[DEBATE] : Two Dutch Pieces on Racism (also Dutch)

[peter waterman]

Two Dutch Pieces on Racism (also Dutch)



Anne-Ruth Wertheim*

anne-ruthwertheim at hetnet.nl








There is Racism and There is Racism - I



A new kind of racism is gradually emerging in the Netherlands. Not the 
classical contempt for others, but a cultural racism of distrust and fear.



In an ad in de Volkskrant, a leading Dutch daily paper, on 17 March 2008 
tv-producer Harry de Winter compared how people talk about Muslims in the 
Netherlands with anti-Semitism against Jews. In recent years, anyone who 
ventured to draw this comparison was viewed as a nutcase. Islamophobia was 
the justified fear of Muslims and didn't have anything to do with something 
as awful as the Holocaust. But De Winter's comparison pertains to the 
preparations, i.e. how the inhabitants of European countries were gradually 
persuaded in the course of the 1930s that there was something really not 
quite kosher about the Jews.



            Calling what the Muslims are dealing with racism still 
encounters strong reluctance in present-day society. There is another reason 
why. Racism means systematically looking down on certain people and there is 
little or no evidence of that here today. Racism is what happened in the 
colonies, what was done to the slaves, the blacks under Apartheid and 
Afro-Americans in the United States. All we are doing here is "calling a 
spade a spade and saying what we think. It is a question of the right to 
have an opinion, and without even being nasty. They ought to be able to cope 
with that and it should have happened a long time ago."



It is true that the colonial racism we are familiar with is on its way out. 
But it is not the only kind of racism there is. For centuries and all across 
the globe, there has been a very different kind of racism, cultural racism. 
It is not about looking down on people, it is about fear and distrust. 
Though we tend to tone it down by calling it Islamophobia, this is the 
racism that is gaining ground in the Netherlands.



            The two kinds of racism are as different as can be, but do have 
one thing in common. They are both brimming with biases and preconceptions. 
Colonial racism sees certain people as being unable to take care of 
themselves, stupid, lazy and childlike. The new cultural racism  virtually 
turns this upside down. Muslims and essentially all non-Western immigrants 
are rarely called stupid, even though they do have a lot to catch up on. 
They are mainly unreliable and their cultural baggage, including their 
religion, is very dangerous and very scary.



            I myself was once part of a minority. As a half-Jewish white 
child, I grew up in the former Dutch East Indies, which is now Indonesia. In 
the colony, Indonesians had to work on the plantations for very low wages. 
This was justified with the usual prejudices. The literature of the former 
Dutch colony is filled with examples of the racial features the colonists 
attributed to the natives. Their Indonesian personnel was simple-minded, 
gullible and lived from one day to the next. They couldn't help it, that was 
simply their biological makeup.



            As anyone who is not lily white can testify, there are still 
traces of this kind of exploitation racism in the Netherlands. After the 
horrors of the persecution of the Jews, the word racist did come to have 
very nasty connotations. But when the Turkish and Moroccan labour migrants 
entered the country, the Dutch were ready to look down their noses at them. 
They couldn't do anything but heavy physical work, nor did they want to, and 
they were too stupid to learn Dutch. But very gradually, something changed.



For centuries, cultural racism turned against mercantile minorities, there 
were Indians and Pakistanis who were driven out of Uganda and pogroms 
against the Chinese in several Asian countries, like Indonesia. And indeed, 
European anti-Semitism had a great deal in common with this kind of cultural 
racism. Wherever cultural racism emerged, it was fraught with malicious 
preconceptions, but nowhere was claimed that anyone was stupid or lazy. On 
the contrary, the group in question was sly and hungry for money and power.



It was not that there was anything wrong with their biological features, it 
was their culture that was so scary, their deviant ways of acting and 
thinking, their religion. And that was something they could definitely do 
something about, i.e. put an end to their abhorrent practices, abandon their 
religion. What is more, they were competing with the established population, 
which was another thing that was not likely to be appreciated. Even though 
no one liked to admit being jealous and it seemed preferable to focus on 
their unreliability.



Let us examine the similarities to the new racism in the Netherlands. 
Condescension has been replaced by fear, distrust and contempt for things 
"people can change, if only they want to". Fortunately most people are not 
contaminated by these ideas. They can clearly see how the dangers of 
extremism have been declared applicable to all Muslims. And no matter how 
much they differ, how all the non-Western immigrants are lumped together 
into one recognizable group. How they become a scapegoat for everything that 
goes wrong, the atmosphere in certain neighborhoods, the streets that are so 
unsafe, and nowadays even for traffic jams. And the contempt they are 
confronted with if they speak out against discrimination, which is then 
referred to as typical victim behaviour.



The people who refuse to go along with this are not blind to the problems, 
they see perfectly well what solutions of this kind can lead to. They do not 
close their eyes to the lessons of history.



