Racism Dutch Style

Ogoma

Well-Known Member
So these things could never possible happen in Canada?

I googled Canada+racism and alot of stuff came up :yep:

Again, there is racim everywhere so....

Never said there was no racism in Canada or no one has attributed such comments to me. I am almost certain you would not find a 'Canada is the most racist country in North America says study' headline either. But either way, I would not care. I am not into denying or minimizing racism anywhere and regardless of who it is directed at.
 

nysister

Well-Known Member
I haven't personally experienced blatant racism, but we do have one racist party that is now in parliament. I think people here are extremely passive aggressive so they won't come out and say anything to your face, but it's definitely there under the surface.

FlowerHair

Do you feel a particular tension/hostility growing?

If you don't mind my asking, why Barbados?
 

AnjelLuvs

Well-Known Member
Okay, but Yardspice, is just replying to someone, before you even entered thread... Maybe YOU explain what YOU meant then, simple as that, Lol... :perplexed
 

Krullete

New Member
Hey, nysister - thanks for the tag... I am here and following along already. I broke off to read a bit about the film mentioned upthread - Only decent people. SMH at the familiar denial of ingrained, first-nature racism. They're too comfortable with it.

Also, as Okay stated it is everywhere (here, too!).
 

VivaMac

Well-Known Member
Denmark does have institutionalized racism, their immigration rules support and actively carry out racism. It's not very clear if you read the rules on their website, but when these are put into practice it becomes glaring. They have a rule that states a child under 18 must be capable of integrating into Denmark's society, fair enough, but then they deport children who speak the language and go to school in Denmark, the problem if you deport the child more than likely the parents will follow. This is just a clever way to get rid of foreign workers once they have served their purpose and are no longer needed.

one example of many:

Increased police force being used to target illegal child residents, says immigration lawyer

The Immigration Service determined that eight-year-old Ripa is not capable of integrating into Danish society (Photo: Jennifer Buley)
Small children being denied residency and separated from their parents; police knocking on families’ doors to check children’s passports. These are increasingly common events in Denmark, say experts.

Earlier this week, The Copenhagen Post reported the story of a little girl from Bangladesh named Ripa Ahmed who is being threatened with deportation.

The Immigration Service ruled that Ripa is incapable of integrating successfully in Denmark – even though she is fluent in Danish after just two years in Denmark, is thriving in her Danish school, and is just 7 years and 11 months old.

Two weeks ago, police showed up at Ripa’s family’s apartment in Vanløse, asking to see her passport and enforce the deportation ruling.

“It was very unfair. Even in Bangladesh – a third-world country – the police do not come after little children. It is really shameful,” Ripa’s father, Jamal Ahmed, told The Copenhagen Post.

Ahmed has lived in Denmark since 1998 and has worked for the past eight years as a dishwasher at Copenhagen’s Hilton Hotel. He brought his wife, Rumana, and daughter, Ripa, to Denmark in 2009. The Immigration Service approved Rumana’s residency application, but rejected Ripa’s on the grounds that she was too old to integrate successfully.

“The Danish people are really kind and nice people – I know, because I have lived here for twelve years. But the immigration rules are really...” Ahmed trailed off, shaking his head.

Immigration lawyer Åge Kramp is working with the Ahmeds to convince the Immigration Service to overturn Ripa’s deportation order.

Kramp told The Copenhagen Post that in the past few years it has become more and more common for police to show up at the door in Denmark to enforce deportations – even deportations of little children.

“It is now a much, much more normal procedure,” Kramp said.

Kramp attributed the change to increases in the police force – an initiative pushed by the Danish People’s Party (DF) with the specific objective of enforcing deportations.

Since 2004, under the Liberal-Conservative and DF-supported government, some 795 children were denied residency in Denmark. Now that the government has changed hands from the right to the left, the centre-left Social Liberals and far-left Red-Green Alliance are both calling for major reforms.

“It ought to be incomprehensible to every single person that a seven-year-old child does not have the potential to integrate,” Red-Green Alliance leader Johanne Schmidt-Nielsen told Berlingske newspaper in connection with the case of another child, a seven-year-old Chinese girl, who was denied residency.

“We cannot allow this policy to continue. There must be limits to the inhumanity, and that limit should have been set a long time ago. Our job now is to clean up this mess of rules that is splitting families apart and punishing children,” she added.

