This has been bugging me for a while. One of the words you will come across a lot in Flanders (and in the Netherlands) is allochtoon. Loosely translated, as those with a grounding in Greek will have figured, it refers to people ‘from another land’ or ‘born abroad’.

It initially became common as a euphemism for vreemdeling (foreigner or alien), but it has taken a life of its own. Broadly speaking, the term nowadays expands and shrinks depending on the context. It can, for example, be a catch-all term for ‘anyone who superficially doesn’t look Flemish’, or more specifically for Mediterraneans or Muslims or, ‘Turkish and North African immigrants and their offspring‘. These are the ‘core allochtones‘ if you may, as opposed to the occasional ones. So basically, if you look a bit foreign you’ll wander in an out of the allochtoon cupboard, but if you’re in the core group you might as well get used to it, decorate it as you please, engrave it on your children’s lunch boxes, preferably in an arabesque-looking font. You know, if they work hard, they may grow up to become allochtoon lawyers, and allochtoon doctors and allochtoon politicians!

It’s obvious how this experience can be alienating.

Crucially, the term in its present form has nothing to do with having been born in a far away land. You may have been born in Lapland, or Nueva Germania, Paraguay, if you don’t look allochtoon enough, you’re not allowed into the allochtoon cupboard. Conversely, if your family has lived in the Low Countries since the days of Felipe II but they haven’t been quite able to rid themselves of their ‘Mediterranean hue’, you might sometimes qualify for the allochtoon treatment. Even if your parents are Flemish and you only speak the most arcane West-Flemish, but were adopted from Timor as a baby, you’re somehow allochtoon too, every now and then.

In short, it’s a thing you have to pull off, but not in a good way… you can surely see why it’s a problem that the term isn’t related to physical immigration anymore (was it ever?) and that the ethnic component has prevailed.

This isn’t necessarily down to xenophobia or ill-intentions. Outright malicious racism, as opposed to the more banal sort, is largely frowned upon in Flanders. Most of the time it’s rather a fastidious exercise in scientific classification: If you move to Flanders you will notice very fast that people will seek to label you and put you in one of these mental cupboards. If you, like myself, happen to be from mixed heritage, you will cause a slight commotion: “But you don’t look like you belong in that particular cupboard, eh, I will put you in this southern cupboard where they dance provocatively and are overly emotional”. And the ‘taxonomic phylum’ for all darkish-looking cupboards seems to be the allochtoon. (By the way, the whole ‘Flemish with tralala-roots‘ shtick merits a post of its own: I’m not a plant!).

This superficially harmless classification can get very nasty, very quickly. It may start as a playful jest on your land of birth, or that of your parents, but after a while you do wonder if you’ll ever fit in. And worse, a bit like the German Südländer, the allochtoon has become a sort of boogeyman in Flanders: He’s the demonised ‘other’, responsible for most serious and petty crime and all of the ‘social fraud’, while also stealing the jobs of the hard-working, law-abiding autochtones.

And this is the cue for the mad rightists to jump in and proclaim that allochtone culture (because there’s really just one) predisposes people to crime and anomie. Would they just forsake their primitive ways and name their children Joke and Joris and send them to the local Chiro (Belgian catholic boy scouts), then all of the country’s social problems would be fixed in a whiff! But despair not, fair allochtonians! Here come the mad leftists in their shining armour of relativism, indignantly announcing that adapting your culture, even just a little bit, now that you moved from the Tuamotu Islands to Western Europe would be the perpetuation of western colonial capitalist oppression, and all the allochtone mischief you manage to get into in this new land is never actually your fault, but a product of the system!

And the rest will marvel together at how ‘well-integrated’ this or that poor sod is, seeing as his grandparents ‘just’ moved from the Takla Makan desert only four decades ago. “And he speaks Dutch so well!”.

And here’s the thing, you can’t demand that people see themselves as stakeholders of society while constantly reminding them that they truly belong somewhere else.

But don’t get me wrong, cupboard-thinking is not strictly related to immigration and multiculturalism, and it’s definitely not new! Cupboards are a stalwart of these regions, as ancient and connected to the land (autochtonous as you may!) as top-fermenting beer. People have been putting each other in cupboards for centuries over here. One need only refer to the verzuiling of catholic and freethinking cupboards, and before that the catholic and protestant cupboards. Or the Latin vs. Germanic linguistic cupboard dispute, as well as thousands of subtle regional sub-cupboards. For, if you can’t separate the ‘us’ from the ‘them’, which cupboard is anyone truly in? Chaos ensues!

Once more, this is neither unique to Flanders not particularly nasty over here. Just a thing that you notice, fairly regularly.

Which brings me to my last point, and my personal ‘bête noire’. Sometimes people will speak of the ‘allochtone gemeenschap‘, the community of allochtones, as if all the people that they themselves put in that particular cupboard were somehow, by magical force, compelled to act as a cohesive social group, have dinner together, organise allochtone cultural events (presumably to coordinate criminal, social-defrauding and job-stealing action, ha! But at least now it can’t be said that ‘they’ don’t take part in the verenigingsleven!). No one’s denying the social problems brought along by recent mass immigration, but are they really related to race and culture?

The imaginary community of allochtones seems also to have become a virtual fourth cultural community of Belgium, with English as its official language. Many will therefore assume that if you look vaguely foreign there’s not a chance in hell you will speak Dutch, and seeing as they’re very polite and accommodating and oh-so polyglottal, they will directly address you in English. (If you do this, you don’t realise how offensive it is, please stop it!). It’s mostly without malice, but this little time-saving heuristic just screams: “You don’t belong here, and you never will”.

A few months ago this girl made a social-awareness film about the misogynistic taunting and catcalling that is commonplace in Brussels, it made news in Belgium. Her video, however, seemed to lay the blame squarely on ‘western consumerism’ and kinda followed the line of the ‘mad leftists’. Anyhow, she came on TV and made an appeal to the ‘allochtone gemeenschap’ to sort it out. I wondered at the time, was she talking to me? Was she expecting me to get on the train to Brussels and get those men to stop? (Alas, I neither have the muscle, nor the ‘street-cred’ to affect any change, other than to my physical integrity). Right, she probably wasn’t talking to me. Like the Chinese proverb, she was ‘pointing at the mulberry tree and cursing the locust’, and maybe she’s right, some cupboards can police themselves. However, she didn’t make an appeal to men in general, or to young men, or to men without a college degree, or to men with facial hair, somehow their foreignness was the decisive variable for their behaviour.

The implication that groups, real and imaginary, are somehow collectively responsible, like a medieval merchant getting smacked down for his countrymen’s misdeeds, is the wrong way to see the problem. Idiotic, barbarous male chauvinism notwithstanding.

And it boils down to that, we should stop assuming things about people on the basis of their ethnic or national origin. In my experience, neither the colour of their skin nor their place of birth ever say anything meaningful about them as individuals. You might think I’m calling for Flanders to ban the word allochtoon, I’m not, after all it has to call foreigners something. But it should definitely get rid of the useless racial connotations and stop seeing newcomers and their children as either a threat or a charity case and provide them with a (reasonable!) path to eventually becoming ‘autochtoon’ one day. Everyone will be better off.