Abstract
The traditional blackface character Black Pete has been at the center of an intense controversy in the Netherlands, with most black citizens denouncing the tradition as racist and most white citizens endorsing it as harmless fun. I analyze the controversy as an utter failure, on the part of white citizens, of what Alison Jaggar has called multicultural literacy. This article aims to identify both the causes of this failure of multicultural literacy and the conditions required for multicultural literacy to be possible. I argue that this failure of multicultural literacy is due to hermeneutical injustice and white ignorance. I close by considering possible avenues for fostering multicultural literacy.
Highlights
Every year in the first week of December, children in the Netherlands2 eagerly await the visit of Saint Nicholas (Sinterklaas),3 who brings them candy and Published by Scholarship@Western, 2019Feminist Philosophy Quarterly, 2019, Vol 5, Iss. 2, Article 4 presents if they behaved well throughout the year
Children sing cheerful songs about Black Pete, whose lyrics include “even though I’m black as coal, I mean well,” while they apply themselves in their arts-and-crafts classes as their teachers show them how to make blackface drawings and cut-outs of Black Pete that will proudly be displayed to decorate their classrooms and homes
29 See, for example, the response from the Dutch government in the introduction of this article, the analysis offered in section 2 of Catala 2015a, and Wekker 2016
Summary
Every year in the first week of December, children in the Netherlands eagerly await the visit of Saint Nicholas (Sinterklaas), who brings them candy and. In the case of Kohlberg’s studies, the fact that the girls’ expressive style is not recognized as valid (form-based type), and that their answers are unintelligible, prevents the girls from contributing, to the field of psychology and children’s moral development, 26 Note that content-based hermeneutical injustice can arise even if nondominant groups create the relevant concepts, when these concepts are not adopted into the mainstream hermeneutical resource or are blocked or ignored by dominant groups (Catala 2015a; Dotson 2012, 2014; Fricker 2016; Mason 2011; Medina 2013; Pohlhaus 2012). Institutionalization of these problematic cognitive-epistemic norms through the very structure of the society: its bodies of knowledge, its cultural institutions and symbols, and other spheres of hermeneutical influence like the media, politics, or the arts
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