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content warning: discussions of racism and blackface

In an article from Time, McDonald-Gibson documents specific examples of how black students get treated in December during Sinterklaas. 

“Those three weeks are particularly difficult for the Black community. Afriyie says he is regularly chased down the street by children shouting “Zwarte Piet.” Kymane, a 10-year-old boy from the south of the Netherlands, recalls the taunts of other children. “When I was little, people were thinking I was in blackface, but I wasn’t,” he explains. “I said I wasn’t, but they were still just going ‘yes you are, yes you are’ and I didn’t like that.” When he has tried to speak out against Black Pete, he says, other kids bullied him: “[They said] just let us do our tradition—if you don’t like it, go back to your own country.”

Following my move from the Netherlands back to California, I tried to make sense of the othering I saw and/or experienced. One of these experiences aligns with Zwarte Piet: zwarte en witte scholen, or, black and white schools in English. 

Attempting to explain this phenomenon involves many struggles. Firstly, although the term “zwarte” translates to black, this term, within the context of scholen (schools), actually refers to all non-white individuals. Witte scholen are exclusive to white students, especially those from Western European backgrounds, which is similarly connotated with the word white when translating these schools from the Dutch culture to an American-English perspective. There are over 500 of these black schools that people of color are sent to and prevented from attending white schools. As you can imagine, white schools have better funding, resources, and education systems. In contrast, students in black schools are often deterred from graduating past the 9th or 10th grade to prevent them from receiving a college education. This contributes to a more extensive system of preventing economic and social mobility amongst non-whites. 

So why is zwarte used to encapsulate such a variety of ethnic and racial backgrounds — mainly as the majority of these schools are actually populated by Moroccan and Turkish children who are considered brown and not black?

This is the power of language, or the lack of it sometimes. As there are not enough words to communicate the segregation happening in the Dutch public school system, victims of this systemic racism are not able to understand their experiences through language. Even the use of “zwarte scholen” has been replaced by concentratieschool to soften the blow of what is happening to people of color. “Concentrated schools” as a term does not encapsulate the purpose of these schools, misleading those who are uneducated on what this actually means and the context behind this separation. 

By controlling the language surrounding segregation, which includes avoiding the word segregation altogether, the Dutch government is able to maintain a facade of inclusion to those outside of the Netherlands. Additionally, the segregated school system is preserved by avoiding words connotated with race, such as “concentrated.” 

xx Deniz