I was a young teenager when I mustered up the courage to call a well-known retail chain for a part-time job. The gentleman on the other end of the line was friendly, there was room and I was allowed to come by.
I cheerfully cycled the five kilometers to the center and beamed along the way. How nice would it be if my mother would pay me later. When I arrived, a gray man looked at me in surprise through his glasses. It took him a few seconds to understand who I was.
“Daphne?” My accentless Dutch had obscured my background, the telephone corrupted my name, but now I stood there in all my Moroccan glory and he began to stammer. Suddenly there was no room left. “You’re very small, aren’t you,” he added as I slunk off. Too small to work in a shop.
On another occasion I saw a ticket on the window of a candy store. They were looking for help on weekends. Feeling supported by the friend who was there, I walked in and was told they wanted someone for five days.
The sneaky thing about discrimination and racism is that you usually can’t argue that you’re being treated differently because of your background. Unless someone unabashedly says ‘I don’t want a Moroccan’, as employment agencies regularly heard from clients when I was enrolled there as a student. They told me out of indignation and because they felt I should know.
Rejection and unfounded mistrust settle in you. They become companions, whispering fiends that warn you of disappointment and make you skittish, no matter how innocent you are and how often you experience it.
I don’t get used to walking next to my white lover and always being picked out by the Marechaussee for a check. When he shouts ostentatiously “that’s because you are Moroccan”, I enjoy the discomfort that arises. I’m uncomfortable, so are you. And there is always the inner panic: soon they will find something that is not mine, as happens in the movies. Your imagination runs wild, even though you know rationally that you have done nothing wrong.
Skin color as a predictor of behavior belongs to the bulky waste
That’s what racial profiling does. It sows doubt that grows bigger and bigger to uncontrollable proportions. If you have nothing to hide, you don’t have to worry, it sounds know-it-all ashore, but that’s not how it works. While being questioned and answering calmly, your thoughts run wild: “Do I seem relaxed,” “Don’t go off track,” “What if he doesn’t believe me,” “Smile kindly.”
And then I am lucky with my Dutch passport. I saw a Filipino au pair at Schiphol, and public square, be humiliated by such a bokito in uniform. Her papers were in order, yet he felt it necessary to subject her to a taunting interrogation and ridicule her answers.
A Lebanese grandmother was not affected either. In the middle of the night, the Marechaussee questioned her, despite her valid visa for family visits. They didn’t care that she didn’t speak French or English.
In the news about racial profiling, this sadistic aspect is forgotten. The humiliation of people who are not suspected of anything. Every bicultural Dutch person of non-Western origin knows how difficult it is to get a visa for family. People who succeed should be welcomed festively.
It is no longer allowed by the courts, ethnic profiling at border controls, that is an important victory. But rejecting people for a job on the basis of origin is also not allowed, and yet the problems persist in practice. Report after report is published with the same indignant reactions every time, but the mistrust remains.
You can change laws – and it’s important that they change and treat everyone equally – but then an actual change of mindset is needed. And that is not easy to push through in a country where politics relies heavily on the stigmatization of population groups.
The Marechaussee is thinking about ‘what consequences this will have for our work, now and in the future’. It’s disturbing that they don’t even deny that they are racially profiling. Skin color as a predictor of behavior or crime is part of the bulky waste. On the same mound where the venomous skull-measuring also lies.
From now on, the Marechaussee may leave its bias at home and treat bicultural Dutchmen and non-Western visitors in a friendly manner. Order a red carpet.
Hassnae Bouazza replaces Floor Rusman as columnist.
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of February 18, 2023