Against prejudice

‘I always thought of the Netherlands as a colour-blind country,’ Danijel says. ‘So I was surprised to learn the Dutch had problems with segregation and with white schools and black schools and all that.’ The twenty-six year old history teacher from Bosnia and Herzegovina relaxes in his chair in one of the lecture rooms of the Anne Frank House. He just attended a talk on the Dutch slave trade by Alex van Stripriaan, Professor of Caribbean History at Erasmus University Rotterdam.

‘When I was studying for my final exams at high school,’ the sixty-one year old professor says, ‘only one sentence in our history books was dedicated to the Dutch involvement in the Atlantic slave trade: “Slavery was abolished around 1860 in the Dutch West Indies and the Dutch East Indies.”’ ‘Full stop,’ he emphasizes. In Dutch history books, slavery was an American thing. Thirty-five students giggle nervously. They are at the Anne Frank House as participants of a yearly summer school organised by Humanity in Action, a non-profit organisation that promotes respect and a better understanding of diversity and human rights.

The participants, mostly American and Dutch students (and two from Bosnia) listen to another speaker. In the four-week programme, they will listen to rabbis, documentary filmmakers, Holocaust-survivors, activists and transgenders talk their way through all the prejudice they still see in society.   
The laughter is nervous. The speakers try to highlight prejudice where it is less expected: the prejudices we all hold ourselves, perhaps without even knowing it. ‘Racism is considered as so ‘not Dutch’ that many people automatically think it’s not a problem. But the figures show something different,’ Van Stripriaan says. He points out that the unemployment rates among Dutch citizens from Caribbean or Suriname descent are still much higher than the Dutch average.