A guest lecture by Marvin Hokstam Baapoure

Wageningen University, Social Justice Course,

Last week I was in Brussels for a meeting at the university there. And as we were talking about iconography of Black people in public spaces, a researcher mentioned a “very violent” statue in the heart of the city. I was intrigued, so I went to see it
It was this statue: “escaped slaves surprised by dogs”. It shows a Black man and his son, trying to escape slavery and someone sicced hunting dogs on them. Metal chains still hang from their arms and their legs and you can clearly see the fear and the
pain and the agony in their faces, as the dogs maul them relentlessly.

This statue is about 3 meters in height. It is located in the heart of Brussels, prominent, right next to a very busy street. Right next to a metro station. Thousands, most likely millions of people have walked past it over the years and nobody notices it anymore.
Nobody breaks a stride at the sight of this statue that glorifies such horrific violence against people. I couldn’t help but wonder: what if it showed a white father and his son being torn apart by dogs? Would people also walk past it without caring?
A smaller version of this statue is located inside the Palace of Justice in Brussels. In the courthouse!
So basically Brussels is saying that when Black people get out of line, just set your dogs on them. Violate their bodies!
This statue by the way, was placed there by king Ferdinand the second in 1895 and nobody ever removed it.
I was appalled.
It reminded me of another statue I saw a few years ago in Livorno, in Italy. Four black men chained to each other.
Why do these things bother me so much? It is just a statue, right? No. these statues perpetually show Black people in subservient positions, forever in positions of submission. Being attacked by dogs, like they’re animals.
Violence against Black people is normalized.
The world is not a safe space for Black people.
On the other hand, the world is designed for white people to thrive. I am not saying that only Europeans people subjugated, enslaved, marginalized and oppressed others, but Europeans did perfect it like a science. All of this formed the basis for capitalism, which has its roots in greed. And unrelenting greed makes you not care about others. It makes you find reasons to treat others differently, simply because they look different from you.
And unfortunately, this is not a statement that characterizes the past. It is still very much applicable today
What I am gonna do today will feel like a whirlwind from how it all started with slavery, to when slavery morphed into something just as nasty. I will also briefly share my concerns about how the past could determine the future unless we make sure that today’s technology -with resources like AI- is accessible to everybody.
Every system I’m about to describe was once ‘new technology’. AI is the first one we can still intervene in to make sure that everyone benefits from it.
SO
Often when people speak of white privilege, they have no idea how far down the rabbit hole goes. Cunning tactics that were used to instill that belief of superiority, are still being used. The media for instance calls Black people a minority.
But while Black people are IN THE MINORITY here, they are not A MINORITY.

