Keti Koti, the chains are broken. The suffering of the enslaved must have been indescribable. Of course, the descendants in particular feel a connection to it. Keti Koti can help make the suffering visible, so that we can move on. But now this day misses that goal. We are being chained to the past, writes associate professor Hans Siebers.
Commemorations and celebrations are important. May 4 and 5 have made entire generations aware of the horrors of war. They have imprinted the ‘never once more’ in all of our memories and led to reconciliation with the Germans. This was only possible thanks to knowledge of what really happened, provided by institutions such as the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies.
But commemoration also carries risks. It can arouse resentment and feelings of revenge and polarise. An extreme example is the speech on the Blackbird Field (Kosovo Polje) on 28 June 1989 in memory of the lost battle of the Serbs once morest the Ottomans six hundred years earlier. With this, Slobodan Milošević heralded the civil war in Yugoslavia. He cherished a victim role to justify aggression once morest the other.
Fantasy stories are also projected onto the past
Thanks to the work of colleagues such as Gert Oostindie, emeritus professor of colonial and postcolonial history, we know a lot regarding colonialism and slavery. But fantasy stories are also projected onto that past. One of these is that the slavery past would continue to have an effect on contemporary society, in the form of institutional racism. Renowned institutions such as the State Commission once morest Discrimination and Racism, the Knowledge Platform for Inclusive Coexistence (KIS) and the College for Human Rights want us to believe that.
That working through is widespread according to the State Commission, but in both of its reports you will search in vain for any evidence. The first contains essays, no data. The second refers to another report, also without any evidence. Data are not even wanted, we read.
The KIS promotes the term institutional racism, but like the State Commission, it simply pushes aside the scientific consensus on that term. Just like racism studies in the Netherlands, the KIS stretches the term so far that reality must fall under it. That is manipulation of concepts. A scientific mortal sin.
Smokescreens to promote the term institutional racism
In its vision paper on institutional racism, the Netherlands Institute for Human Rights acknowledges that racism and institutional racism are sociological terms, not legal ones. There is hardly any racism in the Netherlands if we use the current sociological definitions, it can be read.
That is apparently not the intention, because then we encounter a conceptual smokescreen to be able to promote those terms anyway. On the advice of the Board, State Secretary of Finance Marnix van Rij spoke of institutional racism at the Tax and Customs Administration two years ago. Without a shred of evidence.
This distortion of reality has consequences. Van Rij took measures that were crystal clear would not work. This also applies to almost all recommendations of the KIS. They distract attention from the discrimination by tax officials on behalf of the government. Something that might easily happen once more.
Interventions such as anti-racism training often have the opposite effect, studies show. This is because they often assume ‘white’ perpetrators and victims ‘of colour’. The former are said to be afflicted with racism because they belong to a ‘white race’. According to this unfounded judgement, racism is in their subconscious. You are wrong because you are ‘white’, proof of racism is then superfluous. Anyone who insults people in this way stimulates exactly the behaviour he wants to combat.
Group insult
The same danger lurks in the continuing-effect-of-slavery-past-in-institutional-racism story. On its website regarding the slavery past, the KIS makes the same stereotypical distinction. ‘White’ perpetrators are collectively responsible for the slavery past and contemporary institutional racism, we read without evidence. The KIS undermines our constitutional state by collectively blaming people for something, even if it happened centuries ago. That tends towards group insult.
The projects to raise awareness of the history of slavery, for which the government has allocated 100 million euros, also run that risk. Research by the Historical News Sheet has shown that there is already an excessive amount of attention given to the history of slavery in Dutch education, and in a critical way. Also read the Canon of the Netherlands. For which problem are those 100 million a solution?
In the arms of Trump and Wilders
Polarization is the result. When you put an entire population group in the dock without any evidence as guilty of slavery and racism, at some point they get fed up. Then they vote for Geert Wilders. Anti-liberal racism interventions in the United States have driven people en masse into the arms of Donald Trump. Stories regarding ‘replacement’ and ‘institutional racism’ can best be understood within the same process of polarization, in which camps provoke each other to the extreme.
Keti Koti is at a crossroads. Will the National Institute for Dutch Slavery Past and Heritage (NiNsee) opt for an inclusive celebration of reconciliation for everyone based on democracy and the rule of law? Or will the NiNsee use the slavery past for polarization at the expense of truth and cohesion in society?
By expelling the chairman of the House of Representatives, sectarianism has unfortunately been chosen once more. The question is what the institutions mentioned do.
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