A
s always around this time of year, some people are getting upset about the Dutch Saint Nicholas tradition of “Zwarte Piet” (Black Pete). Although it is pretty clear that the origins of this character have nothing to do with racism (some say it goes back to two black ravens who accompanied Wotan in Germanic mythology), and it is even more obvious that it also has nothing to do with racism today, it seems that some people nevertheless take offense at it, thereby playing into the hands of the Dutch political far right and their hate-filled discourse of an immigrant threat to Dutch culture.
Not, I think, very smart, particularly as Black Pete lost his role of tormentor of bad children a while ago, at least in “official” traditions. This hardly seems like the worst social ill one could imagine to protest against, and its elimination would do nothing to promote non-racist attitudes on the part of those stupid enough to have such attitudes in the first place. I venture to suggest that the only reason the Zwarte Piet tradition attracts criticism is because it is an easy but irrelevant target for a complex problem. In other words, this is the availability heuristic at work. During the decades it might take to shame the tradition into submission, actual important issues around say education, policing and discrimination will receive less attention than they could and should. It is easier to blame Zwarte Piet. In fact, the word in everyday Dutch has become a byword for a symbolic figure made to carry the weight of society’s ills: a scapegoat.
The myth does bear deconstruction, however. Although it is said that the contemporary figure no longer has this association, older Zwarte Piet songs make clear that his role, at a certain moment in history in any case, was to punish children who misbehaved and therefore did not merit the rewards that Saint Nicholas was set to bring. It seems that this role separated out from an earlier ambiguity in the person of St Nicholas himself, who, as a saint, was felt to be too good to inflict punishment, a role that therefore needed to be delegated to another character, even if one whose scope of operations was closely linked to that of St Nicholas himself and bore no signs of autonomy. That such a menacing figure is portrayed as being black might constitute or at least contribute to racial stereotyping, but I venture to suggest this is not really the point. The point is that he exists at all. In other words, that we fail to criticize the way in which we fabricate myths in order to control the behavior of children, and then don’t even take responsibility for it by delegating the dirty jobs to someone else.
Zwarte Piet is just one incarnation of this universal bogeyman who happens, unlike the German “Schwarzer Mann“, to be literally, and entirely incidentally, black. His scarcely critized social purpose is to allow adults to manipulate children through the threat of unspoken evil consequences vectored by the agency of omnipotent spirits which inexplicably have not, however, vented their disapproval on the adults in questions rather than their kids.
The Bogeyman has a lot in common with the devil or the demiurge, figures who crystallized out of the ambiguity of traditional representations of God as both loving and savage. He also lives on in adult imaginations, infusing the sinister powers of any public institution that is there to enforce supposedly moral order, and frequently also other more nebulous spirits.
That can lead to real psychic damage, and it’s a game we should stop playing, whatever the color of the skin of the personality we delegate it to. If a compliance-figure has any role, he or she should take moral responsibility for all of his or her decisions, favorable and unfavorable. Better yet, we should not delegate the enforcement of necessary social norms to any fantasy personality at all, whose actions are beyond reasoning and debate. I am as guilty of it as anyone, but God and Father Christmas have crystallized out of the same dissociation that subsequently produced the devil and Zwarte Piet as mere second-order emanations of our inability to reconcile what we think we need to do with how we want to feel about it and how we want our children to view us. We would do better simply to reunite moral authority and enforcement in the same flesh and blood person, quite able to reconcile these diverse roles, ourselves.