In fact, Black people are a majority.
There’s 0.9 billion white people on earth.
Meanwhile
There are 1.4 billion people in Africa, about 18% of the world’s human population. And that doesn’t even include the 250 million Black people outside of Africa. There are 1.65 billion People of African descent on earth That is almost twice the global population of white people.
Same goes for India and China, both with 1.42 billion people. I often marvel at how the west has been able to subjugate such massive communities. And yet somehow white supremacy has convinced the world that people of color are the minority.
It has to do with capitalism.
Capitalism rests on white supremacy, and it is all designed to keep the west dominant. And rich.
And at the same time they want to keep migrants out. They rather keep the riches that they drained out of the migrants’ countries to themselves.
Now some of you may be tempted to remind me that I also live here. That I am also part of the system that was created for the success of a certain group of people. That I am now part of that same group.
And nothing holds more truth. I did move here; migrants did move here because things are better here. But why did we move here? Why are things better here? And are things indeed
better when we face discrimination and racism and marginalization everywhere we go?
zwarte Piet still exists. Something that hurts Black people is still portrayed every year, simply because white people enjoy it.
Black children still get study advice that is below their level, while white children get a pass even when it is clear that they can’t handle it.
At my son’s primary school, the teacher bragged that my son was always helping everybody with their computerproblems; but my son was still sent to Mavo. Meanwhile his friend Martijn, who clearly had ADHD and all sorts of behavioral problems, got sent to VWO.
Today my son does an HBO program and Martijn crashed down to Praktijk school; and he was happy there.
The system that was designed for him to thrive set him up for something that he could not achieve, but at the same time it wasted precious years of my son’s life. Of Martijns life.
That’s what the system does. Racism is not effective. It wastes human potential.
Racism is denying progress to all of us.
In the 60’s white people in Southern states in the US were told that they had to integrate public schools and swimming pools. So instead, they chose to close them.
And if Black people still showed up…. Well …
This is James Brock, owner of a hotel in St. Augustine, pouring acid into his pool so Black people could not swim.
The ridiculousness of this is that when this fool ruined the pool, it were not just Black people who could not swim. NOBODY COULD SWIM.
This is so epitomic for how stupid racism is.
If only we would realize that fighting racism is not just for Black people. Racism is not a black problem. Ending racism benefits all, because racism has cost all of us so much.
From a geopolitical perspective, the whole world loses because of racist practices.
Australia loses more than $37 billion per year,; that’s three per cent of their annual GDP, because of racism.
The US has lost more than US$51 trillion in income since 1990, because of racism.
So If Black and Hispanic men and women held jobs at the same rates as whites, if they completed college at the same rates as whites, and if they earned the same as whites, the US would have earned 51 trillion dollars more.
These are 2021 stats
SLIDE
So If the US lost 51 trillion dollars… what does racism cost us globally?
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We’re talking about access to education
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Access to medical care that is denied
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Access to business loans
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Access to proper housing
Now here in the Netherlands there has not been much research
done on this subject.
There’s only one report I know about that came out last year:

The Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) alliance said that the
Dutch economy stands to earn 3 billion euros if Black Owned
Businesses would have the same access to funding, business
networks and government support. “Our economic potential is
not fully utilized.”
That is because marginalized people are being left behind.
Because the world is being run by white men who have
convinced the world that they are the best and that only they
can do the job.
But is that really the case? Just look at who is now the
president of the United States.
They really believe it.
This guy’s name is Darren Beattie, and he was appointed last
year as the acting undersecretary for public diplomacy and public affairs in the US. Prior to that he was speechwriter for the White House.
You might say that this is in the US, but here’s one of our own parliamentarians talking about the Antilles.
Thierry Baudet remarked ON THE FLOOR OF PARLIAMENT that the Netherlands should go back to colonialism. That we should send Dutch people to take over the islands because they can’t run it themselves. Baudett spouted this backward neo-colonial nonsense in June last year!

They really believe this and they have been able to make the world believe that white men are the saviors of the world. And there’s enough nonwhite people who believe it
You don’t even wanna know how often I have heard people from former colonies say that their countries were better off when Europeans were in charge. That white people should take over.

This is a lack man asking “what did lack people do for my country? They should have stayed a colony.

Here’s the biggest writer from Suriname saying that slavery was a good thing, otherwise Surinamese people would have been born in Africa and then they would have been one of those pathetic Africans in Ghana or Sudan.

That’s what 16 generations of misinformation and lies will do to you. Slavery lasted from the 1600’s until July 1st 186 ; more than 50 years. That’s at least 10 generations of people who were born and raised in a system that made them inferior by law.
People literally had no rights, no autonomy. They could not choose where they lived, they could not choose their own names or the names of their children. They could not marry. They were not allowed to wear shoes or ride horses. They could be sold at any time! Christianity that was forced on them and watered down so they would believe that being a slave was their fate.

This is the British slave bible in which passages were omitted that could incite rebellion.
In this bible, about 90 percent of the Old Testament is missing and 50 percent of the New Testament. There are 1,189 chapters in a standard Bible. The slave Bible only has 232 passages. They cut out this one: “we are a one in Christ Jesus”
They did leave in the passage that says “Servants, be obedient to them that are your masters.”
Now let me be clear: this bible was used in the US, but there is evidence that the Moravians who were brought in to christen the enslaved in Suriname, used a similar practice to keep the enslaved docile.
There was this Moravian pastor -his name was Otto Tank. He championed for better treatment of the enslaved, but at the same time didn’t think Black people should be freed. There’s a school named after this dude in Suriname. A school for mostly Black children.
These tactics went on throughout slavery.
White people were taught to treat Black people as slaves and Black people were taught to accept their place on the lowest spot in society.
And By the time slavery ended in 1863, Black people did not know anymore who they were. And neither did white people. They gave Black people European names (ask me later how mine was made), we had a white religion and we were told to
act as white people in a world that would forever tell us that we were not white people.
Then.
After the abolition of slavery came 6 more generations of marginalization and discrimination and lies and misinformation. Colonialism ended, but then came neo colonialism, where multinationals would now go in and pillage the natural resources of former colonies. They killed every important Black leader who would come up against them.

