Black Man in the Netherlands – Francio Guadeloupe
Blackness: the historical racist operations (political, economic, culture,
scientific, an social) of naming or implicitly designating a group of people
Black and therewith making it legitimate that they be treated as means
rather than ends in themselves
Global anti-Black racism: the way, since the horror of transatlantic slavery
(part of the operation of Blackness), that brown-skinned people of sub-
Saharan African descent became known as Black people. In being given
this name, they have been symbolically and materially disenfranchised on
the basis of the idea of racial difference
Global anti-Blackness: all historically constituted groups from North African
Amazigh to Australian Aboriginals to Native Americans to Rohingya in
Myanmar, the latter facing genocidal racism
Speaks to a wider operation than global anti-Black racism
Urban Blackness: the way in which popular cultural expressions and styles
mostly attributed to Black people are being commodified by capitalism
and marketed as hip meta-identity that anyone can attract.
Political Blackness: people who resignify and transform Blackness into a
political identity similar to that of the proletariat. In doing so, they seek to
dismantle the racial and unjust economic order
Nonracialism: the dismantling of the idea of racial difference in
governance and other institutional arrangements
Guadeloupe believes society is nonracial when humankind
becomes Black
In other words, when the materially and phenotypical privileged
also acknowledge and accept the accursed Black and their
histories of subjugation as part of who we as an expression of life
are
Guadeloupe uses Black and White as concepts to hierarchically categorize
a person’s station in the capitalist order
The economic sphere cannot be fully divorced from that of
politics, so Black and White are also implicitly operative as
categories of governance
Guadeloupe: iedereen van de laagste klasse moet samen komen om op te
treden tegen het kapitalistische systeem, maar hiervoor moeten wel alle
raciale ideeën aan de kant
Intersectionality in Guadeloupe: race and class
, White Innocence – Gloria Wekker
Main thesis: an unacknowledged reservoir of knowledge and affects based
on four hundred years of Dutch imperial rule plays a vital but
unacknowledged part in dominant meaning-making processes, including
the making of the self, taking place in Dutch society.
The cultural archive: ‘a ‘storehouse’ of a particular knowledge and
structures of attitude and reference, structures of feeling. There was
virtual unanimity that subject races should be ruled, that there are subject
races, that one race deserves and has consistently earned the right to be
considered the race whose main mission is to expand beyond its own
domain’
A racial grammar that is indoctrinated into the lives of people
which is a deep structure of inequality in thought and affect
based on race, which was installed in nineteenth-century
European imperial populations and that it is from this deep
reservoir, the cultural archive, that, among other things, a sense
of self has been formed and fabricated.
Slavery has broken the world in half, it had such an powerful
impact. It made the white slavery masters, they had to
dehumanize, not just the slaves but themselves. They have had
to reconstruct everything to make that system appear true
White innocence: the dominant way in which the Dutch think of
themselves, as being a small, but just, ethical nation; color-blind, thus free
of racism; as being inherently on the moral and ethical high ground, thus a
guiding light to other folks and nations.
Main thesis: an unacknowledged reservoir of knowledge and feelings
based on four hundred years of imperial rule have played a vital but
unacknowledged part in the dominant meaning-making processes taking
place in Dutch society, until now.
Three paradoxes:
1. No identification with migrants: the majority of the Dutch do not
want to be identified with migrants, although at least one in every
six Dutch people has migrant ancestry
o ‘But my point is exactly that the class positionings of one’s
migrant ancestors are less significant than their places of
origin, specifically whether their heritage in terms of visible
difference in skin color could be shed as fast as possible’ ->
gaat in tegen wat Guadeloupe zegt
o Migrant is problematical term because based on country of
birth the term stays longer
o Dutch people deny or ‘forget’ their foreign heritage
o The main model for dealing with ethnic/racial difference is that
you need to assimilate and if you don’t you are segregated
2. Innocent victim of German occupation: two overlooked aspects:
