Column | What you want to keep and what can go

A move always takes longer than you think. Already four months ago I moved to a new place, but there were still boxes unpacked. When I finally decided to go through the last stuff, it turned out that most of it was unnecessary ballast: things that were once useful but no longer needed. In one of the boxes I came across a fabric bag with a worn print. ‘Black Pete is Racism’, it said, with an elegantly curled staff of Sinterklaas next to it. I immediately remembered how my son, then only about six years old, carelessly pulled the bag out of a pile of things and stuffed his gym clothes into it. I had doubted whether to give him another bag. It was November 2015 at that time, he was only six and the debate about Zwarte Piet was raging in the Netherlands. I decided to do nothing and let him go to school with it. In the evening he told me that some friends thought his bag was stupid. “Black Pete is not racism at all!” they had said. They had heard that from their parents, just as he had heard the opposite from me and his father.

I don’t remember how we ended the conversation, but what I do remember is that in the years that followed activists were arrested, angry white citizens tattooed Zwarte Piet on their bodies, and how a black saint with dreadlocks walked through the city drove, handing out red roses to unsuspecting passersby. An elderly neighbor pointed to a picture of the black Sinterklaas in the newspaper and said it was all good, that protest, but a black Sinterklaas?! That was really too much for her.

I wonder how people who cling to the old saint look at the statues from Staphorst. Those grim white men in full Black Pete costumes. This is Zwarte Piet, yes, and this is racism, all the way through. Would this go too far for them? I read in the newspaper that people in Staphorst are embarrassed by the violence, but that they also understand those angry white men well. Because this was their village, and they would celebrate Sinterklaas, as they are used to.

But that is actually an important detail, that desire for self-determination. It is completely understandable that people do not want to be imposed on others. That they say, those Westerners (and then they mean, I think, suburbanites) should not come and tell us what is and what is not possible. Understandable, everyone. But the problem is that the Kick Out Zwarte Piet demonstrators don’t have the power at all to ban or impose anything. All they do is hold up a mirror to the Netherlands: look at yourself, and tell me if what you see is beautiful. Like animal rights activists problematizing the use of fur in the fashion industry, or making the Spaniards think about the sustainability of bullfights. Holding up the mirror is an opportunity for self-criticism.

The people who forcibly imposed something on others were therefore not the activists. It was the angry bosses with their ridiculously painted black faces who blocked an exit, attacked cars with stones and flares, opened doors and poured fuel on people. If I were a Staphorst I would be ashamed of the people who fought for my self-determination in this way.

Anyway, I can’t talk because I live in Amsterdam, the city where the black Sinterklaas sailed through the canals again this year. I heard my old neighbor waving sweetly back at him from the quay. In the intervening years, she had grown attached to the image of these dreadlocks. She too has undergone a move, despite still living in the same place. After all, the past is like a house that you have left. Sometimes it’s good for all of us to unpack the boxes and throw away what we no longer need.

Karin Amatmukrim is a writer and man of letters. She writes a column here every other week.