Last year the loyalty of the New Dutch was suddenly in question because they 
had two passports. Doubts about loyalty and the accusation of being loyal to 
distant powers are also part of cultural racism. Jews were accused of 
following the Wise Men of Zion, a non-existent sneaky association bent on 
ruling the world. And Chinese traders were thought to be marionettes of the 
big bad mother country.



Lastly, there are the risks of violence. Wherever exploitation racism 
dominated, rebellious individuals used to be subjected to public corporal 
punishment as a warning. Everyone else would be left unharmed. After all, 
they had to be capable of hard labour. But wherever cultural racism 
prevailed, as many members as possible of the group deemed to be a threat 
would be eliminated, murdered or driven out of the country. That violence 
was on a mass scale, though there were fatalities on both sides. It was 
preceded by intensifying the spread of rumours about how dangerous the group 
was and how justified the fear.

The dynamite was there, it was just a question of lighting the fuse. It 
usually remained a mystery who made the first move. It is fortunately 
nothing like that yet here, but an end does have to be put to the black 
cloud hanging over us. This can be done once more people get a clear view of 
the mechanisms in operation here.



This article appeared in Podium, the Op-Ed section of the Dutch daily paper 
Trouw on 19 March 2008.







There is Racism and There is Racism - II





After I wrote my article "There is Racism and There is Racism'', I received 
quite a few often very emotional reactions. At the Trouw web site, in 
personal emails and at any number of blogs. Some of the readers who 
responded are just as concerned as I am that the latest developments can 
lead to violence. The distinction I drew between the two kinds of racism and 
the mechanisms that go along with them have encouraged them in their efforts 
to head us all in a more peaceful direction. Others reacted with 
indignation. But all things considered, it is clear that a newspaper article 
like this about such a complicated issue can also evoke misunderstandings. 
That is why I am happy to take advantage of the opportunity Anja Meulenbelt 
is offering me as a guest on her blog www.anjameulenbelt.nl to elaborate 
upon my analyses based on these readers' responses.



In your article in Trouw you agree with Harry de Winter, who compares 
Islamophobia to the Holocaust. That is total nonsense!



Harry de Winter compares Islamophobia to how the public mind set was primed 
for the Holocaust in the 1930s. How considerable percentages of the European 
populations allowed themselves to be convinced that their society's problems 
at the time were all the fault of their Jewish compatriots. I think the 
comparison is a valid one and I will illustrate why below.



Racism is all about races and has nothing to do with cultures!



It is true that exploitation racism is focused on peoples or ethnic groups 
like the indigenous natives in the colonies or the blacks in South Africa. 
Cultural racism is a completely different story. It targets mercantile 
minorities, the Chinese in Indonesia and the Indians and Pakistanis in 
Uganda. European anti-Semitism can also be viewed as cultural racism.



Prejudices are always expressed without people actually meeting and getting 
to know each other and they pertain to entire groups. Our society puts so 
much emphasis on the individual and our individual freedom. People who are 
the object of prejudices are however solely viewed as members of a group and 
held collectively responsible for whatever other members of the group do. 
Depending on the kind of socio-economic problems and feelings that are 
involved, prejudices can be focused on 'race' (whatever that may be) or 
ethnic group at one extreme and culture at the other and everything in 
between. The two kinds of prejudices also often both occur as factors in 
mixtures.



Criticism of Islam doesn't have anything to do with racism!



The point here is not criticism of this religion or that. Of course that is 
something that should be able to be expressed. The point is that people are 
labeled because of their religion, isolated from the rest, discriminated and 
ultimately perhaps even violently driven out of the country.



Muslims and non-Western immigrants are racists themselves, so what are they 
complaining about?



There is racism all over, that is true, and it needs to be analysed and 
combated all over. An eye for an eye and everyone goes blind, that is no 
solution.



What in the world do you mean by different kinds of racism?



It is a distinction that can be used to clarify the mechanisms in effect at 
the moment in our society. I think it is important for people to be able to 
see them for what they are.



In cases of exploitation racism, a small group of people benefits from the 
work done by huge numbers of other people. The happy few have workers do 
hard, dirty and often dangerous jobs under poor working conditions and for 
low wages. They don't want to have to admit this is exploitation, so they 
spread the notion that they are so stupid and backwards they wouldn't want 
it any other way.



In cases of cultural racism, competition among groups plays an important 
role but not the only one. For centuries and all across the globe, there was 
economic competition between the established populations and mercantile 
minorities who, as it happens, had also been living there for centuries 
themselves. The established population was jealous of their ingenuity and 
perseverance and looked for ways to eliminate them as rivals or at any rate 
weaken them. They started by casting suspicion on their deviant culture 
including their religion, and telling stories about how sly they were and 
how dangerous because they were out to rule the world. In the end they 
started to believe the stories themselves and the fears would periodically 
get so out of hand that mass violence broke out against the minorities in 
what was called pogroms. In the anti-Semitism that prevailed in Europe, 
competition was a factor side by side with for example the Christian 
accusation that the Jews had killed Jesus.



