Why does racial discrimination remain a problem in the Netherlands, when the practice has been criminalized since 1971? Sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva advises that the key to understanding why racism persists is to investigate the "mechanisms and practices ... responsible for racial domination.” This research follows that advice by posing the following research questions: How has law been mobilized to address racialized hierarches in the Dutch metropole in the postcolonial period? How do these legal constructions differ from those in the colonial period? How did postcolonial legal mobilizations affect public memory of colonial legacies and contribute to shaping the Dutch metropole as a postcolonial community? How did these mobilizations impact public discourse around racialization and racialized inequality? The dissertation answers these questions using a mix of methods from criticial historical and legal scholarship to examine legal mechanisms and practices responsible for creating and maintaining racial hierarchies in the Netherlands. Through an in-depth case study of the Landelijk Bureau Racismebestrijding (1985-1999) the research demonstrates how legal practices transitioned from the colonial to the postcolonial eras.
The results show that during the colonial period, Dutch laws in the overseas colonies divided people into explicitly racial categories. The Dutch state approved these categories and used violence to enforce them. Racial categories generated wealth for people racialized as white, at the expense of people racialized as non-white, primarily through colonial conquest and slavery. After World War II and Indonesian independence, the legal approach to race changed. Laws and policies prohibited “racial discrimination,” but defined the practice as motivated by irrational, individual prejudice; they ignored material interests, structural practices and the history of racialization in the Dutch context. Despite condemning the practice in words, institutions and individuals responsible for enforcing laws against racial discrimination rarely did so, a practice the dissertation describes as non-performative antiracism. The combination of an ahistorical definition of racial discrimination and a lack of law enforcement contributed to concealing the history of racism and the ongoing and persistent racial inequalities in Dutch society during the postcolonial era. In sum, postcolonial legal constructions of race in the Netherlands contributed to entrenching material inequalities among differently racialized groups of people, and making it more difficult for public memory and discourse to account for and confront these inequalities.
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