The Zwarte Piet Debate On Social Media
If large debates do arise on social media, what seems to especially attract the interest of people is event-based debates. The annual festivities celebrating Sinterklaas is part of this category.
Every year, approaching mid-November, many Western journalists tackle the same issue: the Dutch and Belgian tradition of Sinterklaas and Zwarte Piet (Black Pete in English).
The celebration goes like this: the Saturday following November 11th, Sinterklaas comes from Spain on a steamboat with his black servant, Zwarte Piet, and arrives in a Dutch port. There, he disembarks and parades in the city throwing candies at the public. The performance is widely attended by families and schools. And it is broadcasted on national television all day long.
Then, on the evening of December 5th, children have to put their shoes by the fireplace. During the night, Sinterklaas supposedly comes by the roof and Zwarte Piet enters the houses by the chimney to leave gifts in the children’s shoes.
If these two festivities are advertised to be a children-treat, they face backlash from all over the world. Indeed, every year this tradition authorizes people to wear blackface makeup to achieve a Zwarte Piet costume. Anti-racist activists attempt at educating people about the racist roots of this tradition which refers to minstrel shows and deeply pejorative stereotypes on black Africans.
A quick media analysis reveals a particularly interesting switch in the way Zwarte Piet has been considered outside and inside of the Netherlands. Indeed, over the past few years, a switch occurred concerning the critiques of Zwarte Piet. When they were essentially coming from abroad and especially from the United States before a few years ago, the debate has now entered the Dutch national scene.
As a result, in the Netherlands, two groups now confront each other: anti-racist activists fighting for the banning of blackface and a traditional change, and pro-Black Piet activists willing to protect their tradition. If these two groups physically protest for their position every year on the arrival date of Sinterklaas and, then, on December 5th, their fight is widely done online, on social media.
The online world offers a new scene for the debate concerning Zwarte Piet. And, it enables people to directly confront their ideas with the opposite current and criticisms from abroad. It is a novel communication tool using a straight-to-the-point language, on which the decolonization debate can take place.
The Project: Decolonizing Zwarte Piet in 2019 on Twitter
With this project, we aim at answering the following question: Can the online debate on Zwarte Piet support the decolonization of the tradition and of the Dutch society?
Basically, we want to explore the way the debate on Zwarte Piet translates from the physical world to the online world. How is the debate conducted then? Does it follow the same rules of the game than properly organized debates? But also, we want to investigate the relevance and the significance of the Zwarte Piet debate online. Can it have an impact on the physical world by actively contributing to the discussion on decolonization?
To reduce the scope of study, we decided to focus on Twitter posts from the month of November 2019 (up until November 23th, exactly one week after the 2019 arrival of Sinterklaas) and written in the Netherlands, in both English and Dutch. A list of about thirty hashtags and key words or word combinations were used to target relevant posts and comments.
Twitter seems to be the most relevant platform to conduct this research project as it offers users with a wide range of tools to communicate their opinions and share them with the online world. It is essentially a micro-blogging device.
Then, the timeframe was chosen to reflect the tensions of the debate at its highest as mid-November marks the start of the Sinterklaas festivities and media outlets usually start tackling the Zwarte Piet issue from the start of November.
In a series of a few blogs and visuals on this website, we will cover four main crucial points to assess the significance of the Zwarte Piet debate on Twitter:
· The overall dynamics of the argumentation of the debate on Zwarte Piet online
· The great digression potential of the debate and its value
· The educational potential of social media
· The role of visuals to convey and support opinions
Disclaimers:
1. We do not aim at analyzing all the tweets available. Rather we aim at highlighting trends in the way Zwarte Piet is debated on Twitter and the core arguments influencing the discussion.
2. We do not intend to provide completely objective analyses. We are two individuals with our own thoughts and opinions and advocating for the decolonization of the minds and of Western cultures. However, we will attempt at reflecting the reality of the online debate as it is and as accurately as possible.
3. We decided to avoid directly citing tweets to avoid having to cite the authors' usernames. We picked tweets and threats as illustrations, letting the text be self-sufficient.
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