Malcolm X, Walter Rodney, Tula, Huey Newton, Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King, Anton de Kom, Stephen Biko, Muammar Ghadaddfi, Fred Hampton, Boni, Patrice Lumumba, Thomas Sankara, Maurice Bishop, Baron, Joli Coeur
And these are just a few.

Let me paint this picture for you:
Imagine you dug a hole in your neighbor’s backyard by mistake, right?. When you realize that, you will apologize to your neighbor right? You will close the hole and the both of you will go on with your lives, right?

Slavery is a hole that Black people were dumped into for 10 generations. When slavery was abolished, the Europeans did not close the hole, they made sure Black people stayed in there for another 6 generations. They kept marginalizing people, made life for millions of people hell in the hole, while their own life was a party.
And this is not an empty analogy. It applies to all of us.
All of us got plunged into a world where rich white men could do whatever the hell they liked. They were propped up as the example of success. They were a minority, but everybody who wanted to sound important, wanted to be like them.
I mean when I was growing up, people could tell Black people to know their place and to act according to their skin color. People were killed because they dared to demand humane treatment for themselves. And it was normal.
Comic books that we read, had Black people with BLACKBLACK skin and red lips and bones through their hair. And that was normal! I used to devour these books! Nobody told us that those people with big red lips represented us.

Nobody knew any better. Ignorance is bliss.
We should know better now.
But no.
Slavery was abolished, but it never really went away.
It just took on a new form.
In the past it used to be the monarchy who used to convince everybody to keep the status quo, but these days it’s these billionaires.
Rich white men acting like the majority, While they are, and always have been, a global minority; yet history has always presented their dominance as necessity.
In truth it has always been the majority that has fed, built, and sustained the world.
Just like how there are not enough white brilliant white men, there are more than enough brilliant people of color to design, run, feed, heal, teach, and govern the world. The earth does not have an unlimited supply of resources, but there is enough to go around for everybody.
The constraint has never been talent or intelligence. The constraint has always been access, ownership, and narrative control.
The problem is the dominance of Europeans. The dominance of a few mediocre white men who have been able to convince the world that they should rule. They persuaded the majority to
doubt its own capacity. And they thrive from taking away people’s humanity.
For them it’s not about black and white
But it does start with Black people.
If marginalized people are not given access to opportunities and do not seize them when they arise, power, wealth, and decision-making, will consolidate even further in the hands of these mediocre men who are driven by a thirst for domination.
Because that’s all that it is.
Capitalism is the problem.
At this moment the majority of the world capital is in the hand of a minority of wealthy white men. They could end world poverty just like that, but they rather spend their money building rockets to go to space.
Make that make sense.
And meanwhile they convince their admirers that migrants and people of color are the problem. And these people believe it.

Just look at what ICE is doing in the US.
They’re dragging people out of their houses like criminals, just because they are undocumented. This guy is a cop. HE migrated from Guyana, became a police officer in Maine and still he was
picked up like a common criminal! Because the same people who are the problem are convincing others that it’s migrants who are the problem.
And it happens here too.
A few months ago we saw these rallies by white men and women right here in the Hague against immigration.

All of it is egged on by these men in positions of power, who have this innate need to dominate. Somehow they are able to make their followers chase these outdated notions of nationalism.
It’s all a big misdirection

So I imagine that your next question is how come this still exist?
How did we abolish slavery and colonialism and still end up with a new form of marginalization?
Because the world never dealt with the wrongs that have been done in the past. The people that committed atrocities were never held accountable.
In the US they fought a civil war about the right to maintain slavery and when the south lost, they could keep their
confederate flag and the monuments of their leaders; I mean, these were the guys who lost the war. They did not win their despicable cause! These were the losers. And yet there are still monuments to honor them.