You wrote that prejudices can serve to justify certain things.



Prejudices can mask or legitimate underlying feelings. That was clear in the 
cases of  exploitation racism in the colonies and in competition racism 
against the mercantile minorities as well. Colonials who felt uncomfortable 
with their role as exploiters were all too willing to believe the exploited 
people were quite happy with things as they were. After all, they were born 
stupid, lazy and childlike. An additional advantage was that the colonials 
could feel superior to them. Of course the people who were bothered by the 
successes of mercantile minorities could hardly call them stupid and lazy. 
They turned to the aspects developed later in life, their culture. To them 
the solution was to see the behaviour of the mercantile minorities as 
deviant, unreliable and scary, so that in the end, they had only themselves 
to blame for their demise.



The things people say about Muslims are not just made up, they are true.



As one regards the cultural racism on the rise here in the Netherlands, one 
might wonder whether and to what extent there are other feelings underlying 
the prejudices about Muslims and essentially about all non-Western 
immigrants. Our society is permeated with competition for money and goods as 
well as fame and honour. It is accompanied by all kinds of feelings that 
people are not supposed to have, as we are told from early childhood. You 
should not be jealous of people who are doing better than you, you should be 
able to cope with loss, you should be happy for other people's 
accomplishments and so forth. So it is very understandable that people 
prefer to conceal their socio-economic motivation. For example, their 
irritation at having to compete with immigrants, their jealousy if 
immigrants are successful, and their problems about having to share the 
public space with them. It is more comfortable to believe  that the entire 
group simply does not count, that Muslims are so dangerous that it 
disqualifies them. It would not be the first time in history that the belief 
in a common enemy met a need for harmony and consensus, especially in times 
of economic insecurity like we are experiencing today, what with 
privatization, globalization and market mechanisms.



Do you mean gut feelings?



No, because it is not a term that explains anything or solves anything. What 
is more, it has a condescending sound to it. I am trying to analyse how 
people come to believe in cultural biases.



You wrote that cultural racism is gaining ground in the Netherlands. But isn't 
it inconceivable that competition is playing a role here? Aren't the 
immigrants way too far behind and much too problematic?



In recent decades, there has been a shift in the Netherlands from disdain 
for the first labour immigrants from Turkey and Morocco to growing distrust 
and fear of Muslims and actually all non-Western immigrants and their 
children and grandchildren. At the moment, there is a mixture of prejudices, 
remains of the familiar old condescension and fear and suspicion. I think 
that at least in part, this shift can be explained by the growing ability of 
immigrants and their children and grandchildren to compete. So I think this 
shift is going to continue. Their emancipation is in full swing and they are 
in the process of taking the places they have earned for themselves in all 
the sectors of society including the highly educated ones. Everyone can see 
and feel this, even though most of the media do keep stubbornly zooming in 
on the lags and the problems, which of course are there as well.



Nature or nurture, what difference does it make?



Sometimes victims of exploitation racism, who can't help being the way they 
are, also find themselves getting a bit of sympathy, even though of course 
it is not nice to get it from people who look down at you. Victims of 
cultural racism however are to blame for being the way they are. In the 
course of their lifetime, they have internalized their identity and 
pernicious ideas and customs in their very essence. They are given a choice: 
either abandon their identity, ideas and customs and lose their self-respect 
or be excluded from society. If such a thing is possible, this makes 
cultural racism even more ruthless than exploitation racism.



They just have to integrate, period!



Forcing people to either abandon their identity or be excluded is not 
integration. All over the world, immigrants integrate into new societies, 
sometimes after one generation, sometimes after two or three, in infinite 
different variations. Jewish Europeans were completely integrated and often 
even assimilated and it did not save them from mass annihilation.



What does group formation have to do with violence?



In both types of racism, prejudices focus on a group. It does not matter 
that much to the exploiters whether the group is sharply defined, the more 
people it includes, the better. In cultural racism, step by step the borders 
are reinforced until a recognizable group has been constructed that can be 
eliminated as a whole. The mercantile minorities could be identified by 
their appearance and names and Jewish Europeans, who were more difficult to 
recognize, were forced to wear a yellow star. Delineation of this kind makes 
it possible to scapegoat an entire group. Over and over again this has 
proved to be an excellent way to avert tension in a society.



A clearly defined group can also be more easily accused of being under the 
influence of foreign powers and thus unreliable. Last spring doubts were 
suddenly expressed about the loyalty of Ahmed Aboutaleb, Nebahat Albayrak 
and Khadija Arib, who had all recently risen to high positions in Dutch 
society. No one could claim they still had to integrate or make up for some 
lag so new ammunition had to be found: they had two passports. As I noted in 
my article in Trouw, doubts about loyalty and the accusation of being loyal 
to distant powers are part of cultural racism. Jews were accused of 
following the Wise Men of Zion, a non-existent sneaky association bent on 
ruling the world. And Chinese traders were thought to be marionettes of the 
big bad mother country.



