Zwarte Pieten, Black Face, and America

In December, for my last class before the holidays, we had a guest speaker.  He's a Ph.D. student here at Erasmus but he did exchange studies for his Master's degree at Central Michigan University--it's a small world.

Anyways, we were chatting before class started and he said that he really liked his time in America and, having traveled all around, thought that he wanted to get a job and live there once he graduated.  I realized, though, when he said that, that I think that is the first time someone has said something nice about America since I got here.  Granted, most of the discussions I have heard have been as part of overall discussions of empire, which generally gets people started on an unhappy note, but, in general, most folks seem to consider America to be bossy and unnecessarily inquisitive and her people to be loud, obnoxious, racist, and provincial.  This fellow said that while he had gone to America with similar preconceptions, he had been converted by meeting people and talking to them (it probably didn't hurt that he spent a lot of his time hanging out in Michigan where people are nice--not quite "Minnesota Nice", but pretty close).

Since we were talking about race relations, the Zwarte Piet tradition came up and he said that colored people in the Netherlands find the tradition very offensive.  I mentioned that I was surprised because in discussions I had seen, negative reactions were credited to American over-sensitivity and discounted.  He said that there is a large divide between the white Dutch and the colored Dutch (who, by the way are collectively called "blauwen" (blue) instead of "black" as they are in the States.  "Zwart" (black) is used sometimes but apparently has fairly negative connotations.)  He said that this year several colored students wore t-shirts that said "Black Pete is Racist" (or the equivalent in Dutch) to the official landing of Sinterklaas at Dordrecht and they got put in jail (I don't know if they were causing trouble or not but it sounded like he thought it was just because of their shirts).  So, while it couldn't have translated to America in any case, it sounds like this holiday tradition might have a limited life expectancy in the Netherlands as well.