Author: Anne-Ruth Wertheim
Racism is changing, manifesting itself in more dangerous ways than in the past.
In the debate on integration, some speakers tend to deny the existence of racism. They feel it is a thing of the past, and that at most our modern society suffers from cultural contradictions. Something is indeed changing, but unfortunately it is not that racism is disappearing. In fact racism is manifesting itself in more dangerous ways.
A distinction is rarely drawn between the two types of racism, exploitation racism and competition racism. Yet the prejudices accompanying them differ so much they are almost diametrically opposed. The exploitation racism that was dominant in the Netherlands is changing into competition racism. In the process, racist violence is changing as well. It is no longer confined to incidents but is becoming a mass trend.
In the early 1990s I conducted a study on racial prejudices at several adult education institutions in the province of Gelderland. Prejudices circulating among the Dutch students about the ethnic minority students set me thinking. They looked down on them, “those foreigners are so backward”. But there were also feelings indicative of exactly the opposite: envy and distrust. I discussed this striking mixture of prejudices with my father, Wim F. Wertheim, who had done extensive research on racism in the colonial society of Indonesia. It was a society completely divided by colour lines with the Dutch on top, the people of mixed Dutch and Indonesian descent and the Chinese in the middle, and the Indonesians at the bottom. There were two kinds of racism there, colonial or exploitation racism and competition racism.
Two kinds of racism
Colonial or exploitation racism was mainly prevalent on the plantations. The Dutch had Indonesian workers doing heavy labour there for miserable wages and often under poor working conditions. It was rather convenient for them that there was so much prejudice against these coolies linked to the dark colour of their skin. They were perceived as being “stupid, lazy and childish”, they were “irresponsible, had no concept of the future, believed anything you told them, and were subservient”. All one has to do is consult the literature of the former Dutch East Indies to see the “racial features” the authors had their white characters attribute to their Indonesian servants. As long as the servants worked their fingers to the bone without complaining, they would graciously refer to them as “kind-hearted” and “caring”.
The competition racism in respect to the Chinese was quite a different matter. They had once been in a position to control a large part of the trade so that when more and more Indonesians wanted to take part, they had to compete with them. At the same time, the Dutch used them as middlemen for the sale of plantation produce and the import of products from the Netherlands. This was all accompanied by a deep sense of distrust. There were also prejudices about the Chinese linked to their appearance or name. But instead of being stupid, lazy and childish, they were clever, in fact an unpleasant combination of clever and unreliable that essentially meant they were “sly”. They had “a passion for money and power” and used their slyness to “take over” in all kinds of sneaky ways. There was also clear evidence of jealousy, whether overt or covert.
Exploitation racism legitimizes looking down on a certain group that is “inferior”, and competition racism attributes deviant, fearsome character traits to a group that is felt to be “superior” in whatever competition is going on.
Being “stupid, lazy and childish” is generally believed to be a matter of heredity. In looking down on coolies, this is why there was also an element of “they can’t help it, that’s just the way they are”. In addition to inborn traits such as cleverness, the set of prejudices that goes with competition racism includes quite a few cultural elements, i.e. customs, ideas and religion. The fact that unlike the Indonesian Muslims, many Chinese ate pork, was all too enthusiastically cited as an excuse to treat them with contempt. Having “a passion for money and power” is also a cultural prejudice. This mixture of biological and cultural prejudices makes competition racism particularly vicious. The people these prejudices are deemed applicable to can “do something about the way they are”. They could have chosen not to believe in a hated religion or practise detested customs. Unlike exploitation racism, competition racism also focuses on a group depicted as constituting a threat. So in times of economic recession, they can easily be turned into scapegoats.
Like exploitation racism, competition racism is linked to violence, but of a far more horrendous and massive nature. As a deterrent, corporal punishment was administered to rebellious coolies at the plantations, but the other coolies were not harmed. They had to continue to be able to engage in hard labour. However, cruel mass violence was part and parcel of the fierce campaigns in Indonesia against the Chinese. The driving force behind the violence was not the will of a small number of people to benefit from the efforts of numerous other people. No, the aim was to physically do away with as many competitors as possible and permanently eliminate the rest of them.
The position of the plantation workers in Indonesia can easily be recognized in exploitation situations all across the globe. Apartheid in South Africa and slavery are of course the most obvious examples. But the prejudices of exploitation racism are also evident in less extreme forms, hand in hand with the violence against a few individuals to keep an entire group under their control. Generally speaking, the position of the Chinese mercantile minority can thus be compared to that of the Jews in Europe or the Indians and Pakistanis in Uganda. There too, in the first instance it was a matter of competition between groups of merchants. And there too, the prejudices of competition racism, or of the anti-Semitism that has so much in common with it, served to exclude a recognizable group, violently drive them out, or even exterminate them.
In the conversation my father and I had in the early 1990s about my research, we also discussed our own experiences with various forms of racism. He as an adult and I as a child had been part of the white elite that ruled over brown-skinned Indonesians. When the Japanese occupied Indonesia, we and all the other white people were imprisoned for years in camps, where many of us died of hunger. The Japanese looked down on us and kept us under control by using violence against a few individuals. Some time around the middle of the war, they started separating the Jews from the others. They didn’t do that in all the camps, and thus it happened that my Jewish father was not separated from the rest and we, his half-Jewish children, were. For fear of being separated from us, my non-Jewish mother claimed to be Jewish. The Japanese were following the example set by the Germans in separating the Jews from the other prisoners. But unlike the case in Europe, it did not happen with the intention of murdering us. In the meantime, almost the whole of our family on my father’s side had been murdered by the Germans back in Europe.
