(E)RACING SLAVERY

Abstract

AbstractTextbooks are explicitly racial texts that offer important insights into national memories of slavery and colonialism. The Dutch have long engaged in the social forgetting of slavery even as race served as an organizing principal during centuries of colonial domination of the Dutch West Indies and Suriname. While the Dutch have recently begun to address their history of enslavement, they have yet to sufficiently address how the discursive legacies of slavery continue to impact the lives of Afro-Dutch descendants of enslaved2 Africans and White Dutch in The Netherlands today. This paper uses qualitative content and discourse analytic methods to examine the depiction of slavery, The Netherlands’ role in the slave trade and enslavement, and the commemoration of slavery in all Dutch primary school history textbooks published since 1980 to address questions of whether textbooks feature scientific colonialism to perpetuate The Netherlands’ social forgetting of slavery in a nation that denies the existence of race even as racialized socioeconomic inequalities persist. A Eurocentric master narrative of racial Europeanization perpetuates Dutch social forgetting of slavery and scientific colonialism to both essentialize Afro-Dutch and position their nation squarely within Europe’s history of enslavement even while attempting to minimize their role within it. Findings have important implications for both The Netherlands and all nations with histories of enslavement as the discourses and histories presented in textbooks impact generations of students, who shape local and national policy regarding racial minorities, racial identities, and ideologies.