recently, there were several posts about being mixed race that ended up on my timeline. i have been wanting to add to this discussion for months now, but opening up about this is a scary process; i don't know how it's gonna land with people and i don't know if my takes on this are at all valuable or correct. while i'm already in my "fuck it" era of posting, i figured i might as well share it. hopefully it means something to people.
so.
i had a friend once, who i thought was a really close friend, until one day they were abruptly just gone from my friends list and they had blocked me everywhere. i went to ask their partner what happened, who told me that they both really disliked my behavior, which particularly included my "white person takes" they kept reading from me on my Twitter. hearing this from someone who i thought was a friend infuriated me.
it was the catalyst for me to actually start thinking about my family and their history. because i never thought about it before. i never had any opportunity to think about it.
my mom's side of the family are Indo people, meaning they are mixed Dutch and Indonesian. this mixed race of people pretty much entirely exists because the Dutch colonized what is now Indonesia, and decided to mingle with the local population in an attempt to create a "cheap labor force" for the colonizers. World War II created a power vacuum which got filled up by the Japanese, who proceeded to put everyone with European blood into internment camps. simultaneously the Dutch then sent troops to Indonesia to try and keep it under their colonial power, eventually being forced to give up after committing many atrocities there. my grandma was born in one of the camps; her father was a Dutch colonialist soldier who pretty much immediately fucked off after that, and only became known to our family after my mom spent years tracking him down after he had already passed.
during the Indonesian revolution, the internment of the Indo people got even worse. they were allowed to relocate to the Netherlands as their allyship to the Dutch qualified them as Dutch citizens. the Netherlands, a place none of them had ever been to before, qualified as their "homeland" because it and the colony were part of the same empire. from what i've read, after being expatriated, they were then subjected to extremely heavy cultural assimilation, going as far as being punished for even just speaking Indonesian or engaging in Indonesian cultural practices inside their homes.
there's a chance i might be skipping a lot of details here; i've had to learn most of this from browsing Wikipedia. i don't remember learning very much about this in school; i knew that we had a colony there, horrible shit happened, we sent troops to regain control over the colony, horrible shit happened again, and then that failed and Indonesia became independent. i didn't know more than that, because my family never told me. because they didn't know either.
older generation Indo people share a lot of generational trauma from the colony. my grandma has always appeared happy to be alive and well under all the circumstances. i've never once heard her complain about anything. as a kid, it intrigued me that she was in a camp on the other side of the world, and i wanted to know more about it, but my mom told me not to ask. her grandma, my great-grandma, would always tell my mom these grand stories of how beautiful the scenery was and how amazing it was to travel the world by boat, but they both knew she just didn't want to talk about the bad parts. this is all so common that it has its own colloquial term, Indisch zwijgen (which is simultaneously also the name of a documentary about this topic which i think i really need to give a watch at some point). in all their resilience and loyalty to the Dutch in their efforts to survive, they don't want to be a bother by telling their family what they have been through in the colony, so this part of history pretty much dies with them.
Wikipedia mentions that Indo people are the most "well-integrated" ethnic minority group in the Netherlands, to the point where newer generations of Indo people barely recognize their own individual cultural features and practices, as most of them have either been forgotten about or have fully become a part of Dutch culture. reading that was terrifying to me. as a white kid growing up in a white/white-passing family with a mom who was born here and a dad who was born here (my dad being from a very religious Christian family), i never questioned any of these things. i thought that, outside of how dysfunctional my family was, i had a relatively normal Dutch upbringing.
every single town has an Indo-Chinese restaurant; they're so common that they are basically a part of our national heritage. you can order food there such as Babi Pangang; a meal which in these restaurants' form doesn't even exist in Indonesia itself, because it was specifically engineered to be palatable to the taste of the Dutch people. every single grocery store sells krupuk and kecap and sate and sambal. it's so ubiquitous to Dutch culture that you can find it almost anywhere. heck, when i visited my then-girlfriend in the United States last year, we found this store with a Dutch imported goods section, and they had krupuk and sambal too. Indo food is so Dutch that nobody even thinks twice about the fact that you can buy it at a Dutch store in the middle of fucking Colorado Springs.
