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Discussion: Aspects of Bij1’s Antiracism

In document 1.2 General Outline (pagina 37-44)

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Through their policy proposals, Bij1 articulates several aspects of antiracism. In the second chapter I described antiracism as context-dependent and tendentious, and in this chapter, I will discuss the aspects of antiracism articulated by Bij1 as context-dependent and tendentious. I will show how Bij1’s articulation of antiracism challenges the status quo, but also how their articulation of antiracism reproduces the status quo. To reiterate, the research question for this thesis is:

How do political party Bij1’s policy proposals challenge and reproduce the racist status quo in the Netherlands?

An analysis of how Bij1 challenges or reproduces the status quo in their policy proposals is important because Bij1 has the unique chance to define what antiracist policy entails for Dutch politics. Additionally, a discussion of Bij1’s antiracism as tendentious and context-dependent can be used to understand

antiracism’s subversive qualities. In other words, I show how this perspective on antiracism is useful to study challenges of the status quo. This chapter is divided into two sections. The first is a discussion of the aspects of antiracism and the second serves as the conclusion to my thesis.

38 emphasis on rehabilitation, however, the rehabilitation proposed by Bij1 reproduces the status quo in their explicit acceptation of community service sentencing.

5.1.1 Racism and Antiracism

Bij1 makes explicit references to racism in the Netherlands and proposes several measures that reckon with overt racism, systemic racism and international racism. I mentioned three policy proposals in the previous chapter, which I will briefly recount. The first policy proposal named certain forms of racism which Bij1 finds relevant to the Netherlands, without defining these forms further. The second policy suggestion proposed to instate a Ministry of Equality and the third aimed to give immigrants the same rights as Dutch citizens. In this section I will discuss how the discourses on (anti)racism put forth in these policy suggestions challenge and reproduce the racist status quo. These challenges and reproductions are a means to analyse how Bij1 articulates antiracism.

First, I want to discuss the tensions associated with Bij1’s proposal for a Ministry of Equality. As Sara Ahmed points out regarding diversity committees in university, there exists some tension with putting a part of an institution in charge of diversity and inequality (Ahmed, 2012, p. 136). Part of this tension is best emphasized through a question: Who is responsible for diversity and equality? A common response might be ‘everyone’, but if this responsibility is made to fall on the shoulders of a select few, it can serve as a way for others to give up on this responsibility (Ibid). Another part of this tension is about the way institutions look at diversity and equality initiatives. According to Ahmed, they are seen as a means to solve a problem (Idem, p. 135-136). What happens to an initiative when the problem is then perceived as solved? This might be a problem for a Ministry of Equality regarding race, as Dutch people still feel as though the country is ‘post-race’. The policy proposal highlights the institutional nature of racism and inequality in the Netherlands, but the proposal can also be said to shift responsibility of these matters into the hands of a select few. I want to suggest that this therefore both challenges and reproduces the status quo. They challenge the status quo of denial by pushing for the Ministry, and they challenge an

understanding of race as solely related to the overt hatred of certain groups by connecting racism to institutional factors. However, the Ministry of Equality reproduces the status quo by seemingly absolving others of their responsibility for their role in upholding the status quo.

Another way Bij1 challenges the racist status quo, is by naming specific forms of racism that the party considers relevant to the Netherlands. As Wekker points out, a dominant discourse within the Netherlands regarding racism is the belief in a post-race society (Wekker, 2016, p. 4), where the specific forms of racism mentioned by Bij1 are left unacknowledged. Included in this dominant discourse of denial are the effects of international racism. Many countries are and have been systematically exploited through racist practices and dominant Dutch discourse also obscures this international racism. Through Bij1’s articulation of their long-term migration policy as antiracist, the party challenges this denial of international racism. By solely naming the forms of racism, Bij1’s antiracism seemingly refrains from

39 essentializing the forms of racism and their respective categories. I find that Bij1 challenges the racist status quo of denial by naming relevant forms of racism, many of which are un(der)acknowledged in Dutch discourse. However, Bij1 also reproduces the racist status quo, because, as I have discussed in the previous chapter, these forms of racism still invoke their respective categories, which necessarily

homogenizes these categories and obscures those who do not seem to belong.

