Sinterklaas and racism

It's sort of funny to be in the Netherlands in late November / early December. Sinterklaas is huge here. The Dutch version of St. Nicholas comes on a boat from Spain sometime in November, and travels around (you can even follow on television) for a few weeks before St. Nicholas Day (December 6), when he leaves presents and returns to Spain.

Here's a humorous American take, mashed up with video footage of the event:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDK0nZHmSSI

(I don't know who the narrator is -- can anyone help me with that?)

Anyway, this year I finally went, and saw him riding down Amsterdam's Damrak Street on his trusty white horse, surrounded by a legion of "Zwarte Pieten".

The "Zwarte Pieten" are the plural form of "Zwarte Piet", or "Black Pete", Sinterklaas' helper. This part is generally somewhat offensive for non-Dutch people, so I thought I'd blog about it and explore the issue a bit.

The American version of St. Nicholas is Santa Claus, who has elves as his helpers. Since elves are fictional, you don't have to worry about antagonizing a demographic. But Zwarte Piet is seen as racist because he's black. So I'm wondering how that's racist. To me, racism is one of the following:

-offensive words relating to race ("racial slurs")
-discriminating treatment based on race (like violence against someone because of their race, or preferential treatment because of race).
-stereotyped or generalizing comments or attitudes towards members of a race.
-putting the attributes of a race into a negative light.
-being insensitive about issues that are painful for members of a race (the Holocaust, slavery, etc.)

So let's get this out of the way: the history of Zwarte Piet is indeed questionable. Wikipedia places his origins as being the devil, whom St. Nicholas overcame and shackled into servitude to do his dirty work for him. But I've heard other "origin stories" for Zwarte Piet, including that he was one of the Moorish boys who was being sold as a slave, then bought and set free by St. Nicholas, whom he stayed with as a servant out of gratitude.

But interestingly, the gut reaction for many foreigners on seeing the Dutch Sinterklaas proceedings is "this is racist", even when they are given no background story about Zwarte Piet. All it takes is seeing white people painted as black people running around in the streets distributing candy, telling jokes, singing songs and doing cartwheels and whatnot.

The one element that makes immediate sense to me is that in the framework of this story the Zwarte Pieten might indeed be slaves, and that they seem to feel quite jolly about being slaves. This qualifies as racist in the "being irreverent about a sensitive issue" sense. If people take issue with it because of that, then I do understand.

One African woman I talked to found it offensive because Zwarte Pieten are basically clowns and jesters. They are not "serious" people like accountants, CEOs, or law enforcement officers, and she felt that her whole race was being portrayed as people who are good for a fun time, but not to be taken seriously. I'm not sure anyone who watches the Sinterklaas proceedings is going to take Africans less seriously as a result of having seen the Zwarte Pieten's shenanigans, but when determining whether it's racist or not the answer doesn't lie in my opinion (as the majority) but in the feelings of those who feel offended and slighted in their ethnic identity.

On the other hand, I find it a bit difficult to relate to seeing the procession as "here's a white man with all his black slaves". The Zwarte Pieten are running around distributing candy, rappelling off of walls and just generally having a good time, they're not being forced to row a boat or pick cotton or do any other "slave" sort of activity.

But it also seems that some people consider it racist simply on the grounds that the Zwarte Pieten are white actors with black facepaint. This seems a general attitude: white actors with black facepaint = racist. I don't fully understand this. How is it racist for an actor to impersonate someone of another race? Acting involves playing someone you're not. Gary Sinise played a double amputee in "Forrest Gump". Greg Kinnear played a gay man in "As Good As It Gets". Cate Blanchett played a man in "I'm Not There". Does the fact that one demographic is played by a member of another demographic strike anyone as discriminatory? Is it discriminatory against gays to have a straight man play a gay man in a movie? Yet somehow it seems that when it comes to someone playing someone of a different RACIAL demographic it's an inherent problem. The go-to example is Mickey Rooney's turn as a Chinese landlord in "Breakfast at Tiffany's". Sure it induces cringes, but is that because he's a white man playing a Chinese man, or is it because he plays him as such a broad stereotype? Would it be equally offensive if he had played a more sympathetic, nuanced Chinese landlord? Would it be equally offensive if a Chinese actor were playing a broad stereotype of a Chinese landlord?

I often wonder about the defined boundaries of what constitutes racism. It's not always very clear. In John Grisham's "A Time To Kill", a jury was brought to sympathize with an abused black girl by imagining that she was white. But is it really this simple? Sometimes, no doubt, it is. If Sinterklaas had a bunch of white helpers, no one would have any colonial guilt, or colonial grudges, or any objections to the fact that his helpers are portrayed as silly jesters. If anything, there might be some objections about a fourth-century Turkish bishop having an all-white entourage.

It seems that, for one thing, a lot of it has less to do with a statement or attitude in an of itself, and more to do with the majority/minority context. For example, why can Chris Rock use the term "Cracker", but no white comedian could get away with using the N-word? Why does the sentence "White men can't dance" just sort of sound funny, but "Black men can't write" sound extremely offensive? I'm not sure that one insult is inherently worse than the other, but we can't just evaluate statements like that outside of our cultural and historical context, in which they do mean completely different things because of which racial group has had the upper hand and which racial group has had to suffer as a result.

Most of it, I suspect, works on a cultural and emotional level. Maybe that's part of the problem: for the person experiencing racism, it is a highly emotional experience. If you try a rational analysis of an emotional experience, you will usually find only baffling contradictions, which makes it hard to understand racism from a standpoint of pure rational analysis, rather than sympathy and empathy.

So, your turn. Is it racist for white actors to wear black facepaint and play Zwarte Piet for Sinterklaas?