We keep giving prime real estate to megalomaniacs who were convinced of their own superiority.
Some more examples of nonsense that we took on as norm
After colonialism European countries were allowed to keep the billions in art and gold that they looted from the countries they subjugated. There’s not one gold mine here in the Netherlands, but still the Dutch Central Bank has more gold than God.
Another one
Haiti in the Caribbean, fought a war and became the first free republic in the world. But then France forced them to pay 100 billion American dollars for that independence. They started paying in 1804 and they did not stop paying until 1947. It made Haiti the poorest country on the western Hemisphere.
Everybody looked away.
One more. In Africa 14 former French colonies, including Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger, have paid a “colonial tax” or operated under financial constraints that allowed France to accumulate about $500 billion annually from these nations combined. These countries were not allowed to keep their money in their
own banks; they had to deposit all their earnings in French banks and France would decide how much they would get.
And now their leaders are being called terrorists because they have kicked out France and nationalized their gold mines.
IM NOT DONE

In 1884 14 European countries gathered in Berlin to decide among themselves who would own which country in Africa. They decided what the borders of African countries would be. There were no African leaders present! This still is the cause of destabilization in African countries.
Back to Belgium
The Belgian king Leopold the second had more than 10 million people massacred in the Congo in the late 1800s. Leopold’s mercenary army frequently massacred villagers, burned villages, and amputated the hands of men, women, and children who failed to meet rubber quotas.

But there are statues of Leopold all over Belgium. (YESSS I love that people are protesting against it)
But Imagine a statue of Hitler anywhere!!
And remember the statue of the man with the dogs in the heart of Brussels? My understanding is that nobody ever poured red
paint over it. We look away. It’s just a lack man mauled by dogs. Selective outrage. We look away.

I could go on with this list for hours, but here in the Netherlands … in 2023 the Netherlands finally gave a weak apology for its role in slavery and they freed up a few hundred million for social projects.
But the destabilization has already broken so much; you can’t fix it with a measly 00 million. And it doesn’t just concern the islands and Suriname. What about all the countries in Africa from which they kidnapped millions of people for free labor? What about the remnants of colonial mindsets that have been implanted in the colonies? What about the racism that people still endure and still accept because they don’t know better … because the education system is still too Eurocentric?
Are we doing enough to right the wrongs?
The education system is still full of terms like “Columbus discovering countries” and “slaves” and “Gouden Eeuw”.
Black children are still taught in school about certain men in Dutch history like they are heroes, while some of these same men pillaged African countries and massacred and enslaved people in the millions. A lady that I know lives on VOC street in Rotterdam; the VOC was an early enabler of the Dutch slavery system in Suriname.

We drive through the Coen Tunnel in Amsterdam everyday; JP Coen was the architect of Dutch colonial rule in Indonesia. 15,000 died because of him. And he has a statue in Hoorn, like a hero.
Imagine statues of Hitler that we all have to look at every day. Imagine a Hitler tunnel.
The colonial mindset is still being maintained and polished. And we’re still looking away.
Remember the people pouring red paint over the statues of King Leopold? My understanding is that the paint is never on the statues for more than a few hours. Brussels has it cleaned immediately!
Many people are more than happy to remain on the wrong side of history

