Hi everyone, since we're having the Black Pete discussion again I want to put some things straight for non flemish/dutch people who might not be intimately familiar with the topic.

First off all I want to set out that YES blackface is racist and YES the "classic black -

Petes are blackface. Draw your conclusions. I'm not going to write about the history of the actual St. Nick, bcs it has barely anything to do with the current "tradition"

The first important thing you have to know is that St. Nick is as big here (if not bigger) as Santa. It's +

St. Nick who visits the schools (up till uni) and stores have an advertising budget that rivals the christmas one.

The tradition of St. Nick and his black petes changed a lot in the past centuries. Pete used to wear slave shackles and punish kids (until the 60's when it was

Decided that scaring kids shouldn't be part of the festivities) When I was little, Pete was already transformed into a funny, kind and clumsy help, but some of the meaner, nastier connotations remained in the songs (Lyrics like "Even tho I'm black I'm good" , or "St. Nick Will -

Kick black pete of the roof if he doesnt do his job well, etc.) Saint Nick is also absolutely +

EVERYWHERE. While writing this I walked past several themed decorations already. And this is another misconception: most flemish people do not realise that this (see pic) is offensive. The festivities are the highlight of their childhoods & they don't see how such a

"Happy thing that brings joy to kids" could be truely harmful because they spend most of their lives not questioning it. In fact, most people think it's a "positive black character". This is NO excuse, but it explains why we have been having this discussion for about 10 years &-

Theres so much opposition to abolishing the blackface Petes (Abolishing the whole st. Nick tradition would be like cancelling santa in the US). To find a solution, people have been looking at an alternative pre-existing story which explains Pete is black with soot from going +

Down the chimney. By staying with a story that already existed and alterning the makeup from traditional blackface to "white person with black soot stripes" a solution was put forward that stayed close enough to "tradition" that MOST people didn't care enough to oppose the change

The first example is a blackface pete, the second picture a new "soot pete" the attempt to update this tradition in a society that mostly sees no harm in keeping the original (when I was researching this for my masters thesis, even among my rather leftist FB friends, 65% voted

They didn't think OG Pete was bad in a poll. So OF COURSE there's still a big conservative chunk of our society that holds on to the old design (Protests and anti protests have ended in violence here!) Even dressing like chinese or Indian people for carnival is often still +

Condoned by older people (this is the country with the massive jewish caricature floats in Aalst )

So yes, soot Petes might appear weird if you have zero context for the whole story-

But these are the people doing their best to find solutions so that no black kids get bullied in class anymore and called Petes while St. Nick can continue to make (even more) kids happy. Even stores are staring to switch!

This was my short ted talk! If you want to argue that

Seeing what arguments were deleted in the VF discussion. I will never defend racism and blackface, but please make sure you understand what you are tweeting about)

This video literally explains it 1000 x better than I ever could

https://www.facebook.com/Vox/videos/610288765825396/

if you want to argue that OG Pete is not based in racism, you are welcome in my mentions. I wrote part of my thesis about this subject and I will rip you t- I mean gently educate you on the matter with historical and contemporary arguments

Sincerly, a tired Belgian
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(Also I wrote this thread without -

[Rest of the thread under quoted tweet, I fucked up the editing ] https://twitter.com/JohnWatsGoingOn/status/1198324795575820300