Each November in the Netherlands, the red-and-white-clad Sinterklaas arrives by steamboat to great fanfare. In Amsterdam alone, hundreds of thousands turn out along the canals to greet the tall, bearded saint and his helpers, jolly types called “Zwarte Pieten” or “Black Petes.” After riding off on a white horse, Sinterklaas is said to roam the country until December 5th, when he lands on Dutch roofs and sends his Black Petes down chimneys to deliver gifts to good little girls and boys.
The Dutch Black Petes are more fun, and thus more popular, than the staid saint they serve, and in the festive weeks before Sinterklaas returns to Spain (that’s where he lives, according to tradition) they show up everywhere, from schools to shops to company parties. The fact that they do this in blackface, with curly wigs, red lips, and gold earrings, has been a subject of controversy for decades. But this year, following a bid to include the Sinterklaas festival on a UNESCO list of the country’s “intangible cultural heritage,” the issue has exploded in the Netherlands. One Dutch ethnologist called it “an existential revolt not seen in Dutch society since the murder of Pim Fortuyn.”
The uproar began with an interview with Verene Shepherd, a professor of social history who, as chair of the United Nations’ Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent, received letters, spurred by the UNESCO bid, saying that the Black Pete tradition is racist. Calling the practice a throwback to slavery, she told a Dutch journalist that, “As a black person, I feel that I, if I were living in the Netherlands, as a black person, I would object to” Black Pete, she told a Dutch journalist. Her wholly informal suggestion that Black Pete be done away with was met with pro-Black Pete protests, a stream of social-media vitriol, and a call from the far-right politician Geert Wilders to do away with the U.N.
Even the Dutch Prime Minister, Mark Rutte, weighed in, saying that “Black Pete is black, and we can’t change that.” Two ad agency employees started a Facebook petition against “the abolition of the Sinterklaas fest.” “Pietitie,” a play on “Piet” and the Dutch word for petition, got nearly two million “likes” in two days. With posts that included a photoshopped Brad Pitt in blackface (and the question “Brad Piet?”), Pietitiehas set records for online petitions in the country.
Two weeks ago, J. C. Kennedy, a professor of Dutch history at the University of Amsterdam, was invited to comment on the Black Pete debate on “Newshour,” one of the most important news programs on Dutch television. “Zwarte Piet, as experienced by the Dutch, is complex,” Kennedy explained to me. “As I confessed on TV, I have a hard time, as an American, seeing this as an entirely innocent thing.” While the origins of Black Pete are unclear, the emergence of the figure as he is known today “coincides with the rise of minstrel shows in the U.S. It’s a kind of black figure, not so intelligent, subservient—it’s the emergence of a stereotype of a black person or an African, the rise of the black ‘other,’ ” he said. “But I know a lot of Dutch don’t see it that way.”
One contemporary interpretation is that the figure, now sometimes known simply as “Pete,” is black because he climbed down the chimney (skeptics point out that Pete’s page-boy outfit remains suspiciously clean). Some have suggested painting Pete in rainbow colors, or scaling back to a simple soot-like smudge on the chin.
Peter Jan Margry, a professor of European ethnology at the University of Amsterdam, said Dutch defenders of the tradition have trouble seeing Black Pete as a racist figure because they like him so much, and have for so many generations. “It’s in the genes of society,” he said, adding that the figure of Piet has changed over the years. “He used to be a ‘boo-man,’ a scary person to scare children. Nowadays, he has developed into a children’s friend. The change that took place in the character of Piet didn’t take place in his appearance, which the Dutch didn’t notice has so-called racist semiotic elements, because they saw him already as a good figure.”
“From an insider point of view, this is a children’s festival and a family festival,” one that plays an important role in family togetherness, added Margry. When children outgrow Sinterklaas, the celebration involves something called “surprises”: “a fake parcel, which often contains dirty things, that you have to go in with your fingers and find the poem written about you by a family member, which is usually sarcastic or ironic. With Sinterklaas, you can say things with a smile on your face that you are annoyed about to other family members. It’s a family festival. That’s why the Dutch are so stirred up at the idea that the U.N. might abolish this.”
“Looking from the outside, people say, ‘How is this? This isn’t possible! This is just a racist portrayal of black people,’ ” said Margry. “Insiders say he is a nice figure for children. The two sides have such different perspectives. They don’t talk to each other, but next to each other.”
The poet and playwright Quinsy Gario, who grew up in the Netherlands and St. Maarten, echoed this. “Both sides are not understanding where the other side is coming from,” he said. “We’re still working on that.”
“For me, it started six or seven years ago,” said the twenty-nine-year-old of his engagement with this issue. “One of my mom’s colleagues told her, in front of clients, ‘We were looking for our Black Pete, and there you are.’ My mom is the strongest person I know, and she called me, shaking. It’s such a micro-aggressive way of saying, ‘You aren’t one of us.’ I thought, I need to do something.”
Gario began inserting lines about chimneys and blackface into his poems at readings. He made a T-shirt that read “Black Pete is Racism” and wore it at a poetry slam, where he recited facts about Dutch colonialism, slavery, and the history of Black Pete to an unsympathetic crowd. Next, he created a performance piece in which he wore the shirt in public places. “A lot of people came up to me and started screaming,” he said. “They said, ‘What are you talking about, I’m not a racist! This is my childhood; you’re ruining my childhood!’ I would just present the facts, and they would simmer down.”
Two years ago, when Gario wore the shirt to a Sinterklaas parade in the Dutch town of Dordrecht, he was arrested by police and pepper sprayed. In August, he submitted an official complaint against this month’s Sinterklaas parade with the city of Amsterdam. “After that, it’s been one death threat after another,” said Gario. “One article said I was crazy. But there have also been a lot of articles finally realizing that this is racist.”
At a City of Amsterdam Complaints Commission hearing earlier this month, twenty strangers who had seen Gario’s complaint on the Internet lodged similar protests. “They said things like, ‘Every year, I have to tell my kid he’s not a Black Pete,’ and that they hear, ‘You don’t need face paint, you’re already black,’ or ‘Your boat just arrived, shouldn’t you entertain us?’ ” he said. Amsterdam’s mayor, who urged respect and understanding but also called any disruption of a Sinterklaas parade “clearly morally objectionable,” on par with shouting in public that Sinterklaas doesn’t exist, announced that the city would hold the event, as usual, on November 17th.
“For me, it’s not about saying this figure is racist,” said Gario. “It’s about activating and empowering others. It’s a very interesting moment in the Netherlands, when we have to see that being Dutch doesn’t mean having white skin. It’s about being accepting of heterogeneity, because the Netherlands is black and white and Indonesian and Moroccan. It is Muslim and Christian and Buddhist and Taoist. We need to accept that to move on.”
Photograph by Michael Urban/AFP/Getty
