Column | The discomfort in the Netherlands
Last Saturday I had a dinner with eight Dutch women. The hostess’s mother had made the soup – she got a plus from us. It went all the way. It was a large bowl of couscous from which we attacked like hungry lionesses. One of us’s sister baked burr nut pie for dessert.
But the evening was especially enjoyable because of the horde of hilarious and entertaining stories from everyone we met after midnight getting into the cars laughing.
There was no discomfort that Saturday night. While unease among people of the second generation with a migration background is great. The Social and Cultural Planning Bureau would send that news to the world three days later. I already knew, the SCP had intended the report under embargo. And even without a report I knew. You probably already knew it. It has been researched for years and the outcome is more or less the same.
Lead researcher Jaco Dagevos explains it tirelessly: the second generation are people who were born here, who are often well executed, who are often well executed. They are, in SCP terms, completely complete. And it is they who experience more discrimination because they are at the heart of society.
Ordinary Dutch people, that second generation. But apparently they are not seen that way by many other ordinary Dutch people. “They have trouble with nuance,” says Fatima dryly. She is sitting next to me in the car on the way back. She is college educated, active in the neighbourhood, both she and her husband have a job, they have three young children at home. Yet, like the other women of the pleasant evening, she regularly ends up in strange situations. Then again someone speaks in an exaggerated manner, apparently thinking that she does not understand Dutch. Or – according to her sister – someone with a shopping cart bumps into her again in the supermarket. Or she reads in the neighborhood app that is being planned portion for a boy who is in a state. „I look, is he standing in his fuck own porch”, says Fatima.
It never stops. Other Dutch people who make you feel that you are ‘strange’; it happens in multiple ways and moments but is always pleasant. It gets under your skin, she says. The time when she laughed it off is long behind her. And such, as her husband does, is not in her nature.
You would start to feel uncomfortable too, she tells me. Just follow it for three days and keep thinking about ‘Moroccan’, ‘Muslim’ or ‘profiteer’ that it is about you. Then we’ll even talk afterwards.
Later that night, I’m just in bed, when Fatima texts a screenshot from Twitter. Trending in the Netherlands: ‘Moroccans’.
Sheila Kamerman and Jannetje Koelewijn will replace the regular columnist here until November.
A version of this article also in the newspaper of October 13, 2022