“The Dutch have perfected their facade. They are the definition of ‘facade!’” Sylvana Simons tells me, laughing, on a video call from her home in the Netherlands. “Things look great from the outside. We have told ourselves that we’re tolerant and we’re understanding and we’re progressive, and the rest of the world is so backwards.”
But you don’t have to look far to find plenty of examples to the contrary. Most famously, there’s Zwarte Piet (Black Pete), a Sinterklaas tradition involving blackface; in recent years, anti-Black Pete protesters have experienced violence at the hands of both police and civilians. There’s a Christian youth group lobbying to criminalise sex work. There are the deaths of Mitch Henriquez and Tomy Holten in police custody in 2015 and 2020, respectively. In May, providing a clear example of institutional racism, the Dutch tax authority, the Belastingdienst, was found to have systematically flagged people with a second nationality for extra inspection.
And in politics, women, and especially women of colour, are underrepresented – particularly in parliament’s first chamber, the Senate. Of the 75 current members, only 26 are women, including two women of colour. There are no men of colour.
