I watched the entire first season of Atlanta on my 14-hour flight back from South Africa in 2017. I had an oddly scheduled layover in Amsterdam. It wasn’t enough time to leave the airport and make it back for my connecting flight, but also not short enough for it to pass by quickly while waiting in the airport.
Even though I never left the airport, can I say I’ve been to (visited) Amsterdam?
This week we’re discussing how a Dutch Christmas tradition shapes our understanding of the legacies of Dutch imperialism in the modern world… and we’re using Donald Glover’s TV show, Atlanta, to do it.
Atlanta instantly became one of my favorite TV shows on that long flight from South Africa. Donald Glover employs a genre of writing known as surrealism to provide social critique with a side of humor and sarcasm. Hidden imagery, symbolic gestures, and recurring themes all work together to deliver to the viewer a surreal experience– one step above reality.
On the first watch of an episode, it seems like a particular action or character is just odd, but when you rewatch an episode you notice the hidden messages or commentary behind the scenes (I understand some people “get it” on the first try!). To learn more about the meaning of Atlanta and why the show is so real, insightful, yet weird check out this Youtube video from Wisecrack.
As I was preparing for Christmas this week and resting from dissertation writing, I recalled a Christmas episode of Atlanta.
On season 3, episode 2 of Atlanta, Paper Boi, an up-and-coming rapper (played by Brian Tyree Henry), is set to perform a show in Amsterdam for the holidays. Preparing to perform on stage at his completely sold-out show, Paper Boi gazes at the crowd of attendees from behind the stage curtains. As a remix of Jingle Bells plays, Paper Boi looks out at a sea of white fans wearing black paint on their faces and curly afro wigs. He turns to Earn, his manager and recent Princeton dropout (played by Donald Glover), and gives him an immediate no– there’s no way Paper Boi is performing in Amsterdam in front of that type of crowd.
Watch this scene below (Content Warning: This clip contains explicit language):
This episode of Atlanta is alluding to a Christmas tradition in Amsterdam and the Netherlands more broadly of dressing up as a character called Zwarte Piet or Black Pete. In Amsterdam, Christmas starts early. Around December 6 each year, Sinterklaas, also known as St. Nick or simply Santa Claus, comes to town to deliver gifts for children, but of course, he can’t do it alone. Sinterklaas employs the help of Zwarte Piet, a small dark skin entertainer who threatens to withhold presents from any children found on Santa’s naughty list or even worse–he’ll capture them and stuff them in his pouch.
Such a depiction can be a scary thing for a child who just wants to hoard gifts and treats for the holiday season, but what’s even more disturbing is how people have historically dressed up as Zwarte Piet or Black Pete to commemorate Christmas. White Dutch people would often wear curly black afros, put on blackface using dark paint, and wear exaggerated red lipstick to widen their lips. Even cartoons depicting Black Pete are characteristic of 19th and 20th century American Minstrel shows where white actors would dress up in blackface to ridicule and villanize African Americans.
But where did all of this come from?
In the 19th century, Jan Schenkman, a Dutch teacher wrote a book called Sint Nikolaas en zijn Knecht (Saint Nicholas and His Servant) creating a character called Black Pete, Santa’s helper. There had been similar mythological stories about St. Nick and his black servant that circulated in Europe before Schenkman’s book was published. However, this particular book popularized the Black Pete trope for a modern audience.
The issue of Black Pete came up again while I was reading Johny Pitts’s Afropean: Notes from Black Europe. In his chapter on Amsterdam, he speaks to Jessica de Abreu, an Afro-Dutch activist and member of the New Urban Collective, an organization working to address structural racism in Amsterdam. She had this to say about the modern legacies of Dutch imperialism
In the Netherlands, we’re in this strange situation where, if you call somebody racist, it’s like calling out their mother. It has to do with their self-image; the Dutch are known globally as tolerant because there is a soft drugs policy, the Netherlands was one of the first countries where same-gender marriages were legalized, and prostitution is legalized and controlled. Therefore, the white Dutch identity perceives itself to be liberal, tolerant and open, so how can it be racist? They think that 400 years of colonial empire didn’t leave traces, but of course it did, especially structurally.
Darker-skinned people, many from former Dutch colonies, are often treated more poorly than their white counterparts in Amerstdam. As reported by Time Magazine in 2020:
Aggressive police tactics against minority communities in the Netherlands have been documented by the group Controle Alt Delete, which found that people from non-Western migrant backgrounds are more than five times more likely to be suspected of a crime and more than 10 times more likely to be jailed.”1
The Black Pete trope isn’t just a fairytale, it’s a potent symbol of how the Dutch Empire utilized darker-skinned people as slaves to achieve their commercial ends. Despite this history and critique, there are people and groups in the Netherlands today who want to hold on tightly to the Christmas tradition of dressing up as Black Pete. Some proponents of the traditions have argued that Black Pete gets his dark skin from the soot gathered while climbing up and down chimneys. The question then becomes why wear Afro hair and exaggerated red lips in addition to the blackface?
The key takeaway here is that imperialism, especially Dutch imperialism, reinforced a simple idea that blackness and dark skin are inferior and thus worthy of servitude. So even if it was chimney soot that made Pete black, what matters today is how people with darker skin are treated in modern Dutch society. Dressing up as Black Pete for Christmas each year doubles down on the idea that was birthed during the age of Dutch imperialism that dark skin is something to be feared and/or ridiculed.
Since the height of Dutch imperialism in the 18th century was before the rise of other European empires such as the French and British Empire in the 19th century, it is often neglected when discussing or teaching about the legacies of imperialism. As an early commercial empire, the Dutch transported about half a million enslaved people across the Atlantic Ocean. Similarly, Dutch colonies such as Suriname and Guyana became central markets in their purchasing and selling of enslaved people. There’s still so much more research to be done on the lasting impacts of Dutch commercial and cultural expansion during this time.
As more research emerges, I’ve been enamored by the work of young artists today like Kennedi Carter who are reimagining the black experience under Dutch authority both past and present through her stunning photographs. I had a chance to view Kennedi Carter’s Shahqeel in the exhibition Past Made Present: Dutch Shadows in the Black Atlantic at the RISD Museum a few months ago. Carter plays with traditional Dutch portraiture to imagine a world where darker skin is celebrated with the honor and dignity it deserves.
This Christmas, I hope we dare to acknowledge the past and imagine better futures for ourselves. History only truly becomes history when we acknowledge that it is alive and active, never past, but always present.
Wishing you so much joy this season–stay curious, friends!
Until next time,
Hi! My name is Shae and I am a PhD candidate in History at Harvard University. I write weekly newsletters about history, culture, and art. If there’s a topic you’re curious about and would like to know more– let me know on Threads here.
Sources
Johny Pitts, Afropean: Notes from Black Europe
https://www.dw.com/en/controversial-black-pete-dismantling-a-racist-tradition/a-63969883
https://time.com/5910949/black-pete-netherlands-zwarte-piet/