Indo food is simultaneously also one of my only real, tangible connections to Indo culture; my grandma used to prepare it for us when we'd come to visit her. i never learned any of the other cultural practices, which is why the food is the only thing i can confidently point out here. i don't know how to prepare any of it though, because my family never taught me how to cook it. a fancy hipster Indo place opened up in town a year ago that charges €20 for selling my family's food back to me in a single bowl, and i shell out the money every now and then because without it i wouldn't currently be able to eat the only thing that really connects me to my family's culture right now.
there was another post recently describing people who put soy sauce on everything... and like, i do that! i don't really know if my family did it too, but i love putting kecap in all the meals i make. even if it's kecap from my local grocery store; as far as i know, there's not really any tokos nearby where i could get anything better. i'm not really doing any of this how it was intended. but i also don't want to think of myself as appropriating this culture... for me, this is one of the few ways i interact with it. it's not very deep and it's very bastardized, and that makes me feel bad sometimes. but i also barely have any other ways of interacting with my culture, other than this tiny thing i do with my food. and that's not my fault, is it?
i learned about World War II in school, and how the nazis put people in camps. this made me assume that this was the normal state of things during war, that the enemies tended to just put anyone in camps. this is a weird thing to think but i was a child and i was very naïve. it didn't occur to me that it wasn't normal to have a family member who grew up in a camp, or that this only happened to very specific people who possessed qualities the enemies wanted to get rid of. let alone a camp in a country on the other side of the planet that didn't even exist anymore. there was nobody in my life who told me otherwise. my grandma knew what happened, but she is going to carry it into her grave. my mom never knew either.
you might ask what i even have to complain about. by the looks of it, i am part of the dominant culture of this country. i look like them, i speak their language, i benefit from being able to engage in their cultural norms. some people consider this all to be a privilege! and that's not something i can deny either; i don't know what it's like to get called a Zwarte Piet because of my skin colour. i don't know what it's like to have my job application get rejected because i have a foreign sounding name on it. it's not like i'm not thankful for that either.
i often see people arguing about "white people are gross" or "yt people this" or "yt ppl that" or the aforementioned "white people opinions". i see that kinda sentiment going around, and i get told that it's fine because it's 'punching up at oppressors'. it suggests that there's an implication here that goes beyond just skin colour; it puts the OPs opponent into this dominant, Eurocentric framing. it's why i get told i have "white people opinions" because that friend has seen the Dutch flag in my bio and they have seen my skin colour, so they assume that i am automatically a part of the same culture that has oppressed and enslaved millions of people. the culture that made saying "GEKOLONISEERD!!!" to other Dutch people on the internet a country-wide internet meme for some extremely stupid irony-poisoned reason. the culture that still refers to their periods of colonization and slavery as the "Golden Age", because it brought us all the wealth this country and its infrastructure and public services and welfare were built upon. the same infrastructure and public services and welfare which i have been able to use every day of my life. it's upsetting to me when i get put in such a frame, but the worst part is that they're not even wrong. i don't agree with it, but it is what i was taught all my life. i am a part of that.
but am i supposed to be happy about that fact? am i supposed to feel pride in my country? after everything the Dutch state has done to my family?
my mom left home when she was 17. my grandma and grandpa were both very strict and authoritarian in their parenting; or rather, they were just straight up abusive. my mom never learned to resolve this trauma. we've talked about it sometimes, but she'll just lock herself into 30 minutes of venting about her family with no way to stop it, because she never went to therapy for this. she was raised by immigrant parents who had to learn how to adapt to this strange new country they've never been to before after experiencing horrors in the camps in Indonesia. the Netherlands likes to paint themselves as some sort of benevolent hero for allowing the Indo people in, but i can't help but imagine they still got treated as lower class citizens; they were useful to the empire, useful enough and similar in values enough to be considered citizens, but they still hadn't attained the perfect ideal of the Dutch model citizen, and they were pressured by society to adapt to it.
my mom got together with my dad, who i previously mentioned was from a Dutch family. they never married, but they decided to get kids. she said she already wanted to leave by the time my sister was born, but she decided to stay together because it would be too much trouble otherwise. when she was told at school that there was a possibility that i had a learning disability, she felt sick. she started falling deep into the New Age subculture. she started claiming i was an indigo child, and got me out of school and started homeschooling me. she started psych shopping for anyone who'd just tell her i wasn't autistic. anything for me to be normal and neurotypical, or to be able to put my actions in such a frame. anything for me to not ruin the model image of the normal, hegemonic Dutch family she worked her ass off all her life to earn. anything to have a community that would still respect her for her own decisions after nobody else did that before in her life.
my sister is allistic, went to school normally, is doing uni now i believe, and my mom has always rewarded that with lots of care and emotional support and a place to stay even now that she's an adult. meanwhile, my mom just treated me like shit, was always extremely emotionally distant, unless she had a chance to parade me around to all her friends as this magical indigo child from another dimension who'd single-handedly make world peace real. she kicked me out because we "fought too much" (read: i was extremely depressed) and then wouldn't even take me back in when my dad was about to make me homeless because i transitioned. i nearly became homeless and she didn't do anything because i wouldn't behave the way she wanted me to, in a way that benefited her.
