A court just confirmed: To be Dutch is to be white
Hague District Court recently ruled that ethnicity can be used to single out passengers for checks at Dutch airports.
29 Sep 2021
“Please come with me, sir.”
That is what Mpanzu Bamenga, a city councillor and academic from Eindhoven, Netherlands, heard soon after arriving at the airport of his hometown following a short work visit to Italy in 2018.
He quickly realised that he had been selected for an extra security check because he is a Black man. After all, he was a Dutch national arriving at a Dutch airport, holding a Dutch passport. It was clear that there was no obvious reason for him to be singled out like this – other than the colour of his skin.
This was not Bamenga’s first experience of racial profiling in the Netherlands – this is, after all, not a rare experience for Dutch nationals from minority backgrounds. ...
When faced with such discrimination, we all want to scream: “Is this because of the colour of my skin, is this because you think I do not look Dutch enough?” but we don’t usually say anything out loud, because we do not want to agitate the customs officer and be held longer than necessary. We go along with it and swallow the pain.
But after his experience in 2018, Bamenga decided to do something about it. He first lodged an official complaint. And later, with the backing of rights groups like Amnesty International, RADAR, Controle Alt Delete and PIPL-NJCM, he brought a case against the Dutch government to end racial profiling...
tried to legitimise its officer’s decision to single out Bamenga for special questioning by claiming that he had “matched a risk profile” because he walked quickly, was travelling on his own, was well dressed, and
he looked “not Dutch”...
...On September 22, The Hague District Court finally reached a verdict on Bamenga’s case. “Ethnicity does not have to be an objective indication of nationality, but it could be,” the judge ruled. Ethnicity cannot be the only criteria for singling out passengers for extra checks, the court said, but it could certainly be one criterion among others.
With this ruling, the court has lumped together skin colour and nationality – it cemented the idea that to be Dutch is to be white. Of course, this was something racialised Dutch people already knew, but the court ruling made it official. ..
The ruling is the legal, and seemingly sophisticated, stand-in for its uncritical and banal version: “Well, ‘we’ are white, and ‘they’ are Black, is it not so?”
As a result of migration and colonialism, thousands of people from different corners of the world – some voluntarily, some not – ended up in the Netherlands. And their presence in the country cracked the notion of “Dutchness as whiteness”. The post-colonial migration from the Dutch East Indies and the Moluccas, and later Suriname and the Dutch Antilles, the labour migration from Turkey and Morocco, and the more recent arrival of refugees from Bosnia, Somalia, Iraq, Iran, Congo and so on, shook up the whole idea that being Dutch equals being white. Or so you would think.
How Black does one have to be to be regularly pulled out of queues in Dutch airports? How white is white enough to not be routinely selected for “random” questioning? These questions are indeed uncomfortable and hard to answer. But what then, for goodness sake, does “Dutch-looking” mean?
The court’s assumption that racism or discrimination can only occur if the security forces choose an individual for additional questioning solely or predominantly based on their racial or ethnic characteristics is also problematic for multiple reasons. The ruling gives the impression that there is no problem with racial profiling as long as ethnicity is used “in combination with” other criteria...
In the Bamenga case, the judge seemingly gave precedence to the alleged effectiveness of the stops above principles of non-discrimination. This was a major failure, as it is the responsibility of the courts to keep the excesses of security forces in check, overturn their problematic decisions and put an end to discriminatory practices.
As far as I am concerned, we should rid the world of all forms of racialised thinking – including the uncritical embrace of it among progressives. But let’s first focus on the ingrained racialised thinking in our institutions. We cannot build a post-racial world while our security forces, leading institutions, and courts continue to casually lump together race, ethnicity and nationality.
Bamenga was in Italy to give a lecture on the meaning of liberty. Perhaps Dutch courts and other institutions should spare a few hours to listen to what he has to say, to make sure that meaning is not lost in his own country.