Racial relations in the USA: are we really doing that much better? – Joop

There is less reason than we think to size up America.

In recent weeks, media attention has focused increasingly exclusively on the elections in the United States. Logically: it is of great importance to Europe who is at the helm on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. Most media today have much more limited editorial budgets than in the past. That is why their reporting increasingly relies on the input of interpreters, analysts, American experts and other expert scientists. They talk a lot at talk show tables and in front of radio microphones. Usually there is a subtext: we can be happy that in our politics and society things are not going the way they are in the United States. None of this is from today or yesterday: you will have to give a living to the people who claim about whatever that we do not want “American conditions” here. And long before the war, the famous cultural historian Joan Huizinga, after a visit to the United States, incorporated his fear and disgust into the book Man and Crowd.

For example, on Saturday morning in Nieuwsweekend it was heard that in the United States population groups of different origins lived next to each other and were afraid of each other. How happy we were in the Netherlands!

That remains to be seen. Of course, the media increasingly features presenters and employees who do not come from the white majority. This process has actually progressed much further in the United States and the United Kingdom. This becomes immediately visible when you watch news and current affairs programs from those countries with the help of the Internet. Our country can learn a lot from this.

It is also very questionable whether everything is as smooth as pie at the basis of society with mutual contact between population groups of different origins. Especially in the Randstad, neighbors have little to do with each other. You see the “others” in the shopping streets, but otherwise everyone keeps to their own circuits. In that respect, pillarization has again become a feature of Dutch society, but in a different way. When white people in the Netherlands complain about this apartheid in practice, the finger-pointers in that circle do not blame themselves but the “others”. “They don’t integrate. They don’t want to adapt.” You can see this at large street parties that often attract a one-sided audience in terms of color and sometimes also gender.

Are Turkish TV series or Nigerian TV series ever shown on Dutch TV? Or Mexican? Or Brazilian? Or Korean? For this you have to switch to the offer of the American company Netflix. To that American company.

Dutch society is much less violent than American society, but the different population groups do not live with but next to each other. Now that I think about it: we used to go to the Catholic butcher, now to the Plus and not to the Sahan. Segregation is also increasing in the shopping streets. White Netherlands, convert before it is too late and read from Marianne Meijerink “You buy that from the Turk“.

All joking aside: the commemoration of Theo van Gogh on the Leidseplein in Amsterdam has been moved to the Balie, not because the attack troops had already gathered, but because the organization itself was being blamed. Now the Muslims will be blamed. The public commemoration in the Oosterpark a little further away continued as usual and went without any discord.

Perhaps the relationships between population groups of different origins have more in common with those in the United States than we believe. And as far as the proclaimed “American conditions” are concerned: the Schoof cabinet, directed by the blond-dyed doyen of the House of Representatives, is working hard to realize them on a broad scale.

We shouldn’t be so arrogant and complacent.

For the rest, I am of the opinion that the surcharge scandal should not disappear from public attention, nor should the affair surrounding Groningen natural gas now that the last wells appear not to be closed. I also call the PVV an extreme right-wing party.

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