813330

book-review2019
FER0010.1177/0141778918813330Feminist Reviewthemed book review

themed book review

Feminist Review

white innocence: paradoxes

Issue 121, 90­–91
© 2019 The Author(s)
Article reuse guidelines:

of colonialism and race sagepub.com/journals-permissions

DOI: 10.1177/0141778918813330
https://doi.org/10.1177/0141778918813330
www.feministreview.com

Gloria Wekker, Duke University Press, Durham and London, 2016, 240pp., ISBN: 978-0-8223-6059-9, $89.95 (Hbk)/
ISBN: 978-0-8223-6075-9, $23.95 (Pbk)

Home to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and one of the first countries to legalise same-sex marriage, the
Netherlands is understood by many of its inhabitants to be a beacon of progressiveness for countries across the globe.
However, as Gloria Wekker explains in her 2016 book,  White Innocence,  the dominant Dutch self-portrait is distorted.
Wekker argues that embedded within the cultural archive of this ‘small’, ‘tender’ and ‘color blind’ country remain hostile
racism and xenophobia, inherited from centuries of Dutch colonial rule. Moreover, although many Dutch institutions have
attempted to divorce the history of Dutch colonialism from the history of the state itself, it is Wekker’s stance that Dutch
imperialism continues to play a fundamental role in creating and maintaining contemporary Dutch culture.

While many feminist scholars have addressed how a position of ‘innocent victimhood’ is invoked by white oppressors
to redirect accountability for racism onto those racialised as ‘other’, Wekker’s analysis is fresh in illuminating how this
phenomenon extends into all strands of Dutch life. Furthermore, by contextualising her notion of ‘white innocence’
within 400 years of Dutch colonial history, Wekker illuminates the situated nature of ‘white innocence’ and its history
in both constructing and being constructed by ideologies culturally specific to the Dutch. For Wekker, ‘white innocence’
is not a position taken up circumstantially. Instead, as an integral ingredient of the dominant white Dutch self-
portrait, it functions systematically on interpersonal, local, institutional, national and international levels. Within
the scope of five chapters and a coda, Wekker combines the methodologies of case study, autoethnography and
postcolonial critique in order to make her argument.

Intrinsic to Wekker’s discussion of white innocence is an understanding of the reluctance of mainstream white Dutch
subjects to speak in racialised terms. Unlike countries such as South Africa and the US, the terms ‘race’ and ‘racism’
are hardly used within a Dutch context. Wekker argues that the muting of these terms contributes to the Dutch
understanding of themselves as an anti-discriminatory people, as the Dutch cultural imagination conflates speaking
the terms ‘race’ and ‘racism’ with practising racism itself. However, as Wekker demonstrates through her discussion of
the privileged terms ‘autochtoon’ and ‘allochtoon’, using racialised language is not alien to the Dutch. Although the
dominant white Dutch mainstream understands these preferred terms as merely meaning ‘from the Netherlands’
(autochtoon) and ‘not from the Netherlands’ (allochtoon), Wekker argues that ‘within the binary pair … race is firmly
present’ (p. 23). In other words, in practice, autochtoon becomes conflated with whiteness and a successful claim to
Dutch nationality and belonging, while allochtoon serves to signify outsider status and racial ‘otherness’.

Wekker’s discussion of Dutch rhetoric leads her into Chapter 2 of her book, where she utilises autoethnography and
critical race theory to discuss the racism embedded within Dutch government and academic spheres, which she argues
are intertwined. In both sectors, gender and race/ethnicity are disassociated and treated as separate issues. In the
governmental sphere, this has had the effect of eclipsing the possibility of addressing minoritarian women’s
 themed book review    121  91

intersectional needs, while hierarchising ‘women’ into the distinct categories of white, allochtoon and Third World
women. Within the academy, the splitting off of gender studies from critical race studies and critical ethnic studies
has resulted in Dutch university departments, students, and professors who claim to be doing intersectionality but in
practice treat this methodology as negotiable.

It is at this point in the book that Wekker articulates how Dutch responses to being confronted with their own racism
occur along gendered lines. While Dutch female students tend to shy away from discussions on race out of fear of
being marked as racist, Dutch male students often become aggressive in their claims to anti-racism. The hostile
assertion that Dutchness and racism are incompatible is taken up in Chapter 4 of Wekker’s text, where she discusses
how Dutch homonationalism, in recent years, has pushed anti-Islamic rhetoric. Wekker argues that the acceptance of
gay livelihoods has become positioned as a litmus test for ‘outsider’ belonging in the Netherlands. This positioning,
Wekker argues, is interlaced with a rampant imperial nostalgia that positions white gay Dutch men as the ‘innocent’
victims to ‘violent’ and ‘backwards’ Muslims and immigrants. Wekker describes how in recent years, white Dutch gay
men have overwhelmingly come to support xenophobic anti-immigration policies that distort gayness into a white
positionality incompatible with Islam.

In Wekker’s final chapter, she continues her analysis of aggressive white Dutch defence mechanisms by discussing a
collection of hate mail created by members of the Dutch public in response to anti-Zwarte Piet protests that took place
in 2008. Wekker describes Zwarte (Black) Piet as an extreme caricature of a black man who appears ‘clad in a colorful
Moorish costume, and wielding deplorable grammar, [and] is imagined to be a servant of a white bishop, Sinterklaas, who
hails from Spain’ (p. 28). Although Wekker notes that this racist figure is predominantly articulated by the Dutch as an
innocent children’s character who lies at the very heart of Dutch culture itself, she argues that Zwarte Piet’s ubiquitous
visibility across the Netherlands has contributed to ‘constructing a white “we” versus a black “they” within the dominant
white Dutch cultural imaginary’ (p. 143). For Wekker, the hate mail sent in response to the 2008 anti-Zwarte Piet protests
confirms this, as the rhetoric and the level of aggression utilised in such hate mail reveal that for many Dutch citizens,
admitting that Zwarte Piet is racist means tarnishing their progressive, ‘civilised’ self-image.

Overall, Wekker’s text successfully magnifies the dominant white Dutch self-portrait, illuminating how the Dutch
claim to innocence functions as a tool to maintain a status quo that enables systemic oppression for Dutch
allochtoons, immigrants and Muslim subjects. Through a combination of case study, autoethnography, critical race
theory and postcolonial critique, Wekker’s text provides rich historical and contemporary evidence that white
innocence within a Dutch context functions not only as a diversionary tactic but also as a fundamental organ of the
dominant white Dutch self. Wekker’s text functions as an innovative contribution to both critical race studies and
contemporary studies on whiteness; its focus on the entanglements between ‘white innocence’ and mainstream Dutch
national identity asks readers to contemplate the situated nature of whiteness, rather than treating it as a universal
entity. Wekker’s text emerges as a novel approach to studying whiteness, as it reveals the culturally specific ways that
whiteness and rhetoric around it function as a Master’s tool. Ultimately, Wekker’s text invites scholars to interrogate
intricacies of whiteness by examining their entanglements with national ideology, culturally specific histories and
contemporary constructions of belonging.

Ricky Frawley
Utrecht University