Zwarte Piet: Colonial Past and Contemporary Race Relations: Meanings of ZwArte Prnt for School Children in The Hague

This research is concerned with meanings of Zwarte Piet for school children in The Hague, in the context of racist, colonial and multicultural traditions of Dutch society and more specifically, the ways these traditions appear in children's textual and visual narratives of Sinterklaas and Zwarte Piet in three schools. The existence of a character such as Zwarte Piet contradicts the Dutch selfperception of tolerance with the denial of racism in its defence symptomatic of a systemic denial of racism within the Netherlands that is reinforced through policy makers and homogenous systems of research dominated by white Dutch males. Thus, racism is reworked as discrimination and everyone that does not fit the necessary criteria of Dutch ness is labelled, in a process of 'other- ing', as being 'allochtoon'. Zwarte Piet in turn appears to be symptomatic of this 'othering' process in which he as a black subordinated character reinforces Sinterklaas's identity as a white Master in the process implying mis recognition of black people within Dutch society that is reinforced through a denial of racism. Children are the focus of this paper because they are responsible for transmitting the tradition from to the next generation and the findings show that the children's parental background influences the meanings that the children derive from the festival. Any progress of the festival requires self- examination from Dutch people rather than a banning of the character so that one day Dutch society may wake up sick of the pain and invent a new tradition that fits the diversity within the society better.