY WHITE IS THE SAME AS DENYING THE HOLOCAUST! Im just saying that that sort of apologist behaviour is all about the same thing. Trying to justify biases that you have grown up with. The fact that the Sinterklaas figure comes in from Spain is historically significant. Spain and Netherlands were royally bound and between Spain and the Netherlands, I cant think of a power pair that profited more from slavery and the raping and pillaging of the Americas at the expense of African lives. The French profits from Santo Domingo before the Haitian Revolution and the British empire are close seconds but the 16th century belonged to Spain, and the 17th to the Dutch East and West India Companies -- the first multinational corporations and prototypes of capitalism. There is no excuse for a whole nation to ignore its political and historic past. No reason for it to pretend as though it was not complicit in some of the worlds most abhorrent atrocities, no excuse therefore, to pretend to be innocent and to rewrite facts. Zwarte Piet is the Banania cartoon, the gollywog doll, the justification of slavery where the white man tamed the barbaric African. That imagery has no place in the world anymore -- nor did it ever, really. Plain and simple.
Posted on: Tue, 18 Nov 2014 13:46:32 +0000
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