Dutch society
It is revealing and enlightening to examine Dutch society in recent decades from the perspective of the two types of racism. The first “guest workers” from Morocco and Turkey arrived in the Netherlands in the 1960s. They lived in cramped boarding houses, usually near the factories where they worked, often in shifts. They did not play much of a role in public life. The prejudices that emerged about them at the time can be classified under exploitation racism. People said they were only capable of doing monotonous, hard labour and wouldn’t want it any other way. They were too stupid to learn Dutch. There was a light sense of amused compassion when it came to guest workers. The few racist incidents that did occur were severely criticized by virtually everyone. These incidents, such as a fire bomb tossed into a boarding house where guest workers were living, can be viewed as efforts by certain groups to “teach the foreigners a lesson”, as is common in exploitation racism. As long as they kept doing the monotonous, hard labour and kept their mouths shut, they could stay.
By the beginning of the 1990s, quite a bit had changed. The guest workers were not going away and had moreover formed families here. In my research within the adult education system, in addition to prejudices based on exploitation racism, I came across feelings that people had a hard time putting into words, feelings of jealously and mistrust. I thought it was a good thing at first that everyone felt it was an insult to be called a racist. But it soon became clear to me that racism was solely associated with looking down on people, something everyone indignantly denied doing. What’s more, it did not cover what they were feeling.
This is what made me predict at the time that the nature of the prejudices concerning immigrants were going to change as they adjusted more to the Dutch situation (Vorming, an adult education and social cultural work journal, June 1992). After all, the immigrants and their children and grandchildren would become better able to compete with the established population. For jobs, for housing, for social facilities, for educational opportunities and a role in the business or entertainment worlds. This would make the prejudices of competition racism advantageous for the established population and the prejudices of exploitation racism less “useful”.
I am afraid my prediction is coming true. It is apparent how immigrants are being transformed into a clearly delineated, uniform group. Step by step the contours of this constructed group are becoming sharper externally (skin colour) as well as internally (identity). The established population is also presented with far greater uniformity than it actually has. People who did not clearly “belong” in any particular group are now being pressured into making a choice. The standard question at interviews “Do you feel like a Moroccan or a Dutchman?” can even imply there would be something wrong with a combined identity.
As part of this sharper delineation of the group, there is also an increased impertinence perceived by ethnic minorities when local old-timers ask them about where they come from or what their background is. Of course these questions could be indicative of increased interest. But there seems to be very little evidence of reciprocity, nor of any demonstrated reservations about addressing the other on the basis of visible features. The group that has been created this way - the ethnic minority - is more and more openly defined as “the dark-skinned immigrants”. And the majority - the local old-timers - are increasingly viewed as “the people who belong here”. A clearly delineated group can more easily become the target of prejudices. Gone is the vague sense of amused compassion. No one is calling them “stupid, lazy and childish” any more, at most these notions are now implied in terms like “bad neighbourhoods” and “bad schools”.
The immigrants and their children and grandchildren are now rapidly becoming educated and are therefore more serious rivals on the labour market. At the same time, various forms of emancipation are emerging. Pride in elements of their imported cultures is openly displayed. All around though, the prejudices that are part of competition racism are becoming stronger too. The sense of superiority characteristic of exploitation racism is shifting towards feelings of contempt. Contempt similarly gives the people who exhibit it the advantage of being able to feel they are better than another group. But it includes more aversion and even more distrust. It is also more clearly focused on the features “people can do something about”: customs, ideas and religion.
The competition prejudices “clever and unreliable” can be detected in stories about immigrants as successful but tricky players in the social arena: they use dishonest practices to get licences or housing, abuse social welfare benefits and so forth. The combination of distrust and jealousy comes out in the stories in all kinds of ways: “They act as if they are so badly treated, but they all have these beautiful houses in Morocco or Turkey.”
The emphasis on “the deviant” is also clearly on the rise. It is becoming more common to present the culture of the established population as uniform and “normal” in contrast to the cultural baggage of the immigrants. At the same time, people set more store by the historical falsifications about cultural changes that did not exist here until “the foreigners started coming”. Harping on the “deviant” aspects of the newcomers also means an improper use of the concept of integration: as a commandment to accept the culture of the established population, which is depicted as being totally uniform, and to abandon their own culture, on penalty of deportation.
In defending the measures that have recently been taken to restrict the numbers of new immigrants, there is a tendency to zoom in on the problems (crime, urban degeneration, terrorism) and overlook everything that is going well. It happens with increasing frequency that “the group” is held one-sidedly responsible for whatever problems come up. This means putting the very dangerous scapegoat mechanism into effect.The most alarming thing of all is the propagation of the notion that immigrants are “scary”. The suspicion that they are covertly striving for “total power” is a dangerous manifestation of competition racism. A certain fear of numerical dominance that has been around for a while is now reinforced by the threat of “Islam”. The excrescences of fundamentalism are depicted, in this connection, as being representative of Islam as a whole. Fear always plays a role in any outbreak of mass violence. That has not happened yet, but there is no time to lose.
This article first appeared in Dutch in the quarterly Kunst & Wetenschap (Art & Science), vol. 13, no. 3, September 2004. (A short version also appeared in the Opinion & Debate section of NRC Handelsblad on 19 June 2004).
Published on 08 March 2005 by RISQ
© Anne-Ruth Wertheim | www.risq.org
All rights reserved.
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