RACISM IN THE NETHERLANDS

The month of November is a very special time in the Netherlands. It’s the moment of the year in which Sinterklaas, Saint Nicholas in English, arrives in the country and brings presents and sweets to kids. It is a magical moment for Dutch families and children because throughout generations they have believed in this magical character bringing joy into their lives. It’s comparable, and just as important, to Christmas celebrations in other countries.

I arrived in the Netherlands seven years ago and I wasn’t familiar with the celebration. I was a bit confused about how the Dutch celebrated “Christmas” earlier than other countries, but I was mainly shocked about one specific character joining the party: Sinter Klaas’ servant, Black Pete, or Zwarte Piet in Dutch. …

RACE AND FEMINISM

This year marks the 100th anniversary of women’s right to vote in the United States. A historical moment, only that it is not totally accurate. It is the 100th anniversary of white women’s right to vote. Black women in the US were only able to vote when the Voting Right Act passed in 1965. After getting the right to vote in the beginning of the twentieth century, white women did not vote differently from white men, and this has stayed constant throughout history. This may also explain why the majority of white women (53%) supported Donald Trump. …

RACE AND STORYTELLING

Movies telling Black stories have been gaining more attention. ‘12 Years a Slave (2013)’, ‘Moonlight (2016)’, and the controversial ‘Green Book (2018)’ went on to win the Oscar for Best Picture in their respective years. This is certainly an increase in representation in comparison to the null amount of Black stories that won in the decade before. Given the clear increase in quantity, it is also good to think about the quality of those representations.

The last decade has seen the rise of empowering content told by Black storytellers. They brought us Blackness from a Black perspective; think of movies like ‘Black Panther (2018)’, ‘Selma (2014)’, and ‘12 Years a Slave (2013)’. However, there are still stereotypes about Blackness in cinema and television that seem to die hard. These stereotypes are not only false and hurtful, but also contribute to creating feelings of inferiority among Blacks, and feelings of superiority among Whites. …

I have been torturing my hair and skull for the last eighteen years. Every week my hair routine consisted of a full day of hair creams followed by an hour of applying heat with a hair dryer and half hour of hair iron. My goal was to look beautiful to others, and in order to achieve that my hair needed to be straight.

Working from home for the past months made me reflect on the way I look, not to others, but especially to myself. Because of the decreased pressure of looking good while working from home, I stopped straightening my hair. …

THE BLACK FEMALE TROPE VOL. III

Ebony, the code word for Black in porn sites, was the second most searched phrase in the United States according to the site PornHub in 2018. Porn categories “latina”, “ebony”, and “interracial” were viewed significantly more often in the US than in the rest of the world. That same year, “Black girl, White guy” was the most searched term in the Southern states of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Kentucky. Isn’t this ironic, considering the historic racism in the country and those states specifically? Not if you look closer.

During the time of slavery, the hyper-sexuality myth and fetish associated to Black women served to justify their exploitation, and the brutality exercised on them by White men. It has since then served as a means of racial and gender control towards them, until today. …

THE BLACK FEMALE TROPE VOL. II

Strong is one of the most common words used to describe Black women. Another word used to describe them: angry. But there is more behind those two simple adjectives that have now been upgraded to stereotypes used to describe Black women. ‘Strong’ and ‘angry’ are loaded words when they are used for referring to Black women. Are Black women as strong as they are told to be, and are they as angry as they are perceived?

In my previous article I analysed the Mammy myth. The first stereotype of my ‘Black female trope’ series. The Mammy myth reduces Black women’s skills and desires to domestic work. This stereotype limits them to a role that serves other people’s interests, and doesn’t reflect their own experiences. In this article I reflect on the second stereotype assigned to Black women, which is probably the most pervasive one: The Sapphire myth, also known as the ‘Angry Black woman’. …

THE BLACK FEMALE TROPE VOL. I

Malcolm X once said, “The most disrespected person in America is the Black woman. The most unprotected person in America is the Black woman. The most neglected person in America is the Black woman”. Research shows that he was right. Not only in the United States, African descendent women in western societies live in a constant struggle to fit in a system that is designed to exclude them. In her book Sister Citizen, Melissa V. Harris-Perry called this system a “crooked room”.

The analogy of the crooked room refers to a research on cognitive psychology about how people locate the upright in a space. A study showed that when people were located in a crooked chair inside a crooked room, and were asked to align themselves vertically, they used their surroundings as reference. Some people would tilt themselves and thought that they were upright because they perceived themselves aligned with the images and space that was also tilted. Other people managed to align themselves vertically, regardless of how crooked the rest of the room and objects were. …

Brand names and mascots that are over 60 years old should all be going through a thorough review right now. It seems that many marketers and brand ‘experts’ back in the day were not very concerned with racial sensitivity or history. Their focus was to appeal to customers at all costs. In the lights of the recent social outburst by the Black Lives Matter movement brands have started to remove racist references in their names. …