My piece about racism, police brutality and what I like to call “Black Face season” in The Netherlands got many comments from several irate Dutch people (it also earned me many racist and misogynist epithets, but that’s another story). Many of these Black Face apologists claimed that the Black Pete/ Zwarte Piet tradition is not meant to mock Black people and that it is in no way a racist stereotype. They claim it is all in good fun.

Pep Rosenfeld, the artistic director of comedy group Boom Chicago, just posted on his Twitter the photo above, taken at his kids’ school today. That Rosenfeld, a Dutch, White guy even goes as far as calling it “Institutionalized Racism season” should be quite telling for the Black face apologists that want to frame this discussion as if it was just “political correctness gone wild” from a small and insignificant number of Black only activists. The photo above, taken at a Dutch school paints a different picture than that of “innocent fun”. There is nothing “funny” in this cross eyed, racist mockery, instead, children attending this school will, for the next few weeks, be exposed to these depictions of Blackness.

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