Column Leo Lucassen: Day against Racism and Discrimination

"Two weeks ago I attended an iftar in the Tolhuistuin in Amsterdam to give a short lecture about our book Migration as the DNA of Amsterdam, in which my brother Jan and I show how the population composition of this city has constantly changed over the past five centuries. But also that all these newcomers become the new 'real' Amsterdammers after a few generations. Afterwards, one of the questioners told about a member of parliament who recently claimed that many migrants, especially Turks and Moroccans, had ultimately cost the Dutch treasury more than they had earned. Now that he, the son of such a guest worker, was about to become a father himself, he wondered if that was actually true and how he should prepare his child for this unflattering image of her ancestors. And what did I actually think of that statement?

I replied that I always get a little tired of this kind of one-sided bookkeeping and that if you were to apply such a simplistic principle to the entire population, quite a few people would end up on the wrong side of the line, including my mother who – after working in hospitals in Rotterdam and Eindhoven during the war – raised 9 children as a housewife.

And moreover, no consideration is given to the fact that these men (and women too) often worked themselves to the bone doing the most difficult, dangerous and unattractive work that almost no one in the Netherlands was willing to do at the time. And I could also mention the efforts of Moroccan miners, thanks to whose efforts the Limburg coal mines were able to stay open longer in the 1960s, allowing many Dutch miners to reach their legal retirement age. And so they could collect their well-earned full pension. And I haven't even mentioned the contributions that the children of migrant workers or refugees make to society, many of whom are doing increasingly well in school and the labor market, despite the discrimination that is proven time and again.

But anyway, with these kinds of objections you are already on a slippery slope, because with such a defensive response you unwittingly accept the idea that the value of people can be determined on the basis of a financial cost-benefit analysis.

If you think about it for a moment, you will soon come to the conclusion that this is about something completely different. Because the member of parliament is of course only interested in calculations that can be used to stigmatize certain population groups (not coincidentally with their roots in Islamic countries). And all this under the guise of an apparently objective principle of figures.

This stigma therefore has a strong whiff of racism to it. Because the answer to the question of whether you can be considered a fully-fledged member of society apparently does not depend on who you are, what you do or how you behave, but is primarily determined by your origin. That is why radical right-wing parties have been arguing for some time that the CBS should also make the third generation of immigrants statistically visible, making the migration background, especially of certain groups, a kind of hereditary disease.

As a migration historian, I could of course object by saying that almost all Dutch people have newcomers somewhere in their family tree, but of course that is not what is meant here. The aim is to make Muslims (or people who are labeled as such based on their surname) in general and asylum seekers in particular suspicious and to portray them as unwanted intruders. Intruders who supposedly have (and will always have) a fundamentally different culture than “the” Dutch.

Lumping together such a wide range of Dutch people, in terms of education, origin and political orientation, automatically results in the misbehavior or ideas of a few individuals or a small minority constantly being blamed on the entire group. Something that never happens to white Dutch people who cross the line in a similar way or who, in the eyes of some, do not perform well enough - in whatever area - as if they had been awarded the diploma 'Western Values' at birth, regardless of who they are.

That this is not a harmless pastime is evident from the systematic discrimination of Dutch people with a different name or skin color in the housing and labor markets, but also in everyday interactions. A phenomenon to which Jewish Dutch people in the Netherlands (and other countries) have been exposed for centuries, with all the exclusionary consequences and minority formation that entails. This history also teaches us that the power of stigmatization involuntarily leads people (including you and me) to develop antennae to recognize outsiders by their names, hair color, clothing or accent. Even if you don't believe in that stigma at all.

That is why the consequences of stigmatization affect not only those who are seen as different, but also society as a whole. After all, it does not make things any more pleasant. It influences who we associate with, who we marry and who we trust. In addition, it is devastating for the many talents of new – and now no longer so new – Dutch people, who cannot reach their full potential. Finally, this groupthink makes us blind to the fact that undesirable behavior (whether it involves crime, misogyny or homophobia) is not determined by someone's origin or religion, but occurs among all layers of the population. And such tunnel vision obviously does not help if you want to understand which factors really determine that behavior.

And this brings me back to the iftar in the Tolhuistuin. It is a bad sign that the questioner is worried about what he will have to tell his daughter, who will be born soon, when she is older. Just because her name could be a reason to treat her as a second-class citizen, or worse. Let us therefore remain alert to and continue to resist groupthink that leads to segregation and exclusion. Primarily on the basis of moral values, but also out of enlightened self-interest."

Leo Lucassen