This particular “debate” has been raging on for several weeks now and I finally have some time to chime in with my “two” cents.
To start of I want to remove a misconception many people, worldwide, seem to have about the Dutch Saint Nicholas (or Sinterklaas, as we call him). Saint Nicholas is NOT Dutch for Santa Claus. Like the Germans we have two celebrations in December; one is called Christmas and the other Saint Nicholas. We celebrate the latter on December the 5th (for the Germans it is on December the 6th) and we have two days of Christmas on December the 25th and 26th. We also have a Santa Claus, but we call him The Christmas Man (Kerstman).
I am only familiar with the Dutch celebration and a little with the German one, but Saint Nicholas is celebrated in other European nations as well and also in some of former and current Dutch colonies.
Which brings me to me next point, which is the sordid history of how The Netherlands colonised other nations and was heavily involved in the transatlantic slave trade. The estimates are that The Netherlands shipped almost a million human beings as slaves to the various colonies they had acquired. This happened during the 16th, 17th, 18th and 19th century and is a period of Dutch history that is to this day referred to as the “Golden Age.” A lot of the racism that people face today is a direct result of the actions of Dutch people during this period.
The “debate” regarding Black Pete (I put it between quotation marks, as it seems very one-sided) is not new. During the 1990s attempts have been made to change the appearance of Black Pete somewhat. Eventually people settled on no longer using makeup that is completely black, but instead use a dark brown to paint the faces of those who played Black Petes.
In the 90s I was still a child and I had questions about Black Pete, namely “How come his face is so dark?” Like children today, I was told this was because Black Pete is the one who goes down the chimney to deliver the gifts and the dark stuff on his face is soot. This never made much sense to me. Dutch chimneys have looked like this for as long as I can remember:
How would a human being fit through, much less a fully grown one? I could also never understand why Pete’s face would get dirty, but his clothes stayed completely clean. Even the chimney sweeps from Mary Poppins ended up with very dark clothes. The soot would also not explain the curly wigs, the red lips or the earrings and the often sparkly white sneakers. The whole story never made sense to me.
When the news broke in my country that Verene Shepherd and her colleagues of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights had sent a letter to the Dutch government, my first thought was: What took them so long? Interestingly the letter was sent on 17 January 2013. The Permanent representation of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, in Geneva, didn’t answer the letter until 10 July 2013. Several weeks later newspapers picked up the story and the public response was mostly one of mass fury. In newspapers, on the radio and television shows reactions could be summed up by these examples:
Do we even need to ask if this is racist? Of course it is racist. It is so obviously blackface, it doesn’t matter that it forms part of a children’s feast. This celebration started long before slavery was abolished and that too was a tradition. Tradition doesn’t make it right or inoffensive.
Furthermore, traditions change. Some dutch newspapers have written about the history of Black Pete and shortly thereafter this Youtube video began circulating:
Here you see the same celebration done in 1935. Everyone here is on horseback, instead of just Saint Nicholas with all the Black Petes on foot. Can you see something else? That’s right, no one does blackface here. Do the children look less happy about this? No they don’t. They just want the party, candy and gifts. As long as they get that they are happy.
It is really an insidious insinuation that the opponents of blackface Black Pete want to cancel the entire celebration. They only want people to stop doing blackface and no one has claimed that the celebration itself should disappear. But the voices who want to stick with the current tradition, no matter what, are louder and in the majority.
The people who are getting very emotional about the criticism of Black Pete are mostly adults. The children are a lot calmer about it. A dutch news organisation for youth news polled over a thousand children and did street interviews. The associations that children have with Black Pete are largely position, because he is the one that hands out the gifts and candy. The children are also afraid that the celebration will disappear altogether and they don’t think that’s fair to small children. They do however seem to understand better than adults that the discussion is important and that Black Pete is the comedy relief side-kick of Saint Nicholas and not the one in charge. Many children would also not care if Black Petes would have faces with different colors like purple or blue. In a way the children’s opinion seem to mirror the dominant opinions of the adults in my country.
If you were to show the images of Dutch Black Petes to people around the world and ask them if it is blackface you would find a large majority would agree. Yet in my country, that likes to present itself a model for the protection of human rights, we are somehow exempt for criticism under the guise of “protecting” children who seem more open to a discussion than the emotional adults. Or are the extreme emotional reactions perhaps more due to the fact that people do not like to be called racists or reminded of a past when our protection of human rights was far less of a priority or only applied selectively?
In my country there has never really been a “debate” on the racism of Black Pete. There has been criticism for over thirty years and it largely gets ignored, but now that the UN is involved it is met with aggression and accusations of intimidation and bullying. All people are trying to do is shut down a debate that never even started as quickly as possible.
Perhaps you will also have noticed that for Saint Nicholas and Black Pete I have consistently used male pronouns and that is because the celebration features no female characters either. Sometimes women dress up as Black Pete, but Feast of Saint Nicholas is as much about men as it is about racism.