{"id":4619,"date":"2010-09-19T14:57:53","date_gmt":"2010-09-19T14:57:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/test.transversalmedia.eu\/not-a-token-of-appreciation\/"},"modified":"2010-09-19T14:57:53","modified_gmt":"2010-09-19T14:57:53","slug":"not-a-token-of-appreciation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/theresearchpapers.org\/archive\/not-a-token-of-appreciation\/","title":{"rendered":"Not a token of appreciation"},"content":{"rendered":"

On Friday I posted a brief note<\/a> about my emotional reaction over the Jezebel article on Lila Downs and her status as a Latina icon<\/a>. My reaction then didn’t move further than one of outrage and “grumble\/ rage; who authorized the republishing of this nonsense?\/ How is this editorial fail allowed on a mainstream site?<\/em>”. I didn’t quite elaborate on why I was so upset but the issue has been bugging me ever since and I have managed to more or less put a few (semi) coherent thoughts together.<\/p>\n

I live in The Netherlands, where racial matters and subsequent discussions are framed very differently from those in North America. I suspect that due to the fact that The Netherlands has lacked an equivalent to the Civil Rights Movement, race issues are still stalled in a colonial phase where oppressive language and the relevant discourse have never been properly disarmed (and hardly analyzed at all outside academic circles). To give a bit of background, the Dutch state has a classification system for those of us who live here. This classification is not necessarily framed on ethnicity but on place of birth (both for the classified subject and her parents). The Dutch state uses a word appropriated from biology, \u201callochtoon<\/em><\/a>\u201d to refer to us. This term originally denotes any organism which is non native to a given ecosystem. They have, in turn, created a scale of \u201cforeignness<\/em>\u201d in which a Native Dutch (known as \u201cautochtoon<\/em>\u201d in Dutch state parlance) is at the top of the food chain, followed by \u201cWestern foreigners\u201d (i.e. Americans and other Caucasian Europeans) and then we lowly \u201cnon-Western foreigners\u201d (i.e. everyone who comes from a country classified as non Western or underdeveloped). This foreignness is determined not only by the place where one was born but also by the place where one’s parents come from. So, someone could be born in The Netherlands, but still be classified as a non Western foreigner because one of her parents hails from such place. Because I am South American, I am one such “Non Western Foreigner”. My status as an ethnic foreigner is also made evident by the way I look (I am consistently addressed in Arabic or Turkish because of my completion).<\/p>\n

The laws of the country are such that I am obliged to disclose my “Non Western foreigner” status in a multitude of ways: if I am to apply for a job, I am obliged to tell; if I am to take a language course, I am obliged to tell; my healthcare provider demands to know this and I am obliged to tell (supposedly for statistical purposes); education plans and programs are put in place specifically for people like me (and my children if I had any).<\/p>\n

Media representations of people like me (i.e a non Western foreigner) are scarce, if any. In general, they fall under one of these categories:<\/p>\n