Even in the former colonies that are now autonomous countries. The colonizer is no longer there, but the system they created to keep the rich rich and the poor poor, is still in place. Even if white people are not present, they are still present. That’s how invading white supremacy is.
And not just here Let’s take it to my ountry o birth
The best schools in Suriname are Dutch. Surinamese children can go to Dutch school in Suriname. These schools are private, and they’re expensive!
So rich children go to those schools, where they are educated for the future. They will get the better jobs later. They can easily fit in if they choose to move to the Netherkands. And why wouldn’t they? They went to Dutch schools, where they were trained to become Dutch people.
If they would stay in Suriname, they would be Dutch minds running Suriname.
Meanwhile the public school system is also Eurocentric, but it’s broken and outdated. Poor people (mostly Black people) send their children to public schools, where they are not educated for the jobs of the future. They are educated to fail, even when they’re brilliant. And they can’t leave, because their lives didn’t prepare them for that. And that doesn’t matter, because even while they’re educated to fail, they have still been to Eurocentric school.
Colonialism has ended, but it’s still being taught at all levels.
And this is the case in all former colonies.
Our education system is designed to give people a permanent disadvantage.
And the people that run the system, prefer to keep it like that. That’s the past and the present.
And if we look to the future, the way things are going, it won’t change.
The world is at the threshold of a new power cycle, where technology will determine who shapes the next fifty years.
AI, for instance, is already determining access to jobs, capital, visibility, and rights, and if people of color remain absent from its design and ownership now, we’re looking at another couple of generations of generations of disadvantage.
The transition will not be inclusive by default.
But again, that’s how the system pre ers it I can tell you.
In 2022 I applied for a license to start an Afrocentric secondary school in Amsterdam. And the Municipal council said no, that’s gonna result in segregation.
Meanwhile research has shown that children perform better when they are educated from within their own community.
So The system would rather send Black children to school, where they are not taught how to be stronger people.
The system is wasteful.
So if your question was how come we’re still here at this junction, this is how.
This is how come these men still exist, who think that only white men can do it. The education system is designed to teach white people that they’re superior.
Ask yourself: How much have you learned in primary and secondary school about Black people? ut you’ve learned a lot about white men, right? Everybody has learned about white men. You’ve learned about Napoleon, but you haven’t learned about Toussaint Louverture from Haiti who beat him in a war.
That’s by design. The education system is designed to teach everybody that white men are superior.
And what makes me cringe is that people often don’t see it. While these rich white men have accepted their superiority as norm, many Black people have accepted their inferiority as well. They have not learned about Louverture either. Or any other Black leader that could have instilled a sense of pride.
Because of colonialism, we maintain a system that was created two centuries ago when everything was in service of the white men.
It’s a vicious circle and we have to break it.
History doesn’t pause. Those who build and organize now will define the next era, and those who don’t will be managed by it.
Ma o m X said “I you on y study today, you wi never understand how yesterday was designed to control tomorrow ”
NOW
I always say that Black people hold the moral compass of the world.
lack people knew they were not to be anybody’s slaves, even when slavery was a legal system. That’s why they fled the plantation.
And when Black people fled in search for freedom, white people called it a sickness. There was a white doctor in the US who said that Africans who left the plantations suffered from drapetomania.
Europeans believed slavery was justified. Remember the statue of the man and the boy and the dogs? Who set the dogs on them?
Go back to the Black leaders who got killed because they were saying that the system was wrong.
Black people started the Black Lives Matter campaign against police brutality and white people were asking “but what did you do to get shot? Just follow police commands. If you just behave …

I saw this video yesterday and I debated long if I should show it today.

Abnormal is normal. Some people defend abnormal. Back in the day when I was catching the train more often, I would notice that people would not sit next to me. The train would be packed but the seat would be free. And when I wrote about it, people would tell me “how do you know that they didn’t wanna sit? Not everything is racism! Stop being so sensitive”
And we’ve have had our share of police shootings of Black men here in the Netherlands too, whose only crime was that they were doing things. I can tell you their stories.

Are we hostages?
We have all seen this right?
Sometimes I make the mistake of reading the comments under these stories. People agree with the cop kicking the woman, because that’s what a Moroccan deserves.
It’s normal.
Seriously! And now everybody in the US is facing ICE and immigration protests in countries that got rich through pillaging and plundering the same countries the migrants come from.

Remember when police shot two white people, and then all of a sudden everybody was in shock? Black people have been warning us for centuries, but everybody looked away. Because it was just violence against lack people. And that’s normalized.

The cringeworthy thing is that just a few days before they short Renee Good and Alex Pretti, ICE agents also killed a black man. His name was Kim Porter, but he did not get the kind of news coverage that the white victims got.
Violence against Black bodies is normalized.
It’s always been like that
It’s not getting worse.
It’s just being filmed more often.
It is a mistake to believe that the status quo is acceptable. The reality is that marginalized people, are being left behind. And that can never be good.