According to scholar Judith Butler, subversion of the status quo requires that the categories employed refer to themselves as constructed and thereby retain an open-endedness for future meanings (Butler, 1999). Bij1 refrains from naming the categories associated with the different forms of racism, which allows for a space in which the reader must make up these categories for themselves. Whether or not this connotes that the constructed quality of these categories is being question will remain

inconclusive, since it depends on the audience’s interpretation of their own categories. As we will see in some of the following sections, Bij1 does not define the categories employed in other aspects of their antiracism as well. Even if a definitive answer might remain elusive, I still think it is fruitful to engage with the ambiguity in their strategy of invoking categories without defining them. I want to suggest that this strategy both subverts and essentializes these categories. By leaving the categories undefined, Bij1 does keep these categories open to possible future meanings, but it also means that the reader must rely on stereotypes to invoke an image of the categories. For example, when I say ‘Muslim’, your thoughts will rely on your personal experiences and cultural knowledge of this category to define it, and implicitly the recollection of these experiences and cultural knowledge cements your way of defining the category further. However, when a new iteration of these categories comes along which does not entirely fit the category, leaving it undefined might leave more space open to include this future iteration.

5.1.2 Democracy to Redefine Hierarchies

In the previous chapter I emphasized three of Bij1’s policy proposals regarding democracy. The first was about democratically elected university boards, the second was aimed to involve sex workers more in sex industry policy and the third policy proposal was intended to give workers more control over their surplus value and product. I chose these three policy proposals because they show how a central tenet of Bij1’s antiracism entails giving those heard less in the current hierarchies more control over the structures within which they live. As a result, Bij1 chooses certain hierarchies, such as university hierarchies, and ascertains who they consider to be without agency. The antiracist aspect of these policy proposals lies in the connection between race as a sliding signifier and hierarchies. Similar to the different forms of racism, categories are invoked of dominant and dominated without defining these categories. Bij1 challenges the status quo by pointing out relevant power hierarchies and who should have more power to define these hierarchies. Bij1 challenges the racist status quo by pushing a discourse where power should be distributed equally. If racism is connected to power hierarchies, then challenging the power distribution in these hierarchies is antiracist. By leaving these categories undefined, Bij1 leaves them both open-ended for

40 future meanings and reproduces the old meanings the categories had. While Bij1’s policies challenge the racist status quo through a discourse of power redistribution, I think this aspect of Bij1’s proposals also reproduces the status quo in a different way. In the next two paragraphs I will use the works of Gloria Wekker and Gayatri Spivak to show how this aspect of Bij1’s antiracism reproduces the status quo in two ways.

Bij1’s effort to envision hierarchies in the Netherlands differently through alternative power distribution invites two ways to reproduce the status quo. The first is the way in which Dutch society has been fundamentally shaped by racist hierarchies, as pointed out by Gloria Wekker (Wekker, 2016), and shifting the power distribution within these hierarchies to increasingly serve the needs of the dominated still propagates a faith in the hierarchies. For example, electing certain university boards strengthens the idea that we should have these university boards. Fairly elected structures of oppression remain structures of oppression nonetheless and elections can serve to give these structures an image of fairness.

Democratically elected institutions which have fundamentally been shaped by racist hierarchies can still operate in a racist manner, but now they can seem less egregious due to the perceived ‘fairness’ of these institutions.

The second way that the democratic aspect of Bij1’s antiracism strengthens the status quo is about representation, and this critique is inspired by scholar Gayatri Spivak. She critiques the representation of the subaltern in her text ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ and her critique is useful to discuss Bij1’s attempt to empower the dominated (Spivak, 1994). Spivak turns to Karl Marx to divide the word representation up into two main connotations, representing as in ‘speaking-for’ and representing as in ‘re-presentation’

(Idem, p. 70). For example, a politician is speaking for a group, while a painter is re-presenting a flower.

