White Innocence in the Dutch Academy Professor Gloria

White Innocence in the Dutch Academy Professor Gloria Wekker January 21, 2016, Wageningen University

Definition of “race” Race: a harmful fiction – yet very real in its consequences. “A socially constructed rather than inherently meaningful category, one linked to relations of power and processes of struggle, and one whose meaning changes over time. Race, like gender, is “real” in the sense that it has real, though changing, effects in the world and real, tangible, and complex impact on individuals’ sense of self and life chances” (Frankenberg, 1993: 11).

Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison • “I have never lived, nor have any of us, in a world in which race did not matter. Such a world, free of racial hierarchy, is usually imagined or described as dreamscape. Edenesque, utopian, so remote are the possibilities of its achievement. (. . ). How to be both free and situated: how to convert a racist house into a race-specific yet nonracist home. How to enunciate race while depriving it of its lethal cling? ” (Morrison 1998: 3, 5).

Structure of the presentation 1. A closer look at “White Innocence” in the Netherlands. 2. “White Innocence” in the Dutch academy. 3. Towards a decolonial university.

Edward Said’s cultural archive • The cultural archive is a “particular knowledge and structures of attitude and reference… [and, ] in Raymond Williams’ seminal phrase, “structures of feeling. ”… There was virtual unanimity that subject races should be ruled, that there are subject races, that one race deserves and has consistently earned the right to be considered the race whose main mission is to expand beyond its own domain. ” – Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism, 1993, pp. 52 -53.

White Innocence, Paradoxes of Colonialism and Race, Duke U Press 2016 Image: Ruud van Empel

1. White Innocence • “White Innocence” plays a vital part in the making of the self and the organization of academic knowledge production. • Central question: how is it possible for a nation, that has been a formidable imperial power for close to 400 years, to imagine that this history will not have left traces in culture, language, in knowledge production and its conception of the Self and the Other?

3 prominent paradoxes in dominant Dutch Self-Representation • A juxtaposition between the Dutch imperial presence in the world, since the 16 th century, and its almost total absence in the Dutch educational curriculum. • The memory of the Holocaust as the epitome and model of racist transgression in Europe erases the crimes that were perpetrated against the colonized for four centuries. • One in every six Dutch has migrant ancestry, but there is no identification with migrants in the present.

Summing up… 1. A foregrounding of being a victim, rather than a perpetrator; 2. A tendency to stress “positive” aspects of Empire (Balkenende’s “VOC mentality”) , not the violence, racism, injustice; 3. Forgetting, glossing over, not working through the imperial past.

Associations of innocence Innocence as… • The desired state of being that is invoked in Christian religion. • Associated with being small. • Carrying female connotations. • Having license to utter the most racist statements, while in the next sentence saying that it was a joke or was not meant as racist. (Spijkerman and Tan). • Also claimed by other European, former imperial, nations. • Not wanting to know, or the epistemology of ignorance (Charles W. Mills, 1997, 2007).

The Epistemology of Ignorance • “…. is part of a white supremacist state in which the human race is racially divided into full persons and subpersons. Even though—or, more accurately, precisely because—they tend not to understand the racist world in which they live, white people are able to fully benefit from its racial hierarchies, ontologies and economies” (Sullivan and Tuana, 2007, 2).

Innocence as ignorance “an ignorance militant, agressive, not to be intimidated, an ignorance that is active, dynamic, that refuses to go quietly – not at all confined to the illiterate and uneducated but propagated at the highest levels of the land, indeed presenting itself unblushingly as knowledge” (Mills 2007, 13, emphasis in original).

II. “White Innocence” in the Dutch academy • 1. The division of labour between disciplines is often based on imperialism and thus on race • 2. that “race“ is silently at the heart of the way that many disciplines have been ordered. Here, I will look at the disciplines of History and of Gender Studies.

Development of the modern sciences • Should be seen in the context of imperialism; • “The racial “Economy of Science”; Toward a democratic Future, by Sandra Harding ed. , 1993

The discipline of History. The history of the metropole is structually set apart from the history of the colonies. . “Race and the Education of Desire”, Laura Ann Stoler, 1995

Gender Studies • Whiteness as the dominant racial positioning is never studied, pointing again to the aptness of white innocence. • Three sites in which women are studied , - 1. Women’s/ Gender Studies; 2. Ethnic Studies Departments; 3. Third World Women/ Women of The South - function in splendid isolation. • Antecedents of this split were constructed in the colonies.

Conclusions Race and Ethnicity. Race itself is not studied in the Netherlands. Ethnicity is, but only in the limited sense that it pertains to the other. . “Unearned Privileges of Whiteness”, Peggy Mc. Intosh, 1988. . Knowledge production in the academy is not innocent.

3. Towards an inclusive, decolonial university • 1. Need to think through unjust divisions; • 2. Need to break through thinking in only one axis of signification, e. g. gender, instead we should bring gender, race/ ethnicity class, sexuality and religion in conversation with each other; • Need to study the history of your own discipline and how it was entangled with imperialism; • Need to study: a. the content of curricula; b. composition of staff (acad. And supporting staff); c. Composition of student body.

White Innocence, Paradoxes of Colonialism and Race, Duke U Press 2016 Image: Ruud van Empel