To turn the tide, we must fix our education. We need to start teaching our children better.
All of ‘m.
Black children need to learn more about their identity. And white children need to learn about more than white identity. The education playing field needs to be leveled.
At this moment, many of our children are disengaging because they do not recognize themselves in what they are taught. They know it’s outdated.
The curriculum is not about them, and schools are preparing them for jobs that will soon no longer exist, in a world that will be fundamentally different from the one we know today.
The question is: are we ensuring that everybody is ready?
The world needs to start listening to people of color.
Because this is about more than Black people.
Reminds me of this poem by Martin Niemöller

“First they came or the socialists, and I did not speak out—
First they came for Black people …..
We have to start making sure that people of color are afforded the same opportunities like others. We have to level the playing field. And It starts with fixing racism. It will benefit everybody.
We have to stop pouring acid into the swimming pool!, because that benefits nobody.
And that brings me to you.
It does not have to be difficult to bring change. All you have to do is have some sense and bring that change.
Your generation can be the hero in this story.
ecause you’re perfectly situated in time and space to bring that change.
We know better now.
I can bitch and moan all day about what is wrong with society, but I also must admit that I have witnessed some pretty amazing developments in my lifetime.

Barrack Obama was president of the US; a Black man. A black woman was vice president. Ok there is an idiot in the White House now, but honestly: I have witnessed the impossible. And that impossible is normal to you.
I am less worried about your future because I know that you do not know the world any different. But we should not take it for granted. A lot of work has been done by previous generations to get us here, but there is also a lot of push back.
We saw the video of these angry white men marching against migration. That’s genuinely scary.
I get attacked by them regularly.
They want me to give up and accept my place. Either under rule of white supremacy or with a measure of success that they allow. White supremacy wants me to be happy that I am here and not there, while it’s white suprema y that destabi i ed there and caused me to be here.
It wants me to relinquish my culture and my identity.
OH MY GOD Donald Trump shared a photo of Barack and Michelle Obama as apes last week. And people were defending it. Black people were defending it.
Do not take the things for granted that are now normal.
If you’re white this world was designed for you to thrive, but don’t thrive alone. Dare to take a stand. Don’t waste potential because it’s covered in a different skin color than yours.
It took the Netherlands till 2023 to finally give a weak apology for slavery. And white people did not believe it was necessary and now they are resisting the notion of reparations.
While all Black people are doing is fitting themselves in a system that is not really built for people of color to thrive.
And what I know about your generation is that this is not how you want to continue.
So listen to people of color. Try to see things from their perspective
When you’re able to look at the world from different perspectives, you see more.
You learn thing like fixing your language. Like that the correct term for “minorities” is “marginalized people.”
And that white people are not lank”; explain to them why they are WIT (white). (When people call themselves Blank, I love to tell them “oh yes, Blank like me … I’m pure, unblemished. that’s what Blank means right? So I’m Blank too. And then I just sit and watch their brains short circuit)
Even when it’s lack people that use incorrect language. (I know Black people who call themselves NEGER.

I know Black people who support zwarte Piet. When you meet them, correct them.
Explain to them that they are being racist against themselves.
I do that every day. During a presentation I gave two weeks ago, the facilitator kept using the word “slaves”. That slaves were taken from Africa. No! people were taken from Africa. Nobody is born to be a slave.
Fix your language.
A lot of the work has already been done.
There are many heroes who have done a lot of work in the past.
There are a lot of heroes who do the work now.

But A lot of work is still left to be done.
A lot of wrongs to be righted
I was talking to a friend of mine last week about social systems that are not in place in former colonies, like where I am from. Things that are normal here, are non existent there, like proper facilities for people with disabilities. We came to the conclusion that if we want a just world for the future, we need to go back to 1863, when Europeans freed Africans from slavery. If at that moment Europeans had stopped with marginalization, and discrimination and segregation.
IF they had given back what they had taken away.
If they had closed the holes
Yeah then….

The past happened.
The present hurts all of us
ut you’re the future and you can make sure this doesn’t happen again.
Don’t look away.
Thank you