I Saw People In Blackface At The Grocery Store. When I Found Out Why, I Was Even More Disturbed.
In 2004, I followed my boyfriend Frank from North Carolina, where we’d met, to the Netherlands, where he was born and raised. One evening that November, I turned a corner in our local grocery store and encountered two people wearing what I now know were Pete costumes — floppy velvet hats atop curly black wigs and ... blackface.
I was stunned, but they just smiled, waved and went on their way.
I remember thinking: “Go out like that in downtown Durham and you’ll get shot! How can this be real?”
Back in our attic apartment, I spluttered my story of shock and indignation to Frank. Instead of sympathetic anger, though, I got a lesson in Dutch culture.
Zwarte Piet, or Black Pete, costumes weren’t blackface, he explained. The darkened faces were supposed to represent chimney soot from delivering holiday packages to children. Who was I, anyway, to judge another culture?
The people I saw in the store were in full minstrel-style blackface greasepaint that covered all visible skin from their hairlines to the collars of their frilly jackets. Later, I would learn that another variation of Petes were the Roetveeg Pieten, whose skin is visible under a dusting of black powder. However, no matter what type of Pete they were, they all wore curly wigs with earrings and had bright red lips.
If casual blackface was acceptable in my new homeland, I wondered what might happen to me, a biracial woman living in a country I’d always thought was synonymous with liberal values, like supporting same-sex marriage and not prosecuting recreational drug use.
I needed Frank to recognize the racism inherent in blackface of any kind, regardless of intent. His response? “It wasn’t racist until you got here.”
As far as Frank was concerned, my racist labeling was more problematic than his cultural tradition.
He wasn’t alone. Most Dutch people at that time found absolutely nothing offensive about the Petes. I was astounded.
Despite our differences, Frank and I were in love and built a life together in the Netherlands. I finished a master’s degree in Amsterdam, started teaching at a Dutch business school and biked everywhere I went. But every November I raged while the country celebrated.
The celebration of Sinterklaas, the Dutch version of St. Nicholas, begins in November, when he is said to travel to the Netherlands from Spain. Each year a different city has the honor of welcoming the “real” Sinterklaas to the country, along with his helpers, the Petes, who are similar to Santa’s elves. Most cities have a parade at the same time, where other “help” Sinterklaases walk a route with local Petes and throw candy. Over the next three weeks, Sinterklaas and the Petes show up in stores and schools. At night, they also ride over the rooftops of homes and leave little gifts in shoes that children have put out by their fireplaces. Then on Dec. 5 — St. Nicholas Day Eve, or Pakjesavond, which is considered the major gift-giving day of the holiday season — the biggest presents are exchanged. On Dec. 6, St. Nicholas Day, Sinterklaas and his Petes return to Spain. I couldn’t have been happier to see them go.
As the years went by, I found allies while teaching an intercultural awareness class with topics like culture shock and cultural relativism. St. Nicholas and his Petes became a fruitful local case study. My international business students’ negative responses assured me I wasn’t alone in taking offense. Many of them couldn’t believe what they were seeing either. But my conversations with Frank, even after we bought a house, got married and became parents, didn’t change.
Meanwhile, debates about the Petes that had flickered in the 1970s and 1980s reignited. In 2011, activists wore T-shirts with the phrase “Zwarte Piet is racisme” — or “Black Pete is racism” — to encourage conversations about the tradition. When that didn’t inspire reflection, they created Kick Out Zwarte Piet, an organization that coordinated protests with signs reading “Zwarte Piet kan niet,” an expression roughly translating to “Black Pete is not allowable.”
In 2013, then-Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte took the position that “Black Pete is black, and we can’t change that.” Traditionalists were confident that Black Petes could do no harm because they meant no harm. Others disagreed. In one of his Sunday night monologues, comedian Arjen Lubach brilliantly and thoroughly deconstructed a series of arguments in defense of Black Pete. As tension continued to escalate, 34 Black Pete defenders faced criminal charges after blocking a highway near Dokkum in 2017, as they tried to stop people from joining a protest against the character.
While all this was going on, I adopted my Taiwanese mother’s smile-and-nod tactics to avoid offending locals. However, I was living a lie — pretending to enjoy St. Nicholas along with the Dutch, while secretly despising it.
In 2016, my son began attending a Waldorf school. Most of the parents seemed progressive, and my hopes for a racism-lite St. Nicholas celebration were high.
That November, when St. Nicholas and the Petes boarded their steamboat in Spain and made their way to the Netherlands, we watched the Dutch public broadcaster’s nightly report on the journey, called “Sinterklaasjournaal,” or the “St. Nicholas News.” Children across the nation tuned in to watch the 10-minute “Sesame Street” inspired newscast every night, as presenter Dieuwertje Blok talked to correspondents all over the Netherlands about the weather conditions for St. Nicholas’ journey and how kids were preparing for his arrival. Episodes also included skits from the steamboat featuring the saint and his blackfaced helpers.
The Petes differentiated themselves by adding their job titles in front of their names, and every year a few different Petes were given the spotlight. Head Pete was in charge, House Pete was responsible for lodgings and keeping things clean, and there was usually a Package Pete responsible for the gifts. Other Petes over the years have included Silly Pete, Reserve Pete, Forgetful Pete, Chocolate Pete and Rhyming Pete. While St. Nicholas was wise and patient, the Petes were chaotic and provided comic relief.
My kids loved the “St. Nicholas News” and retold stories they saw about the Petes, whose antics one year included unwrapping chocolate letters and then losing their corresponding name tags, thereby creating chocolate chaos. They giggled watching House Pete’s overacted frustration with messes, and repeated Silly Pete jokes for weeks. Where I saw problematic politics, they saw fun-loving helpers. Still, at home, I insisted we call the Black Petes just “Pete” in both English and Dutch.