If and when it comes to violence, a very important difference between the 
two types of racism is the nature of the violence. In exploitation racism, 
violence is focused on a few individuals in public to make it clear to 
everyone else that resistance is useless. In cultural racism, violence is on 
a mass scale because it is designed to murder all the members of the group 
viewed as dangerous or drive them out of the country.



You wrote that we tend to tone cultural racism down by calling it 
Islamophobia!?



Islamophobia only pertains to the fear of Islam. Although a phobia is an 
exaggerated, unhealthy and irrational fear, in only a few years and under 
the influence of this very same irrational fear, the term has been weakened 
to now mean a justified fear of Islam. Nowadays people barely seem to feel 
any embarrassment about using it this way. I want precisely these people to 
appreciate the severity of the situation. And to realize that in the end, 
incessantly spreading fear and discord in a population can lead to mass 
violence. It is naive and arrogant to think this kind of violence can only 
break out in distant countries and that we in the West are too respectable. 
That is not what our history tells us. It is also short-sighted and 
misleading to act as if Islamophobia is something very different than racism 
just because it targets a religion and not a race, whatever that may be. As 
I noted above, the cultural racism that is emerging in the Netherlands and 
is toned down by calling it Islamophobia has quite a few features in common 
with competition racism against mercantile minorities and with anti-Semitism 
as well. The main point of racism is that it singles out a specific segment 
of the population, targets it with prejudices about traits people are either 
born with or acquire, and then treats them as if these prejudices are 
actually true.



Why don't you refer to it as discrimination? That doesn't sound as bad.



Discrimination can be an aspect of racism and often is, but it is not always 
demonstrable. The people who treat a group unfairly or exclude it can often 
defend their decisions by saying they have nothing to do with race or 
religion and claiming to have totally different reasons in mind.  The term 
racism covers a lot more than just discrimination, it also includes biases 
and preconceptions and prejudices and can include violence as well.



Don't you think it turns people off if you accuse them of racism?



I am not accusing anyone of anything, I am analysing the situation and 
showing what can happen. I hope and trust that it would be a good thing if 
more people could understand the mechanisms in operation here. I do think 
though that the people who encourage and spread fear of a specific segment 
of the population are taking on a very heavy responsibility. They are 
attacking, so they are the attackers. By labeling the people they are 
attacking scary and dangerous, they are creating a very advantageous 
reversal of the whole picture. In one fell swoop, they turn themselves into 
the attacked party instead of the attackers. They present themselves as 
victims of the danger they themselves have invented, and they try to 
persuade everyone else to share their prejudices. And instead of seeing the 
situation as something they themselves are creating, they say the Muslims 
ought to be able to deal with it and should not act like victims.



            But I have faith that we are capable of rational thinking, well 
maybe not all of us but certainly most of us. If a lot of people, whether 
they are politicians or not, see what is actually happening, in the end they 
will stand behind what is in the interest of society as a whole and thus 
also in their own interest.



But don't you think extremist Muslim violence is dangerous?



Of course I think extremist violence based on religion, whether it is Islam 
or any other religion, is dangerous and needs to be combated. But not by 
randomly holding people responsible just because they believe in the same 
religion. Whenever the media focus on violence, they automatically refer to 
extremist Muslim violence. I think they should also consider the possibility 
that violence might break out here in the Netherlands against the Muslims 
and all the other recognizable non-Western immigrants. People's fear is an 
incredibly strong motivation for outbursts of violence. The media would be 
wiser to expose these mechanisms for what they are.





*Anne-Ruth Wertheim is a journalist and the author of various books, 
including De gans eet het brood van de eenden op, mijn kindertijd in een 
Jappenkamp op Java (The Goose Eats the Ducks' Bread: My Childhood in a 
Japanese Prison Camp on Java) 1994. An Indonesian translation of the book 
was published in March 2008.



Anne-Ruth was born in 1934 in Indonesia, at that time a Dutch colony. 
Following the Japanese occupation, all whites were interned in camps. Her 
father, Wim Wertheim, the Dutch sociologist of development, was confined 
separately from his family. After the war Anne-Ruth heard how the whole of 
her father's Jewish family had been killed and that her Jewish grandparents 
had killed themselves on the day the Netherlands capitulated to Germany. It 
was this confrontation with 'racial' options and violence that provided the 
source for her later research on the nature of racism.



After studies at Amsterdam University she developed methods to teach both 
youngsters and adults to carry out independent research. She has three 
daughters and now also three sons-in-law and six grandchildren.