Agree.
In other news, a black Sinterklaas, who was trying to bridge the divide by offering an second alternative to the white master figure of Sinterklaas was also refused entry into the city that is hosting the televised parade this year
You are blowing things up out of proportion and removed from factual context.
Europe suck; America is winning.
(just kidding!).No, this is not oppression. They refused to work with police, who offered to escort them to the place they could protest and make their message heard. They refused, and by that went against the local authorities ban for that day, which was in place because of safety concerns.
On large events there are designated areas to protest. This is to prevent any safety issues and the clashing of opposing protest groups. This is a very normal thing and has always been.
How do you think large protests are normally organized? The organisations for the most part work together with the authorities to handle safety issues and prevent trouble.
No, though at the same time, we really don't know how it started. Zwarte Piet seems linked to krampus and other midwinter festivities, where people would soot up their face to become unrecognizable, but it's a lot of folk tales mixed into one, so it's kind of guess work as to the exact progenitor. Most people agree modern Sinterklaas started around 1850, at which time interestingly it was starting to get overtaken by modern Christmas, which is an evolution of Sinterklaas. To combat this, modern tales of Sinterklaas were created and written down, and the most popular one was by Schenkman, a teacher/ children book writer from Amsterdam. He wrote about Sinterklaas having a black helper boy. The reason why this boy was black Schenkman sadly never talked about, so we honestly don't know. There's some circumstantial evidence that Schenkman was at least close to the abolitionist movement and consequently it is somewhat plausible Zwarte Piet might have actually been included to show black people are kind-hearted, as a kind of progressive statement. Then again, or corroborating this, depending on how you look at it, Schenkman did posthumously publish something on the minstrel shows, saying that he didn't mind white people dressing up as black, because so many men of e.g. the clergy had white skin but black hearts. Which obviously by today's standards is a fucked up thing to say, but at that time was probably considered pretty progressive. Anyway, so the people who would normally make themselves unrecognizable by dressing up like Sinterklaas or sooting up their face now wanted to dress up like a black boy, and I guess as minstrel shows became more popular, so the blackface became the way to go, a caricature of black people based on slavery. And there we are. A hundred years later the majority of the country claiming it is not racist and it has nothing to do with the US or slavery. The origin might be neutral or even relatively benign, that's not what it became pretty quickly.
We will see what the courts will say about this as according to the lawyer present it wasn't exactly as you paint it to be now.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying the police has not made mistakes about this in the past. But I don't think the events this year fall under oppression when it comes to what happened to the demonstration.We will see what the courts will say about this as according to the lawyer present it wasn't exactly as you paint it to be now.
Also one of the original activists Jerry Afriyie was standing at a distance from the rest of the protesters yet he was nevertheless pulled in to the protester group by the police with force and arrested.
In terms of the two originators of the protests, Quinsy Gario and Jerry Afriyie there has actually been numerous cases of documented oppression from 2011 up till last year.
The police and public prosecutor tried to make an example out of Jerry Afriyie and took him to court over his resisting arrest in 2014 but last October the court ruled that actually it was the police that had applied too much force during their arrest.
Nevertheless the public prosecutor has decided to appeal the decision.
On this video it is very clearly visible how in 2014 in Gouda it was right extremists and police that escalated the situation with the protesters being the oppressed victims.
Since starting the protests Afiryie has been involved in three different court battles, lost his job, been receiving constant death threats and is persecuted by the police rather than protected by them.