i remember when i educated myself on white supremacy, and i learned that the core belief of it is that of a single, global race of white people. everyone with white skin gets reduced down to just that physical aspect, regardless of their actual cultural features or what language they speak or where they're from. to believe in white supremacy is to force yourself to unnaturally ignore all these cultural differences. i've therefore never understood why people of colour will often generalize white people. i don't see how it's "punching up"; all i see it as is giving white supremacists what they want, what they believe in. they want you to think that every white person is the same. why aid them in that?
but it's more than just that. white supremacy positions this ideal of a white race above every other race and culture — i mean, it's literally in the name. it doesn't actually work this way in reality, as the idea of a single white race is bullshit, which is why instead it gets violently enforced and manufactured through racism and discrimination. this not only makes white supremacists feel better, but it also accomplishes another goal: it makes whiteness seem like a positive, attainable quality. if you can obtain this, if you can blend in with them, you will be safe from the violence they've created. you can't change your skin colour, but you can learn to want to throw it away for them.
my grandpa is a PVV voter. PVV is the party of Geert Wilders, who you might know for running on an anti-Islam and anti-immigration platform for the past 20 years. his party won the most recent Dutch elections, as our country continues to slide further and further into right-wing extremism. my grandpa probably cheered at his TV. he believes in everything Wilders believes in. he grew up in a very big family, and had to do a lot of hard work to build up a life, and now he thinks the foreigners are taking it away and they should all go back to their own country.
but isn't that strange? my grandma wasn't born here. she's visibly Indonesian. yet my grandpa doesn't have an issue with that, and he never has. my grandma is too silent and complacent to even complain. she doesn't look Dutch, but she has absolutely become Dutch. under the threat of violence, she learned that in order to survive and keep her family safe, she had to shut up about the parts of her that weren't Dutch. she has been assimilated into the dominant culture so far that a literal xenophobe would still be willing to marry her.
do i have to pretend that this is fine? do i have to be happy about this? like, i should be glad that across all of these generations, it has resulted in me having a much safer experience interfacing with this country and the structures within it than the people that came before me. but at what cost? do i really have to be happy about this?
i want to learn more about Indonesian culture and all of its cultural practices, but i feel so far removed from it that i worry it's cultural appropriation or that it's just too late to do it now and it'd just be awkward. my bloodline could've ended up somewhere entirely differently, but the chance to see what my life would have been like has been stolen from me by someone else. i feel grief over that. i feel grief over not even knowing what exactly i'm grieving over because nobody ever taught me what it's like. i feel bad because i don't even know whether i can call myself an Indo because i don't know what percentage i have of it in myself. who knows, it could be just 1% and my claim would be completely illegitimate and i'd look like a fool. how would i know? i feel grief because i don't even feel allowed to claim this part of my identity because i'm so divorced from it, even when i stop to realize that it wasn't even my choice to be divorced from it, but that of the institutions and systems in this country pushing me and my family towards it.
i feel like i have no reason to complain sometimes, because i am living a good life here. i don't know where my family came from, or what they lived like. i feel like i'm not even allowed to wonder what they lived like, because why would i want to live like they did? i couldn't understand their language. i'd miss all the food i have here. i'd miss the public transit. the bicycles. the welfare and accomodations i require to survive. the things this country made me grow into, with i now couldn't live without. i'm sure my mom is happy that despite everything that happened, i still have a better life than her. and i'm sure lots of Dutch people sure are happy to live here, happy to not live in a country they think is so primitive and backwards and foreign, or whatever they might think of Indonesia. i should be happy like they are, too! our blessed homeland, their barbarous wastes, right? and if the barbarous wastes happen to have anything we do like, we can just claim it as part of our own culture instead so we can still enjoy it! problem solved.
i don't know.
i wish i could find more people who were in the same situation as me. but it's hard to find other people like me when apparently our most defining feature is that we have no defining features left at all.
i hope people would stop calling me white. i have no desire to be associated with that or to serve as a tool to push it any further. i label myself as Dutch sometimes; while factually speaking i am culturally Dutch, i feel like my intention when i label myself that is much more of a geographical one. there's a lot of spaces which people from my country aren't very well represented in, and i do take pride in that and bringing my rather unusual experiences to the table along with it. but not every European naturally or automatically belongs to European culture by default; there's plenty of people here for which it was violently enforced. it's not my fault i don't know anything else. i didn't choose that. i like it here, but i don't ever want anyone to frame me and my experiences in a way that makes it sound like me living here today somehow wasn't violently enforced on my family.
i hope that by resisting, i get to keep this part of myself i know so little about alive somehow.