The Red-Green Alliance has demanded that all cases of children denied family reunification during the Liberal-Conservative government’s ten year reign be reopened and reviewed
 

Okay

New Member
^^ Trust me MANY danes are tired of those strict immagration rules too. Alot of them arent fair at all..
 

Kurlee

Well-Known Member
I saw this in the paper this morning and the headline was kind of apologetic. :nono: It's crazy how these things keep happening all over the world, in the same ways and with the same symbols and oppressions. What do we do? In the last thread, OP said she had given up on the idea of some kind of pan-African movement across the diasporas. I am beginning to feel more and more that this is needed.
 

nysister

Well-Known Member
I saw this in the paper this morning and the headline was kind of apologetic. :nono: It's crazy how these things keep happening all over the world, in the same ways and with the same symbols and oppressions. What do we do? In the last thread, OP said she had given up on the idea of some kind of pan-African movement across the diasporas. I am beginning to feel more and more that this is needed.

:yep: The more fractured we are, the easier it is for others to run over us, and for some reason many people seem to be keen on trying to run over us. :nono:
 

nysister

Well-Known Member
nysister , and 'we' seem just as keen on fracturing ourselves. :rolleyes::ohwell:

I think the best way to help with that is with sharing experiences, that's something that we're good at here on LHCF even if we are sometimes very passionate about it. I've learned so much about being Black in different parts of the world, it's been eye opening to me.
 

ambergirl

Well-Known Member
I saw this in the paper this morning and the headline was kind of apologetic. :nono: It's crazy how these things keep happening all over the world, in the same ways and with the same symbols and oppressions. What do we do? In the last thread, OP said she had given up on the idea of some kind of pan-African movement across the diasporas. I am beginning to feel more and more that this is needed.

Still doubt it. To me there is just too much divisiveness and diversity within the diaspora as a whole and too much variation in laws and culture for any kind of movement. Maybe through the EU but i doubt that too. More likely movements will be national and with luck strategies and tactics will be shared.
 

Kurlee

Well-Known Member
Still doubt it. To me there is just too much divisiveness and diversity within the diaspora as a whole and too much variation in laws and culture for any kind of movement. Maybe through the EU but i doubt that too. More likely movements will be national and with luck strategies and tactics will be shared.

me too, but i so see why we need one. no matter where "we" go around the world, it's the same ish, with no advocacy, recourse . . . we barely even react anymore. Frustrating.:perplexed
 

ambergirl

Well-Known Member
me too, but i so see why we need one. no matter where "we" go around the world, it's the same ish, with no advocacy, recourse . . . we barely even react anymore. Frustrating.:perplexed

Even though the world largely looks at us as a group of African descended people we don't see ourselves as a common people. We share a skin color (for the most part) but have few cultural similarities.

On other hand the Jewish diaspora is comprised of different ethnic groups (Sephardic, Ashkenazie, Ethiopian, Iranian, etc) but share a religious tradition. It's amazing to think that Jews all over the world share the same holidays, same rituals, worship the same deity, from the same ancient texts. Yes there are conflicts within their diaspora as well but they do have that common bond that gives them an avenue for coming together. Not to mention the Holocaust and how it compelled them to think about their survival as an religious group.

We'll never have a pan-African culture so our only hope for coming together would be if we truly believed that when some of us are persecuted, all of us are harmed. And as of yet doesn't seem like that mindset is emerging.
 

Honey Bee

Well-Known Member
And this is what's so sad about it. All of us in the Diaspora already know how to do this. We did it before, when they first brought us over here. We didn't know each other, spoke different languages, might have been at war with each other back at home- who knows? But we got here, or to whichever Caribbean island, and became a cohesive cultural group based on nothing but oppression.

People say, oh, but we're not oppressed anymore. Yes the heck we are, as this article and the one about the school in London, and the freaking Tea Party prove. Now, the question is, what are we gonna do about it?
 

FlowerHair

Reclaiming my time
FlowerHair

Do you feel a particular tension/hostility growing?

If you don't mind my asking, why Barbados?

Yes I do feel a tension growing :yep: and I'm keeping my eyes open. Nazi Germany was only 60 years ago, people don't change that quickly...