Spivak’s critique involves the way in which speaking-for is a position of power, and how this position of power gets obscured through the connotation of re-presentation. To bring this theory back into practice, Bij1 proposes to empower the dominated through enhanced democratic control. However, the dominated in this imaginary are taken to be re-presenting themselves instead of speaking-for their group. For

example, allowing sex workers a say in sex industry policy imagines sex workers to be a unified group re-presenting all sex workers. In this imaginary a power relation is obscured where the power gained by specific sex workers who get to now voice their opinions on policy and ‘speak for’ the whole group, is taken to re-present the whole group. Bij1’s antiracism invokes an imaginary where people at the bottom of hierarchies should have more power to define the hierarchies within which they live. However, this imaginary obscures the stratified heterogeneity within the people at the bottom of hierarchies.

5.1.3 Internationally Stratified Climate Crisis

International climate justice is an important aspect of how Bij1 articulates antiracism in their programme.

Through this aspect, Bij1 emphasises how the climate crisis has unequally affected and will unequally affect disadvantaged communities generally. As scholar Françoise Vergès points out, understanding the

41 climate crisis is impossible outside of the systemic inequalities produced by racial capital (Vergès, 2017, p.

74). In Bij1’s policy proposals, an aspect of antiracism emerges as international climate justice and through this aspect Bij1 articulates the climate crisis as connected to the systemic inequalities produced by racial capital. This aspect nicely embodies the way in which Bij1 challenges the dominant understanding of racism as nothing more than the overt hatred of certain racial groups by emphasising an understanding of racism as related to systemic inequalities. Challenging this dominant understanding of racism is important because, as Wekker and Essed both show in ‘White Innocence’ and ‘Dutch Racism’, this understanding allows other forms of racism to go unnoticed (Wekker, 2016; Essed, 2014). Bij1 also challenges an understanding of the climate crisis as disconnected from racism. Vergès points out how the climate crisis is generally understood as having been caused by humans and how this understanding of the climate crisis obfuscates how capital and racism are the cause instead of a generic category of ‘human’ (Idem, p. 75-76).

Through their policy proposals Bij1 challenges this generic category of ‘humans’ being the cause and implicitly connects racism and capital to the climate crisis, by running on an antiracist platform and proposing to mitigate the climate crisis through reformations of big capital. Bij1’s climate crisis policies challenge the racist status quo of seeing racism and the climate crisis as disconnected from capital.

However, in this aspect of Bij1’s antiracism they also reproduce the racist status quo, which I will explain in the following paragraph.

Bij1 articulates international climate justice as an important aspect of their antiracism and therefore as related to the ways in which capital and racism have stratified society. Thinking with scholar Donna Haraway’s critique of the Capitalocene, I will highlight how this aspect of Bij1’s antiracism

reproduces a racist status quo. Haraway critiques ways of thinking about the climate crisis that can broadly be summarized as ‘humans are responsible for the climate crisis’ or ‘capital is responsible for the climate crisis’ (Haraway, 2016). She names eight critiques of these discourses, but I will focus on one of these criticisms to show how Bij1 reproduces the racist status quo. According to Haraway, both these stories regarding the climate crisis centre the human as the only important actor, while the other beings are reduced to reactors in these discourses. Haraway critiques how these stories elevate humans and human society above the world we inhabit, playing into a nature/culture divide (Idem, p. 55)15. Bij1’s international climate justice as focused on the racial and capital stratification of society elevates human society as the most important actors and plays into the nature/culture divide, which according to Gloria Wekker remains a prominent aspect of racist discourse in the Netherlands. Wekker observes that the Dutch cultural archive depicts black people16 as closer to nature and by upholding the nature/culture divide these ways of thinking remain unchallenged and are reproduced (Wekker, 2016, p. 39). I feel it is important to reiterate here that a challenge to the status quo is always a reproduction of the status quo as well, because the status quo gets to dictate how and on what grounds we perform our challenges to the status quo, and I

15 Haraway also critiques the gendered dynamics of such discourses, namely that these discourses specifically elevate

‘Man’ as the prime actor to which others have to react.

