RetroFed
At least 3.3m people were victims of Dutch enslavement, research claims
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https://www.theguardian.com/news/2026/jul/01/dutch-enslavement-slavery-figure-research
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As a Dutch person I’ll say there is a biiiig drive to try and forget all of our many crimes. Glad this os getting attention. Now to get reparations. And finally and end to racism that has a direct line from this colonialism to present day.
There was an article a few years ago about Zwarte Piet. Someone commented that Zwarte Piet was fine, not racist at all. A person replied that they were black and lived in Holland and that they felt like Zwarte Piet was a bit racist. The original commenter told them to go back to Africa.
So anyway, that’s kind of where we’re at.
The Zwarte Piet discussion has been ongoing for the past decade orso, and especially a few years ago that discussion was very heated.
As someone who lives in the Netherlands, I get the impression that at this point the vast majority of people accept that Zwarte Piet in its old form is not really acceptable anymore. It does help that, unlike a few years ago, there have been proposals to update the tradition without making a complete mockery out of it.
The new the design of the soot-face Piet is a decent compromise, and more in line with the story we have been telling kids for decades anyway.
When I was a kid, we moved to NL. This was in the 90s
I was always confused why my mom found zwarte Piet so weird
Years later: “oh… Oh no”
Classic
Another benefit of the biggest offenders becoming transparent as well as liable, is that it can show smaller countries how we can follow the same pattern. It is difficult to explain to people why we should hold ourselves accountable when they point at Britain, Germany, Israel, etc and see no accountability. Best of luck (in the most genuine sense of the phrase).
Reparations paid to who exactly?
So racism is directly tied to colonialism?
Japan was never colonized. Russia was never colonized, unless you call the mongols colonizers.
Both those country were or are racist. Was German colonized. They were racist and colonizers.
Racism is a far larger, older and deeper idea than colonizing. Every civilization in the history of humans has had slaves.
North american Indians made slaves out of their neighbors. Raided and brought them back home. Mayans and Aztecs did too but they stole more land than the northern tribes.