Ah, you are correct, to my embarrassment. I immediately associated 'Caucasian' with 'Dutch'. But there may be non-Caucasian Dutch as well as non-Mongolian Chinese. Thank you.
It is about “ethnicity” as in country of origin and customs, not skin color.
I was not born in the Netherlands but did spend my formative years there; my skin is certainly a fair bit darker than the average Dutchman; my eyes are more oval; my nose is wider and smaller; my lips fuller; my hair is a perfect black. — yet never have I been treated as non-Dutch.
This is very different for my parent who speaks Dutch with a Surinamese accent and has different mannerisms, as it is for my parent's younger sibling who looks quite white but also has the Surinamese accent and mannerisms.
Surinamese people in the Netherlands definitely seem to feel some sort of kinship, and large parts of my family live in areæ of high concentration of Surinamese people, but these come in all colors, many of them are quite white but speak with a Surinamese accent.
I agree with you, I did not mean to imply it's an exclusively Dutch problem, I was just pointing out that it's a problem that isn't brought up enough when people talk about issues in Dutch society.
Also, since "white" is a flexible term that varies per country but always basically designates which socially constructed ethnicities are the "exclusive clubs" on top of society, it should probably be pointed out to for everyone who has no experience with North-Western European whiteness that people from Eastern and Southern European countries are not considered white in these countries most of the time either, except perhaps when they're compared to immigrants from countries even further away.
> In a sense, they were Japanese because they behaved like Japanese. It seems that behavior plays a big role in how people can identify another one as being one of them.
I find this to be the case too in the Netherlands.
There is a large immigrant population and they cannot be identified by the color of their skin, but easily by their body language. It is strangely reproducible to spot a Pole from a rather far distance from the way he walks.
A friend of mine is “Turkish”, but he came to the Netherlands quite young and thus did not undergo Turkish socialization and walks and speaks as any Dutchman, so many are quite surprised when it's eventually revealed that he speaks Turkish fluently and was born in Turkey, as many Turks, though not visually very distinct from the Dutch, have a certain body language that often identifies them that often disappears within a generation with those that did spend their formative years in the Netherlands.
Similarly, I am not white but since I spent my formative years in the Netherlands my body language and accent are completely Dutch, but my parents both have a hint of Surinamese accent and body language that instantly identifies them, though one of them is white.
> Robert Sapolsky has a great series in Youtube about Behavioral Biology. One of the insights he brings is about Arabs: According to him, Arabs adopted very long names so that they can avoid racial conflict. When two persons recites their names and find a family name that's similar, they assume that they are family and this helps them co-operate. Now that's BS (given a long enough last name, you are going to find a similar grand-parent name) but it happens to work. Islam had this too: Your fellow muslim is your "brother".
> It's time some countries realize that this has been a solved problem: To uproot racism, you need to rally your population behind common denominators and values.
Yet what this simply seems to create is conflict with external parties until it reaches the entire world.
It seems as though many men have a drive to be part of an ethnic, tribal conflict. I even find that, most ironically, what brings men together is the combined struggle against other men.
There is nothing quite like a war with another nation, that makes a nation forget it's petty differences.
I didn't want to chime in because Dutch colonialism etc. but still....
There has to be a place in the global stage for whites/caucasians/etc. just as much as any other grouping. And it's OK for them to have their own culture and place. They are not the global majority in any way, either by culture or otherwise. Demanding that they assimilate to a foreign ideal is not going to work.
The whole concept of "race" is on pretty thin ice to begin with. Applying the word to the Dutch isn't necessarily any more or less meaningful than to, say, all Chinese -- it's something that's socially constructed.
The article isn’t quite as clear on that. Jews were classified as non-white at least for a while and in the census. Italians also faced discrimination, although not by law.
Then, obviously, there are British citizens ich Indian roots, and Belgians born in Kongo. Not sure how they fit into this debate.
Well, they are all Europeans. I am not denying that racism existed at the time, but hardly any non-white person lived in Europe back then. (Even nowadays in most European countries the percentage of non-white people is so low that, in a group of 30, finding none is well within statistical error).
Keeping lists of people who have special traits should be kept to an absolute minimum. Just ask the Dutch (good people got punished and killed trying to destroy the official registers of Dutch jews as it became clear the Nazis sought them.)
Pointing out the differences between people isn't going to help!
In the place I grew up in Europe there were almost no foreigners. But in summer holidays we lived next to a really black family at a camp site for years. Their dad were friends with my dad and well, that was it. They were humans like the rest of us.
Today it is almost like it is scarier to meet people from other cultures.
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