‘Complain-nigger!’ or how the Dutch gracefully handle criticism by a black American woman

Peter Breedveld

Illustratie: Vitali Gavrilovitsj Tichov

So Karen Attiah of the American newspaper The Washington Post wrote an article about Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad combining the headline ‘Nigger, are you crazy?‘ with a stereotypical black-face caricature of a crying black person with fat, red lips.

Many Dutch people are none too happy with Attiah’s article and, to prove to her that there’s no racism at all in The Netherlands and that all Dutch people are very tolerant indeed, they call her, among other things, a ‘complain-nigger‘ and tell her that she has their colonial past to thank for her position at The Washington Post. Note that these are not some anonymous losers who have nothing else to do but blame others, preferably with darker skin than their own, for their own misfortunes. Nope, the tweep calling Attiah a ‘complain-nigger’ is a very successful trend-watcher earning buckets of money telling people what everybody already knows and the other is a successful businessman.

Hilariously Elma Drayer, a white conservative columnist for Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant, comments in reaction to the whole affair that, like black people in the past, nowadays it’s white people being discriminated against because of the color of their skin!

Shitty little Moroccans

NRC Handelsblad, very embarrassed by the whole affair, makes up for the blunder with the racist slur and the black-face caricature by publishing, a few days later, a page-long rant about the inherent perfidiousness of Moroccans by Ebru Umar, known for her racist rants about Dutch Moroccans on Twitter, accompanied by yet another racist caricature of what seems like a gorilla-like Moroccan looking angrily and threateningly at the reader, shouting ‘Cartoonist, are you crazy?’

The maker of this uplifting little doodle, Ruben Oppenheimer, seemingly afraid someone might miss the point he is making with it, puts his drawing on Twitter, saying he’s eager to know what The Washington Post will think of his ‘offensive’ illustration of Umar’s piece about ‘shitty little Moroccans’.

In the US a racist tweet like that would certainly mean the end of one’s career, in The Netherlands it’s your ticket to success. If you want to be popular in The Netherlands, make fun of immigrants, belittle Turks and Moroccans, warn against the danger of the Muslims, promise you will deport millions of them. Anyone opposing this explicit, extremely aggressive type of racism will be vilified by the media. For instance, Quinsy Gario, an anti-racist activist of Caribbean descent, is continuously hounded by the press, be it right-wing or left-wing, and was voted ‘Asshole of the Year‘ by the listeners of a popular radio station. This is how it works: racists are heroes of free speech, anti-racists are assholes.

The danger of immigrants

Last week a special United Nations committee, the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) held a session about racism in The Netherlands. The committee reads reports, hears representatives of The Netherlands and this will result in recommendations that nobody in The Netherlands will feel obliged to do anything with.

To begin with: despite disturbing reports by for instance Amnesty International, the national ombudsman, scientists, commissions et cetera on racial discrimination on the labor market, racial profiling by the police, institutional racism, racist politics in parliament and so on, the responsible Dutch minister of social affairs, Lodewijk Asscher, will stress time and again that there’s no racism in The Netherlands at all.

Which is no wonder, because every time Asscher speaks about immigrants it is about the danger they form, their refusal to integrate, their backward ideas about homosexuals and women and their antisemitism. Even when speaking to a group of very successful Dutch entrepreneurs of Turkish descent, Asscher will nag to them about integration. The man is simply unable to see the upside of immigration. To him it’s all about risks and dangers and costs.

Death threats

Asscher could not be bothered to appear before the UN committee last week, because he had to be present at some gratuitous photo opportunity at the beach, together with the other members of the Dutch cabinet. Instead a Dutch delegation stood before the committee to tell lies about for instance measures taken by the police to prevent ethnic profiling the very day after it became public the police specifically targets people with a ‘negroid appearance’.

The Dutch media, meanwhile, are mainly concerned with what was said by the committee about Zwarte Piet, a form of black-face which is so popular in The Netherlands that people, who even consider changing it to a more acceptable, less racist version, receive death threats by the peaceful, tolerant and certainly not racist inhabitants of this pleasant little kingdom by the North Sea.

Head stuck up arse

The Dutch delegation told the committee that The Netherlands is working on a more acceptable version of Zwarte Piet, but that is a lie as well. The opposite is true. Instead of abolishing Zwarte Piet, a black-face caricature of a black slave, last year a black-face Sinterklaas (Sinterklaas is the Dutch version of Santa Claus) was introduced as an extra addition to the black-face festivities of jolly December.

Which makes it clear once more how this country has its head stuck so far up its own ass it will never again see the light of day without some help from outside.

For non Dutch speakers who want to learn more about racism in The Netherlands I wrote this piece, also something about Zwarte Piet and about blackface in both The Netherlands and Japan. Christie Mettes wrote an article about the way The Netherlands treats its former colonies.

Peter Breedveld is a Dutch journalist writing about diversity and racism in the Netherlands. For this and for having a Moroccan-Dutch girlfriend he is threatened and slandered on a daily basis, see also this piece about slanderous trolls. He keeps this website at great personal cost. You might consider supporting him with a donation: bank account number NL59 RABO 0393 4449 61 (N.P. Breedveld, Rabobank Rijswijk), SWIFT BIC RABONL2U.