Last Wednesday I gave this introductory text at a debate, which was part of the seminar ir/relevance of race. The debate took place in the university of Amsterdam.
My location as a Queer able-bodied cisgender man of colour from Curaçao has shaped the way I read the questions “what’s the use of race?” and “is race a relevant or viable category in understanding current day societies?”
Race, to quote Cornel West, matters. However, the extent to which race matters, and how race matters, specifically in the Netherlands, remain, it seems, eternally indeterminate. More often than not, race is approached as a purely epistemological problem. Now, one explanation for this ambiguity is that the material consequences of race thinking are often obscured, or brushed over, in the public imagination. Racism is a topic most people aren’t willing to talk about. According to popular knowledge race, and its corollary racism, are ancient relics. Rutger Bregman claimed in an op-ed published last year on the website of the Volkskrant that “only neurotic Americans think we’re racists”.
Last July Gavan Titley and Alana Lentin wrote an excellent article entitled “Racism is still very much with us. So why don’t we recognise it?” which was published on the website of the Guardian in the Comment is Free section. In it they address “the constant struggle in public discourse over what is recognised as racism, and who is allowed, and has the power, to define it.” This struggle is exemplified by the recent flurry of debates surrounding the film “Alleen Maar Nette Mensen,” in which the parameters of racism within contemporary Dutch society are being heavily contested. What Bregman’s statement and the debates surrounding “Alleen Maar Nette Mensen” highlight are the epistemic struggles that take place in racialized social fields. Who gets to name and define race and racism?
Discourses of race are not about “describing” the differences between people, but about incorporating these differences into one particular way of understanding the world. Any analysis of race and racism requires, therefore, an awareness of institutional and cultural practices that generate and maintain both race and racism. The problem of race and of racism is a problem of power. Whose way of understanding the world is being privileged?
The “White Autochtoon Dutch” construct, which combines race, place, and cultural genealogy, what Barnor Hesse would describe as “a sustained racial coherence (‘Whiteness’, ‘Christian’, ‘the West’, ‘Europeanness’)”, lies at the centre of the problem of race in the Netherlands. The Netherlands is conceptualized as a “White Western European Christian country”. Consequently, the racial and cultural norm, the established order of things, requires bodies to be invested with race, and a cultural essence, as well as citizenship, in order to be intelligible within the Netherlands. In this framework the very speaking of intelligible national subjects is structured upon the racialization of collective consciousness itself. Despite the disuse of race in public discourse the Dutch sense of self has not eluded enmeshment with race.
The problem is that the “people making” project, in other words how desirable subjects are constituted within networks of power relations, is presented unproblematically as safeguarding “Dutch culture.” Even though, these networks of power relation are and have been shaped by the effects of race. Moreover, in spite of the nation-state having articulated a racist national identity, it is still perceived as an equal and legitimate representative of all Dutch citizens.
By leaving White Autochtoon Dutchness, and the concomitant White privilege, out of the discussion on race we engage in a dishonest analysis. Whenever I make the social location of White Autochtoon Dutch people matter by mentioning White privilege White Autochtoon Dutch people, especially well-intentioned White Autochtoon Dutch people, often respond with indignant denials and resistance. All White Autochtoon Dutch people, who belong unproblematically, are advantaged by and benefit from the unjust structures brought about by White Autochtoon Dutchness; they have a possessive investment in White Autochtoon Dutchness.
Despite massive racial inequality White Autochtoon Dutch people claim to be for “equality” and “fairness” for everybody. “Racism is disavowed even as it is reproduced in new ways and forms.” During colonialism White Dutch people defended their privileged status vis-à-vis colonial subjects on the basis of a self-fashioned sense of superiority. Nowadays, White Autochtonen defend their privileged status vis-à-vis Allochtonen on the basis of cultural difference. The underlying premise remains the same. They see themselves not as racists, since the main concern is the maintenance of the culture and values that have made the Netherlands such a quote unquote “great nation”.
White Autochtoon Dutchness manifests itself also in the ways of knowing. I hope we can discuss today how this epistemology operates through and/or within universities, which are still bastions of White heterosexual cisgender able-bodied male dominance, and how this dominance structures and inflects the knowledge being produced. The fact that universities are still overwhelmingly White institutions shapes the techniques of study and practice—the questions academics leave unasked, and how questions are formulated. White epistemology, the White Autochtoon Dutch way of knowing, frequently renders the operations of racism, privilege, and exclusion invisible, or reinforces their invisibility.
Epistemic racism, which is the hegemonic tradition of privileging White (heterosexual cisgender able-bodied) male knowledge producers, is, as Ramón Grosfoguel contends, an underestimated aspect of racism. Epistemic racism and sexism (as well as, ableism, heterosexism, cis-sexism) are entangled, and this toxic mix forms the key intellectual basis for environmental, social, and economic inequality, which is manifested through the historical amnesia of dominant institutions, and the privileging of only certain memories, or knowledges.
As Kwame Nimako writes in “About Them, But Without Them; Race and Ethnic Relations Studies in Dutch Universities” “the ‘us has become the consumers of their own knowledge production. The objects (i.e., ‘them’) of research are hardly interested in the knowledge production of the subjects (i.e., ‘us’).” The ‘us represents White Europeans; the them represents the ‘Other.’”
One egregious consequence of epistemic racism is epistemic injustice, a concept developed by Miranda Fricker. Epistemic injustice, she argues, is a kind of prejudice against certain speakers. The central cases of injustice involve identity prejudice, or prejudice against someone because of their social identity, meaning a hearer discounts the credibility of a person’s testimony due to prejudice against their social identity. In addition, Ann Laura Stoler’s research “repeatedly has pointed to how much the nonvisual and nonsomatic—cultural competencies, personality traits, and psychological dispositions—provided the crucial and changing criteria for racial membership.”
White Autochtoon Dutch bodies are spoken into being as intelligible, and credible subjects, and specifically as colonial bodies—as bodies whose being relies upon the existence of colonized bodies. The Allochtoon doesn’t exist ontologically, it is a discursive invention. You can be an Autochtoon because I am designated an Allochtoon. As a non-Western Allochtoon, a Curaçaoan male with metropole citizenship, I am excluded from—yet interior to the functioning of institutions. I am included in the social domain of institutions—yet external to them. This is, in essence, an internal colonial system, which makes the political identity Allochtoon a border identity.
The promotion of this internal colonial order as beneficial transforms White violence into White benevolence. Despite having been attributed a second class citizen status I should be grateful to be here. The material consequences of “having a race” for particular bodies range from higher rates of unemployment, to racial profiling, to higher prison sentences, to high blood pressure, to depression, and to put it bluntly, even death. These material consequences beg us to think about what it might mean to write “the body” as “having a race.” Race is a situated embodied, material and affective event, and race has a social and political ontology that makes the practice of colourblindness socially and politically untenable. Lest we forget we are talking about something that affects real people in very palpable ways.