Barbados or somewhere else in the Caribbean lol. It's just my dream destination.
nysister
 

Kurlee

Well-Known Member
Yes I do feel a tension growing :yep: and I'm keeping my eyes open. Nazi Germany was only 60 years ago, people don't change that quickly...

Barbados or somewhere else in the Caribbean lol. It's just my dream destination.
nysister
Curacao is beautiful too:yep: as is St. Vincent & the Grenadines (especially the Grenadines), Trinidad, Grenada and the Bahamas! Check them out:yep:.
 

nysister

Well-Known Member
Yes I do feel a tension growing :yep: and I'm keeping my eyes open. Nazi Germany was only 60 years ago, people don't change that quickly...

Barbados or somewhere else in the Caribbean lol. It's just my dream destination.

I totally agree. Ingrained traits are hard to break when one is taught that they're okay even if they aren't.

All the best on your move plans!
 

Laela

Sidestepping the "lynch mob"
I'm sure ya'll can Googles it yourself... lol but thought I'd drop the Wiki history here:
The Dutch want to know why folks messing with their tradition, they aren't racists.. looks like, along the way, it morphed into a racist concept. And they're fine with that. Soooooo??



History[edit]
Origins[edit]
According to Hélène Adeline Guerber and other historians,[3][4] the origin of Sinterklaas and his helpers have been linked by some to the Wild Hunt of Odin. While riding the white horse Sleipnir, he flew through the air as the leader of the Wild Hunt. He was always accompanied by two black ravens, Huginn and Muninn.[5] These helpers would listen, just like Zwarte Piet, at the chimneys of the homes they visited to tell Odin about the good and bad behavior of the mortals below.[6][7]


Illustration from Jan Schenkman's book Sint Nikolaas en zijn Knecht
The Saint Nicholas tradition contains a number of elements that are not ecclesiastical in origin.[8][9] In medieval iconography, Saint Nicholas is sometimes presented as taming a chained demon, who may or may not be black. However, no hint of a companion, demon, servant, or any other human or human-like fixed companion to the Saint is found in visual and textual sources from the Netherlands from the 16th until the 19th century.[10] According to a long-standing theory first proposed by Karl Meisen,[11] Zwarte Piet and his equivalents in Germanic Europe were originally presented as one or more enslaved demons forced to assist their captor. These chained and fire-scorched demons may have been redeveloped as black-skinned humans during the early 19th-century in the Netherlands in the likeness of Moors who work as servants for Saint Nicholas.[12]

One or more demons working as helpers for the saint can still be found in various Austrian, German, Swiss, Hungarian, Czech, Slovak, and Polish Saint Nicholas traditions in the characters of Krampus, Père Fouettard, Schmutzli, Perchta, Knecht Ruprecht, Rubbels, Hanstrapp, Little Babushka, Pelzebock, Klaubauf, and Belsnickel. These companions of Saint Nicholas are often depicted as a group of closely related figures who accompany Saint Nicholas through the territories formerly controlled by the Holy Roman Empire. The characters act as foils to the benevolent gift-giver, or strict disciplinarians who threaten to thrash or abduct disobedient children. Mythologist Jacob Grimm associated the character with the pre-Christian spirit kobold, who could be either benevolent or malicious.

The introduction of Zwarte Piet did coincide, by and large, with a change in the depiction of the Sinterklaas character. Prior to this change, he was often quite strict toward poorly behaved children and often presented as a sort of bogeyman.[9] Many of the terrifying characteristics that were later associated with Zwarte Piet were often attributed to him..[13] The presentation of a holy man in this light was troubling for both teachers and priests. After the introduction of Zwarte Piet as Sinterklaas' servant, both characters adopted more gentle personas.[14]

The lyrics of older traditional Sinterklaas songs, still sung today, warn that Sinterklaas and his assistant will leave well-behaved children presents but punish those who have been naughty. They might even take very poorly behaved children to their homeland of Spain in burlap sacks where, according to legend, they'll be forced to assist them in their workshop for an entire season or longer. These songs and stories also warn that a child who has been only slightly naughty will receive a bundle of birch twigs or a lump of coal instead of gifts.
 

Laela

Sidestepping the "lynch mob"
I didn't do a search on here before posting on this topic.. but look at that... 7 years later... SMH
 
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