The false innocence of Black Pete | Daily News

The false innocence of Black Pete

Writing a weekly column for a Dutch newspaper is a good way to lose heart. Not because whatever topic you choose, you’re bound to receive slews of emails from readers who disagree with you, or because of the amount of hatred people tend to offload in those letters. What gets you down is that some people seem to think that when you contradict them, you lose your right not only to freedom of speech but to your nationality. “That’s not the Dutch way of doing things.”

When I hear this, I often find myself coming back to the James Baldwin passage from the Autobiographical Notes that begin Notes of a Native Son: “I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.”

Moral centre

Although I have lived here for almost five years now, the country that I love most is not the United States of America. I was born in the Netherlands, and most of my family and friends live there. Still, the notion stays the same: precisely because I love the Netherlands so much, I insist on my right to continuously criticize her.

The aim of that criticism is to better the principles by which that country functions, and because I know no single person-and certainly not me-can be the moral centre of a country, my hope is that other Dutch people will do the same. I suggest we start by taking a closer look at our family holidays.

Every year, on the December 5, the Dutch celebrate the feast of Sinterklaas (Saint Nicholas). The concept of Sinterklaas is different from that of Santa Claus. For starters, Sinterklaas is not a Christmas character; Sinterklaas’s name day is December 6. Furthermore, Sinterklaas does not live on the North Pole but, rather, in Madrid. He comes to the Netherlands a few weeks before his birthday by boat and he rides a horse. He does look like Santa Claus, in the sense that he, too, is an old, white, and bearded man. Sartorially, however, Sinterklaas looks more like the pope: he wears red robes and a red miter with a big cross on it, and carries a golden staff.

Every night of his Dutch sojourn, Sinterklaas makes a round on his horse to hand out small presents to the Dutch children. I write “small” because they have to fit inside the shoes the children have put out at night (near the radiator or in front of the fireplace). Sinterklaas has helpers, called Zwarte Pieten (the Dutch plural for Black Pete), who travel alongside him on foot across the rooftops and slide down chimneys to deliver the gifts. The night before his birthday, Sinterklaas goes to visit all the children in the Netherlands one final time to bring them a few more presents. This time, most of them are too big to fit in their shoes, so he knocks on their front door and leaves a big bag of gifts. This night is called Pakjesavond-a contraction of the Dutch diminutive for gifts and the word for evening. Since the early fifties, Sinterklaas’s gifts come with letters addressed to the children, composed of carefully constructed rhymes, that are both funny and didactic and that reveal Sinterklaas has his eyes-or rather, Pete’s eyes-on you all year round.

Golden hoops

The celebration of Sinterklaas has a long tradition: as far back as the middle of the sixteenth century, children have been putting their shoes out at night. Since the middle of the nineteenth, though, Sinterklaas (portrayed by an older, white man) arrives by steamboat, and usually sometime in the middle of November. He is accompanied by Zwarte Piet, his helper.

The number of Sinterklaas’s helpers has grown steadily over the years; at the end of World War II Canadian soldiers in the Netherlands organized a Sinterklaas celebration with a mass of Zwarte Pieten. Ever since, Sinterklaas has been accompanied by many Pieten.

These are portrayed in the streets by white people playing dress up. Piet has a black face and big red lips and wears golden hoops in his ears. When I was a kid, this version of Zwarte Piet was prominently featured in advertisements and on wrapping paper and confectionary packaging. This media and print incarnation of Zwarte Piet has mostly been phased out, but close to ninety percent of Dutch schools still use live actors (amateurs) during their celebrations: white people in blackface portraying black people as acrobatic, slightly dim-witted, kindhearted, gullible “manservants” (the word Dutch children use to describe Piet in their Sinterklaas songs).

As I child, I loved Sinterklaas: I loved the gifts he left in my shoe and Pakjesavond (of course), but I also loved sitting around the fireplace, drinking tea, eating chocolate snacks, and listening to my parents reading his poems. I loved singing for him on the evenings before December 5 and I put a carrot in my shoe for his horse. Once, I staked out the front door all evening until, finally, I had to pee. It was in just that minute that Sinterklaas knocked on our door. When I opened it, he was gone. Still, I loved it when he came to our school and invited you to sit on his lap and how he talked to you in his low voice. He had read in his big book that I should work harder on my long division and my handwriting.

And I loved his Pieten, too.

Shifting demographics

It wasn’t considered problematic that I thought of them as “his” Pieten, either. I grew up in a predominantly white world: white parents, white teachers, white doctors. There was one black boy in my high school, and he came in by train. The only other black people I knew were soccer players and Gerda Havertong, one of the characters on the Dutch version of Sesame Street (who first raised this issue more than thirty years ago). - Paris Review


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