Blacked up

THE Dutch festival of Sinterklaas on December 5th, the country’s most important children’s holiday, is turning into an annual slugfest of racial politics. The problem is the figure of Zwarte Piet, an impish clown with a black face who accompanies the bearded St Nicholas (“Sinterklaas”) on his rounds, distributing presents and biscuits. The character is derived from 17th-century paintings of Moorish slaves, and many Dutch with African ancestry find it offensive. Most white Dutch fail to see the problem, and react angrily to accusations that their tradition is racist. The conflict plays out in the media, the schools, the courts and at Sinterklaas parades around the country. And it has fed into culture wars between Dutch liberals and anti-immigration populists such as Geert Wilders.

Opponents of the tradition thought they had won a victory earlier this year, when a court ordered Amsterdam to bar Zwarte Piets from its Sinterklaas parade. But a higher court reversed that decision last month. Amsterdam, with its leftist politics and large immigrant population, has taken a conciliatory approach, ordering some Piets merely to smear their faces to suggest they have climbed down a chimney. (Many white Dutch use this just-so story to excuse the character’s skin colour, though it fails to explain his curly hair and thick, bright-red lips.) Other liberal Dutch are switching to multicoloured “rainbow Piets”. But in most Dutch towns, Zwarte Piet remains thoroughly blacked-up. At a Sinterklaas parade in the town of Gouda, protests by anti-Zwarte Piet activists led to 90 arrests.