AMSTERDAM — There are some things Dutch kids can count on. Rain. Bicycles. And every year, on a cold November day, a gift-bearing Saint Nicholas will arrive, accompanied by African-looking helpers.
While the three weeks of festivities leading up to the Dec. 5 celebration of Sinterklaas, or Saint Nicholas, will surely take place this year, they’re drawing international scrutiny. A panel that advises the United Nations on human rights has questioned whether depictions of the mischievous helpers, collectively called Black Petes and typically portrayed by whites in blackface paint, are racist.
That has fueled a furious backlash among the Dutch: More than 2 million people have liked a Facebook group supporting the Petes. Fewer than 13,000 have joined another group saying they are racist.
Anouk, a Dutch singer who this year represented the country at the Eurovision Song Contest, in recent weeks has spoken out against traditional portrayals of the Black Petes. In response, she says, she has received hate messages.
Retailers are voting for the Petes by keeping shelves stocked with goods bearing their image. Stores run by Royal Ahold, owner of the Stop & Shop chain in the United States, sell everything from Black Pete children’s outfits and face-painting kits to bath gels bearing grinning Black Petes with wide lips and gold hoop earrings. Giant stuffed Petes will again climb the atrium at De Bijenkorf, Amsterdam’s premier department store. Toy store Bart Smit sells Playmobil sets of three Black Petes for 9.99 euros ($13.50).
Blackface, the practice of painting a person of European descent to look African, has long been decried in the United States and elsewhere as racist. Backers of the Petes are quick to point out that the Netherlands doesn’t have the same history of slavery as the U.S. and say there’s nothing negative about Black Pete being black. “This is part of our heritage,” says Erik Maarten Muller, a Web designer in the northern Dutch city of Den Helder. “We should be allowed to keep that.”
It’s unclear when the Dutch Saint Nicholas, by legend a bishop who spends most of the year in Spain, acquired black helpers. Many trace the modern version of the tale to an 1850 book called “Saint Nicholas and his Servant,” in which an African boy accompanied Nick.
“The figure Black Pete has been made up by a writer in the 19th century at a time slavery still existed,” said Jimmy Veldwijk, 49, a DJ who came to the Netherlands from Suriname at the age of 2. “This personality is clearly based on a slave. That can no longer be tolerated in the 21st century.”
Undisputed is that Black Pete is big business. The country is full of Petes in the weeks after Saint Nicholas’s steamboat arrives at a different Dutch port every year, in a nationally televised event with actors playing the saint and his Petes. Shops host Saint Nicholas events, and blackface Petes walk the streets hauling bags filled with gingersnaps for kids.
In most families the occasion trumps Christmas, when dinner is the main event, as the biggest gift-giving occasion of the year; it accounted for $675 million in sales in 2012, according to Detailhandel Nederland, a trade group of Dutch retailers.
“As long as Saint Nicholas is celebrated by a large part of the population in the Netherlands and there’s demand for the products, supermarkets will continue to sell them,” says Miranda Boer, a spokeswoman for Centraal Bureau Levensmiddelenhandel, an industry group of food retailers.