16 I have used Wekker’s category of ‘black people’ here.

42 emphasize that this should not discourage us from trying to challenge the status quo. For example,

Haraway points out how she often uses the term ‘Capitalocene’ herself due to its usefulness in challenging the status quo and she finds that it is part of the response-ability she promotes in her work to deal with tensions like these (Haraway, 2016, p. 47).

5.1.4 Nationally Bounded Economic Equality

Another aspect of how Bij1 articulates antiracism through policy proposals is their emphasis on economic equality. Through this aspect of their policy proposals Bij1 is striving towards economic equality in a country skewed by unequal distribution of capital. As I point out in my theoretical framework, capital and race are intricately connected through power relations and one cannot be understood without the other in the Netherlands. A bid for economic equality is implicitly a bid for racial equality, because challenging the status quo of how capital is distributed in the Netherlands is also a challenge to how racism has stratified the Netherlands, especially when race is taken in accordance with Hall’s sliding signifier (Hall, 2017). By taking economic equality as an aspect of their antiracism, Bij1 once again challenges the disassociation taking place within the dominant Dutch understanding of racism as solely pertaining to the overt hatred of certain people. A mainstay of the dominant Dutch understanding of racism is not only the narrow

definition of racism, but also the avoidance of using racism as an explanation of certain phenomena in the Netherlands. Instead, as scholar Ellie Vasta points out in her chapter of the book ‘Dutch Racism’, Dutch academics would much rather reach for explanations such as social class to explain stratification (Vasta, 2014, p. 392). Vasta observes that Dutch social scientists generally prefer the term ‘discrimination’ or

‘institutional discrimination’, but Vasta critiques that these general terms hinder us in identifying the specific types and forms of discrimination, therefore contributing to the racist status quo (Ibid). By connecting discourses on antiracism to discourses of economic equality Bij1 is challenging the racist status quo of seeing race as irrelevant to economic equality within the Netherlands. However, as I view Bij1’s policy proposals through a perspective that emphasises the tensions within antiracism, I think this economic aspect of Bij1’s antiracism also reproduces the racist status quo.

Bij1’s economic equality as antiracist, and subsequently my own thesis, reproduce a discourse where the nation is taken-for-granted as an uncontested entity. I will highlight two critiques which show how Bij1 here is reproducing a nationalistic discourse. The first is inspired by scholar Gayatri Gopinath and relates to the marginalisation as a result of using the nation as a unit of analysis, while the second relates to the national boundaries within which Bij1 needs to operate to push for economic equality and the implicit acceptance of supranational economic inequality. Gayatri Gopinath refers in her book ‘Unruly Visions’ to the regional identities emergent in queer postcolonial communities as a way to refrain from invoking a nationally bounded imaginary (Gopinath, 2018). She refrains from using the dominant national imaginary because it marginalises identities which do not conform to the national image and are therefore deemed valueless within a framework of global capital (Idem, p. 5). Gopinath’s critique can be applied to

43 Bij1’s push for economic equality within the Netherlands in how Bij1 engages with who is imagined as a Dutch citizen and conversely who is not. A critical question would then be: Who is enough of a Dutch citizen to deserve said economic equality? Within a country where a common question asked to those of a different skin colour remains ‘no, where are you really from?’, I question how inclusive the imaginary on citizenship upheld by the status quo is and therefore whether economic equality or equity would include all. By enforcing a national boundary without employing specific inclusionary tactics or reflection on the openness of this category, Bij1 is reinforcing our lacking imaginaries on who is a Dutch citizen and who is not.

The second way in which Bij1’s bid for economic equality reproduces the racist status quo relates to the national context within which Bij1 is vying for economic equality. Bij1 is employing a discourse of economic equality for those who live in the Netherlands, but implicitly they are therefore accepting the economic inequality existent between countries. Bij1 reinforces the racist status quo by taking the nation as the unit which requires improvement, which necessarily leaves global inequality unchallenged. As I have said in the second chapter, Bij1 explicitly refers to the intersectional qualities of their electoral program and Bij1 does have policy proposals which indicate an attempt to strive towards supranational equality as well. However, I still think it is relevant to mention this critique because I see this reinforcement of the status quo as inherent to all Dutch political parties. All parties choose to work within a system whose goal it is to serve Dutch people, and, in an unequal world, this goal is itself a reinforcement of the racist status quo. This tension is unavoidable for Dutch political parties. To refer to the title of a famous book by scholar Audre Lorde: ‘The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house’. (Lorde, 2018).

