Black Pete, Islam, and the Sexualization of Cultural Protectionism in the Netherlands

In the Netherlands, sexuality has come to play an increasingly important role in giving form and shape to a cultural protectionist idiom through which contemporary Dutchness takes shape. First, the debate about ‘Zwarte Piet’ - the blackface figure that plays an important role in Dutch December celebrations - has become increasingly important. While ‘race’ and racism is at the forefront of this debate, it is often clad in a sexualized idiom. Second, the debate surrounding the presence of Muslim citizens has been played out in and through a language of sexual freedom and progress and (alleged) Muslim conservatism - a dynamic that has simplified the socio-political space by symbolically dividing society between the homotolerant and the homophobic, peripheralizing homophobia as a quality of non-secular, non-white, cultural others. We approach these questions through the lens of socio-ethnic leveraging. The perception of black sexuality oscillates between the affect-laden idea of wildness in need of domestication (a classic colonial discourse) and an object through which a Dutch sexually liberated self is articulated. Hence, when set off against Muslim Dutch, black sexuality becomes part of a discourse of sexual emancipation. In other moments when ‘Dutch culture’ or ‘cultural heritage” is perceived to be under threat, black sexuality is framed in racist terms. The ‘co-incidence’ of these different articulations of sexuality, race and the construction of alterity must be understood in terms of an increasingly dominant cultural protectionism through which a peculiar, postcolonial white, secular Dutchness is being redefined and re-imagined.