Every December, a handful of Dutch students at the European Schools in Brussels black up their faces, paint their lips and throw on a dark corkscrew-curl wig.

To the participants, this is nothing out of the ordinary — a traditional yuletide celebration in which some kids masquerade as St. Nicholas and others dress up as his dark-skinned helper Zwarte Piet (“Black Pete”).

But for other students at these EU-funded institutions, which are attended by children from across Europe and beyond, the practice can sometimes feel offensive — a symptom of an unwillingness in Brussels to engage with issues of racial diversity.

“The only time I would see people of color represented would be in cases like Zwarte Piet, with stereotypical African traits — big, red lips and so on,” said Marianne Tatepo, a former student at the European School of Ixelles, who now lives in London.

"Whenever there were issues of ethnicity and race, people rolled their eyes" — Marianne Tatepo, former European School of Ixelles student

“I feel as though there weren’t really provisions to take into account how young black people at the school felt,” said Tatepo, whose parents moved to Brussels from Cameroon. “Whenever there were issues of ethnicity and race, people rolled their eyes.”

“My objections about harmful messages about black people at the school were largely not taken seriously,” she added. “I was seen as a loudmouth.”

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Dressing up as Zwarte Piet is a long-standing tradition in the Netherlands and Belgium, but in recent years it has increasingly become the subject of controversy. Organizers of major public St. Nicholas Day — or Sinterklaas — celebrations in Amsterdam and the Hague last year reacted to public backlash by stipulating that Zwarte Piet costumes had to lose the red lips, curly hair and dark skin.

In 2016, the Dutch Ombudsman for Children determined that Zwarte Piet depictions violated children’s rights, noting that instances of bullying and harassment of non-white children based on their skin-color spiked around the December 5th holiday.

Campaigners have pushed for the controversial character’s costume to be “adapted” in various ways. Some advocate calling him Piet and portraying him as a chimney sweep (one defense of the tradition suggests his face is black from soot, and is not related to his ethnicity) or painting his face green, gold or red.

The European School of Ixelles received its first complaint about the celebrations last year, when a British parent took issue with a poster depicting the character hanging on a classroom door. European schools are divided into language sections — such as English, French, Dutch and German — allowing students to learn in their mother tongue.

The parent, who asked to remain anonymous, said they were also shocked to see children “blacked up” at the school as part of St Nicholas celebrations.

“The school already has guidelines in place that told students to avoid caricatures of Africanness,” Emmanuel Tournemire, the headmaster of the European School of Ixelles, said in an interview at his office earlier this year. But among the older students who distribute candy in classrooms, those who dressed up as Zwarte Piet had painted their faces black, he added.

“Looking at the photographs the parents took of this, we recognized that our policies were open to criticism,” said Tournemire, who said he set up a meeting with Dutch members of the school’s parents’ association to discuss ways to make the celebrations “more consensual.”

“I’ll be clear — there’s no question of getting rid of these celebrations,” he added. “It’s a question of adapting them. We live in Belgium, which is part of this culture and where St Nicholas is an important holiday and we want to preserve that as well.”

The European School of Ixelles does not keep records of the racial makeup of its student body, Tournemire said. Keeping tabs on students’ backgrounds “would be stigmatizing them in exactly the way we want to avoid.”

The student body, he said, “reflects Europe” in its diversity and has evolved as “the European population becomes more mobile and families become more mixed, both by nationality and ethnicity.”

“We don’t need Zwarte Piet to keep the Sinterklaas tradition" — a parent at The European School of Ixelles

Other Brussels-based EU schools contacted for this story did not respond or declined to comment.

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Most parents across sections, when pressed, agreed there was “a whiff of the 1970s” about the way the school celebrated Sinterklaas, according to the parent who placed a complaint with the school’s administration. “Most Brits didn’t think it was appropriate.”

Among the Dutch parents gathered by the school to debate new guidelines, some strongly defended the tradition. Others were shocked and want to change it. “They recognize that there’s tension around it,” the headmaster said.

The hard thing for non-Dutch parents to understand is how rooted this tradition is in Dutch society, said Janet van Noordwijck, a Dutch national who is married to an Italian and whose children are enrolled in the English language section. “It’s the biggest thing that Dutch kids look forward to.”

“For me, it’s a luxurious problem,” she added. “If this is what we have to talk about, it means there aren’t a lot of other problems around, which is a good thing,” she said, adding that when she was growing up in the Netherlands, Zwarte Piet was not thought of as “racist.”

“I think it takes an outsider to really scrutinize the subject,” said a former Dutch student who dressed up as Zwarte Piet as a high school student at the Ixelles school. No one complained at the time, he recalled, saying the younger kids “always loved it.”

The key is to modernize the tradition, said van Noordwijck. “If people feel offended by it, you should look into it. Times have changed … I can understand perfectly that a person from another [language section] would look at it from a different perspective and they’re right.”

“I think in 10 years, we won’t have Zwarte Piet anymore,” she added. “We don’t need Zwarte Piet to keep the Sinterklaas tradition.”

“For kids it won’t matter,” the Dutch former student said. “They aren’t perceiving the world in that way … If my kids grow up with a red or blue Piet, then fair enough. I really don’t care about it.”