However, as I have been emphasizing throughout my thesis, within a racist status quo a different toolkit does not exist, and it is up to us to find the tools that do ‘do’ some dismantling.

5.1.5 Societal Transgressions

In the previous chapter I tried to show how Bij1 proposes to deal with transgressions. There were two sides to Bij1’s policy proposals on transgressions. First, they aim to narrow the definition of transgressions and second, they propose to alter how transgressions are viewed and subsequently punished. Bij1 opts for a discourse on transgression as a societal failure instead of an individual failure, by for example preferring community service sentencing over prison sentencing. Bij1 here challenges the racist status quo in its tendency to individualize transgression, where the ability to conform to the status quo is attributed to individual failure or success and where more complex causes to this behaviour, specifically racism, are left unexplored. As Essed points out, the Dutch history and pervasiveness of racism is generally denied as an explanatory factor, and often these aspects must make way for stories of individual failure or ‘unique’

situational factors (Essed, 2014, p. 12-13). For example, Mark Rutte, currently under resignation as the Dutch prime minister, recently said as a response to several corona riots that he ‘will not be looking for sociological causes’ (NOS, 2021, January 26). Rutte here implies that these incidents where solely due to

44 individual choice, and therefore that systemic factors played no role. In addition to that, the discourse of denial allows Dutch people to refrain from taking responsibility for their involvement in the creation and perpetuation of racism. For example, incidents of overt hatred of certain racial groups are brushed off as individual racist actions and this allows Dutch people to distance themselves from these individuals and more subtle institutional forms of racism. I suggest that a perspective on transgressions as a societal failure challenges the discourse which views racism as unique separate incidents that can be attributed to

individual failure, and it also challenges the lack of responsibility Dutch people feel for their role in the reproduction of the racist status quo. As is the crux of my thesis, I will discuss in the following paragraph how Bij1 also reproduces the status quo in this aspect.

Bij1’s perspective on transgressions as a societal responsibility entailed an emphasis on community service sentencing over prison sentencing, and in this regard, I think Bij1 reproduces the status quo. I use scholar Miranda Boone’s evaluation of the Dutch community service system in relation to a trend in American prison sentencing, emphasized in the documentary ‘13th’, to show how Bij1’s focus on community service sentencing might reproduce the racist status quo. This critique is practical in nature but speaks to a discourse of ‘solving’ racism and denial of its recurrent character. Boone observed that Dutch laws requires labour sentences to guarantee the voluntary character of the sentence’s execution in two ways (Boone, 2010, p. 24). They require the sentenced to have a choice between a labour and non-labour sentence, and they require the sentenced to give explicit consent (Ibid). However, from 2001 onwards the requirements speaking to the voluntary character of community service sentences were abolished (Idem, p. 25). Additionally, community service sentencing laws used to explicitly mention the

‘benefit of the community’, but the 2001 reforms omitted this phrasing, which resulted in attracting for-profit projects to the un(der)paid labourers (Idem, p. 31). I think these are symptoms of what the documentary ‘13th’ movingly names ‘modern slavery’, where American prisoners are increasingly

sentenced to un(der)paid labour tasks (13th, 2016). The documentary tries to warn its viewers of how the racist status quo can alter alongside society’s attitudes as to what seems fair. The prisoners’ transgressions are used to justify their sentence, which makes it harder to criticize this system due to its perceived fairness. In Sara Ahmed’s words, Bij1’s turn to societal responsibility reproduces the racist status quo in how it provides a solution to a problem, which can be seen as merely the problem in a new form (Ahmed, 2012, p. 143).

In document 1.2 General Outline (pagina 37-44)