Dutch holiday season sees new 'Black Pete' controversy

Gordon Darroch | Special for USA TODAY

THE HAGUE, Netherlands — The Dutch are welcoming another holiday season with all the usual traditions: shopping, Christmas trees, special treats — and a renewed controversy over Black Pete.

The black-faced assistant who hands out presents for a white St. Nicholas — who inspired Santa Claus — is again at the center of a national debate about racism in a country that takes pride in its reputation for tolerance and progressive thinking.

To critics, showcasing a figure in blackface with bright red lips and a curly black wig is a racist tradition that should end. But Black Pete's defenders say he's a part of Dutch folklore that has no roots in racist depictions of Africans.

Evidence of the emotional debate played out several weeks ago, when police arrested 90 demonstrators in Gouda, 40 miles south of Amsterdam, for picketing the annual parade to welcome St. Nicholas to the Netherlands. Some carried banners declaring, "Black Pete is racism," while others staged a counterprotest in support of the character.

The protest in the packed town square was made more bizarre by the presence of eight "Police Petes" in the crowd — armed undercover officers who blended into the crowd by caking themselves in black makeup, curly black wigs and pageboy outfits.

Clashes over Black Pete are expected to climax Friday on the Dutch holiday Sinterklaas — St. Nicholas Day — when gifts are exchanged, much like on Christmas.

"We have been avoiding talking about issues of race and racism and that needs to change," said Quinsy Gario, an anti-Black Pete campaigner who reignited the debate about the character three years ago, when he was arrested at a St. Nicholas arrival parade in Dordrecht. "People who beforehand perhaps never thought about it are finally doing that, and it's painful. In the past, we could hide behind the national identity of being tolerant."

Marc Gilling, who chairs the Guild of Petes, a group fighting to retain the Black Pete tradition, argues that a misplaced sense of victimhood is fueling the controversy.

"The problem is that there is a small minority of people in our society who mistakenly associate Black Pete with slavery," Gilling said. "It's not blackface like you used to see in America, which is indeed racist. Pete's blackness has a symbolic meaning which dates back thousands of years, to the days when black represented winter and the Catholic bishop (St. Nicholas) stood for summer."

The debate intensified last year when University of West Indies professor Verene Shepherd, who led a United Nations panel studying the cultural impact of Black Pete, assailed the tradition. "The working group cannot understand why it is that people in the Netherlands cannot see that this is a throwback to slavery and that in the 21st century this practice should stop," she said.

Her comments promoted pro-Black Pete rallies in Amsterdam and The Hague, and 2 million people signed a Facebook "Pete-ition" supporting the character.

Now, there are signs of a gradual shift away from Black Pete. The character is less prominent on the shelves of major Dutch stores, which have removed some of the more racially tinged features of his appearance, such as thick red lips and chunky gold earrings.

And the children's TV program Sinterklaas News introduced three white Petes — clowns with curly red wigs — into the show's usual posse of blackfaced actors.

Most Dutch politicians have ducked the passionate debate over Black Pete's future.One exception has been anti-immigration, right-wing populist Geert Wilders, who has proposed a law to make it illegal to alter Black Pete's blackness.

Even Gilling of the Guild of Petes thinks such a proposal goes too far.

"Black Pete has always changed and will continue to change," he said. "If society wants him to be blue, he'll be blue. But it has to come from within society rather than being enforced and imposed from outside."