ANOTHER FAIRLY STUPID SCANDAL FROM MY HOME AND NATIVE LAND

Really, now.

So Joachim Stroink, an MLA from Nova Scotia, went to a Dutch Christmas party and sat on Zwarte Piet's knee. Zwarte Piet is a mythical character usually portrayed by someone wearing blackface; Mr. Stroink decided to tweet his nice picture and was then very surprised when people got upset. 

"I didn't sign up for this," quoth he as the maelstrom broke. Presumably, Mr. Stroink refers to the scrutiny of his life and photographs. Is it right that members of government have every detail of their lives picked apart? Probably not. But it happens, and when you're posting the pictures yourself, I don't think you're allowed to be upset with the press for demonizing you. 

What's really irksome is this description of Zwarte Piet:
"A traditional song refers to the character as a “servant” to the elderly St. Nicholas, but in recent years those references have largely been replaced with the idea that he is black from chimney soot as he scrambles down to deliver toys and sweets for children who leave their shoes out overnight."

No. Zwarte Piet is not a white dude covered in soot from hustling up and down chimneys. The Dutch held colonies in Africa and captured slaves too. Let's not elide that part of history away, and let's not practice this kind of malignant euphemism, the same effort that produced the concept of "colour-blindness", that we don't see race when we look at other humans. Of course we see race; pretending skin colour doesn't mean anything does a fundamental disservice to people of colour. Feigning colour-blindness is the act of well-meaning white people trying to pretend that treating everyone the same is the same as treating everyone equitably, that we can just forge ahead as a united whole and leave all those nasty memories of slavery and segregation and lynchings behind. Similarly, claiming Zwarte Piet is just a sooty white man is harmful revisionism that attempts to avoid both history and the well-deserved controversy blackface performance generates. Zwarte Piet is a racist historical representation of a black servant. That is a fact. So, where does Canada's Dutch community go from this point? Ideally, by acknowledging these three things:

1. Yes, that happened. 
2. It was wrong.
3. Let's consign that tradition to the past.

I can already imagine the uproar, the claims that pluralism is neutering cultural celebrations. Never mind that if any other ethnic group in Canada had a special figure who was represented in whiteface, we would raise holy hell about it. The fact is, there is a lot of racist crap that we used to do that we don't do any more because it is no longer compatible with the world we inhabit. The cartoon image of the "darkey" eating watermelon or "talkin jive" was present in mainstream American culture for decades; it no longer resides there because it is offensive. It was deemed to be an unacceptable portrayal of real, live humans with feelings and individual personalities, so it faded away. Zwarte Piet, or at least his representation by humans in blackface, can fade too.