Laat verkleedpartijen geen indianenverhaal meer zijn

I saw your flirtation with redface (costuming as Amerindian people, “playing Indian”) recently just like I saw your blackface a few weeks ago during Carnival 2018 (and last November and December) and you guys really need to stop it. You are better people than this. Many of you have been seeing people “blacken up” since you were children and cannot understand how the object of such pleasant memories could, simultaneously, signify humiliation and degradation for anyone else. This is, in part, because many of you live in all-white communities. Many of you attended (or attend) all white schools. The vantages of people of color were never issues for you and, to the extent that you were taught “people are people, and we are all equal”, there was never any reason for you to imagine that people of color perceived the world in a qualitatively different way from you because they were people of color. The very notion that people of color and white people experienced reality in fundamentally different ways is a problematic proposition for you, who have been taught that race and color should not matter so much as the content of someone’s character. Race and color do matter though. Race and color have, historically, determined a person’s access to basic human rights. That history informs Europeans’ images of people of color today. That history of being refused basic considerations that Europeans routinely extend to one another, in terms of human rights in particular, informs the image that people of color in the West have of Europeans as well as the image that people of color in the West have of themselves.

Darryl Barthé in Laat verkleedpartijen geen indianenverhaal meer zijn (Overdemuur)