One multiracial child responds to that Louisiana judge’s foolishness about not wanting to perform mixed marriages because it’s so hard on the children not being normal:
White people are funny like that; they think they are the normal, and everyone else is “multicultural” and “ethnic” and strange; they think they are the only way to be. But we outnumber you, you know. Right now, we outnumber you in volume of numbers – I’m an Indian woman, one in twelve of living humans is Indian and female, and one in six is brown (and stands up straight, and is strong, intelligent and beautiful, despite not being pale like you). Right now, we outnumber you; mathematically, we are the normal, and it’s only accidents of history that make you so proud of being white. (Even if we weren’t, we sing, dance and tan better than you. Deal.)
As you can see from the handsome picture on the left hand side of your screen, I’m somebody who has grown up seeing people who look like me on television, in the movies, in magazines and so on all the time, whose race, skin colour and gender were defined as normal by the media I grew up with. Worse, I grew up in the most whitebread part of the most whitebread province in the Netherlands, where a full three quarters of the average school class would be blonde haired, blue aryans and the rest would have dark hair. And although the reality of life even there has become much more …colourful… the media have lagged behind. White men are still the norm, anybody else the exception. it’s no wonder that we think we are normal, as people like m grew up with the priviledge of seeing our natural assumption of being the norm affirmed all around us.
But even the flawed reflection in the media of our multicultural societies has made that illusion less and less easy to maintain. The US never was a purely “white” country, the UK and Holland haven’t been one for a long time, but for a lot of people, like that idiot in Louisiana, this is a hard truth to swallow. Especially when the world turned scary again in the wake of the September 11 attacks, the War on Iraq and locally, the murders of Pim Fortuyn and Theo van Gogh. This fear and discomfort forms what I think is the reason for Geert Wilders’ popularity, as well as a more widespread change of attitude in the Netherlands.
The Netherlands has long had a reputation for being a tolerant nation, but this tolerance has quickly disappeared in the past decade. It’s not just Islamophobia, though that’s a large part of it, but it’s a general shift in attitude towards all foreigners. There’s much less willingness to accomodate strangers, less pride in being able to speak to them in their own language and a more explicit demand that they learn our language if they come over here — and that goes for Moroccan as well as English immigrants.
The governmental commercial shown above is a good example of this new attitude. It shows several “obviously” foreign people (i.e., not-white) trying to ask questions in their own languages of an authority figure only to be stared at uncomprendingly before the patronising voiceover starts talking about how much easier it is to learn Dutch. The focus is on the duty of these people to adapt, not on the government’s role in helping them adapt.
This change in attitude is widespread, not limited to Wilders voters, — I’ve heard plenty of supposedly liberal people saying that of course everybody who lives here should learn Dutch and that the government shouldn’t waste money offering information in any other language. I’m not sure what can be done to change this attitude again, but it would help if the government didn’t encourage it in its propaganda.