On the morning of Dec. 5, singing kids and their parents packed the schoolyard and waited for St. Nicholas. One dad played accordion. My son and his buddies swayed back and forth, arms thrown over each other’s shoulders. My daughter held my hand and bounced with excitement. Then a bearded Sinterklaas in his red robes and white gloves passed through the schoolyard gates, waving at the children. Accompanying him were two Petes — both in black soot faces. It was better than blackface, but my stomach still fell. However, my children’s eyes were bright with excitement.
The next year, we went downtown to watch the parade celebrating St. Nicholas’ arrival. The kids wore homemade velvet hats and their own gorgeous unpainted faces. Soon the first Petes appeared, leading St. Nicholas on his white horse. Then dozens more appeared. They chatted, shook hands and tossed peppernut cookies and candy to costumed kids in the crowd.
I looked up and saw a Pete descending headfirst from a metal pedestrian bridge above the parade. I pointed him out and then caught myself. I was excited. There was a delightful antiestablishment daring to what he was doing. The adult pretending to be Black Pete wasn’t worried about rules or health and safety. He was a guy with climbing gear, having a good time and making kids laugh.
The 10 years I lived in the Netherlands had been tainted by racial microaggressions — and sometimes macroaggressions. A parent with a child in my son’s class asked me if we ate with chopsticks on the weekends. An older man told me I couldn’t be American because I was 'colored.'
But I remained conflicted, and the optics of Pete’s blackface weren’t my only concern. The 10 years I lived in the Netherlands had been tainted by racial microaggressions — and sometimes macroaggressions. A parent with a child in my son’s class asked me if we ate with chopsticks on the weekends. An older man told me I couldn’t be American because I was “colored.” That incident surprised me so much that I remember asking him to repeat the word “gekleurd” in Dutch until he gave up on me and switched to English. Countless neighbors, colleagues and strangers asked where I was “really” from because my nationality didn’t explain my skin tone. The othering was relentless.
I wasn’t the only one feeling like our household was a little off. Teachers told my son that “eraser” wasn’t the right word to use because British English used “rubber.” After playing at a friend’s house after school, my daughter once told me that at her friends’ homes they had cookies after school, like “normal people.” We were not a normal household, and our nonconformity was a problem in a country where parents routinely say “doe normaal,” or “be normal,” when telling kids to behave.
The mother in me wanted my kids to have the joy of chocolate and fruit and little gifts in their shoes every year. I wanted them to feel included in Dutch, American and Taiwanese culture. I never wanted them to not feel Dutch enough, the same way I so often felt — or was told — I was not American or Taiwanese enough. I learned to smile and nod to get by, but I wanted my children to embrace their identities, and to reject any suggestion that they should compromise complexities for someone else’s comfort.
I also began to change how I reacted. Once, instead of pretending I didn’t understand Dutch, I spoke up when a mom at our dance studio told her daughter that my son and I “talked funny” and claimed that American English was not “real English.” My mother taught me to simply ingest that kind of nastiness when I was a kid and move on, believing that rejecting it would be worse. She was wrong. Insults and othering didn’t nourish me; they corroded my sense of self. I taught her grandchildren that they deserve respect. Only now do I realize I was teaching myself, too.
We developed our own family traditions around St. Nicholas. We made peppernut cookies at home, and Pete was always “just Pete.” We celebrated holidays in our own way, and my kids learned that every household celebrates differently, just like they each have unique foods, languages and behavior expectations. We continued to talk about why blackface wasn’t OK, and my kids were able to enjoy St. Nicholas while understanding that Black Pete was problematic.
Eventually Frank abandoned the “it wasn’t racist until you got here” argument. Witnessing my experiences and what our kids went through helped him understand more about what racism is, how it can present itself and who gets to decide. He also came to see that just because something has been a tradition doesn’t mean it can’t be wrong — or change, which is exactly what happened.
The “St. Nicholas News” started featuring Petes of different colors — and today, blackface Petes are no longer shown on the newscast. Rutte, the prime minister, even changed his thinking about Black Pete. By 2020, companies like Amazon, Google and Facebook had banned depictions of the blackfaced helpers.
Today, we’re a Dutch-American-Taiwanese family living in Canada. We still watch the “St. Nicholas News.” This year, we bought chocolate letters when they turned up at a local store and brought chocolate-covered peppernut cookies back from the Netherlands. We opened all the treats and had an air fryer-fueled snack and game night on Dec. 5.
When I think back to that first encounter with the Black Petes in the grocery store and look at how far the Netherlands has come, it gives me hope. My family has come a long way, too — my husband has learned about being a good ally and I found my voice.
I hated the annual offense of a holiday that prominently featured blackface, but, in some ways, it prepared me to cope with the political polarization we’re living with today. It helped me understand the importance of listening to the people I disagree with — and sometimes loving them as well. I learned that I could live alongside people who saw the world through a very different lens and pass on values that matter to me to my children, while refusing to accept what I know to be wrong, no matter how many millions of people might say otherwise. That’s a valuable lesson for any time of the year.
Christine Tsai Taylor writes essays and short fiction based on her experience as a biracial American abroad. For 17 years she lived in the Netherlands, where she completed an M.A. in cultural analysis at the University of Amsterdam. Christine has a Dutch passport to match her Dutch husband and two kids, and they now live on Treaty 6 territory in Alberta, Canada. Her Substack newsletter is Wonderings.
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