When Saskia Blom cycled past the parade welcoming St. Nicholas to the city of Den Bosch in the south of the Netherlands, she immediately noticed a familiar sight in the crowd: “Black Pete.” Blom parked her bicycle and approached the woman who had darkened her face with brown makeup to play the role of St. Nicholas’ helper. She asked why the woman felt the need to blacken her skin. Then she spotted another performer wearing a curly black wig and confronted him as well. “I admit I was annoying,” Blom later told me. “I kept asking the same question. But I see it as my responsibility to fight racism.”
What she did not expect was the way security at the event in mid-November would respond. Four guards twisted her arm behind her back and pushed her against a wall. It hurt. “Nobody stood up for me, nobody protested,” Blom recalled to New Lines. “I was only released after the parade had passed.”
Blackface season begins each year in the Netherlands in mid-November, when St. Nicholas traditionally arrives from Spain — so the story goes — on a steamboat packed with presents for well-behaved children. For decades, the white saint was accompanied by “Black Pete,” or “Zwarte Piet” in Dutch: white performers in blackface, wearing Afro wigs and oversize red lips, behaving clownishly as they assisted the saint.
The traditional explanation — that Pete’s face is blackened by soot from sliding down chimneys — never accounted for why his clothes remained spotless, or why his face was painted a uniform, glossy black. Only in November 2011 did the mainstream conversation begin acknowledging the practice’s racist roots.
That month, artists and activists Quinsy Gario and Jerry Afriyie launched their campaign, “Black Pete Is Racism,” by quietly attending the St. Nicholas arrival in the western city of Dordrecht wearing T-shirts bearing that slogan. They stood silently, a short distance from the public. Yet police soon forced them into an alley and violently arrested both men. The images drew national attention. Suddenly, blackface and racism were at the top of the public agenda.
“We wanted to force a breakthrough,” Afriyie recalls. “Protest was the only tool we had. As Black Dutch men, we couldn’t struggle through established politics or through the courts — those institutions were themselves shaped by racism.”
Fifteen years after that first intervention, Black Pete has largely vanished from the country’s streets. Persistent protest, public debate, and negotiations with local organizing committees and mayors have nearly eradicated the practice. Parliament and governments have not wanted to intervene with a legal ban on Black Pete, arguing it was an issue that society had to solve. Now, most municipalities refuse to subsidize parades featuring blackface. Over time, more municipal councils and mayors were convinced that Black Pete was indeed racist, and decided that the mayor would no longer officially welcome St. Nicholas if he was accompanied by traditional Black Petes. Instead, sooty-faced Petes, with small dirt smudges and without Afro wigs or exaggerated red lips, now dominate the festivities.
You could say Black Pete has been kicked out, echoing the English-language name activists have given their movement: Kick Out Zwarte Piet. But has he, really? In Den Bosch, activists like Blom still spot Black Petes, and are treated as the troublemakers when they speak up. Sometimes, they appear with alternative colorful face-paint versions in pink, purple, green or even blue, but still with Afro wigs or large golden hoop earrings. Other times, they appear with a token smudge of soot painted over an otherwise solid dark foundation. Similar scenes still unfold in other towns.
In some rural communities, resistance to change is open and proud. In Yerseke, a small town in the southwest known for its mussels and oysters, about a hundred performers in pitch-black blackface appeared this year. “Black Pete is black and nothing else,” locals said. When Kick Out Black Pete demonstrated there last year, residents hurled eggs, stones and fireworks at them.
These lingering pockets of blackface, along with the rise of the extreme right in Dutch politics, make it clear that racist traditions have not been fully dismantled. In the recent parliamentary elections on Oct. 29, the social-liberal party Democrats 66 won by a narrow margin, leaving Geert Wilders’ far-right Party for Freedom (PVV) in second place, with each party holding 26 of the 150 seats in parliament. Government formation is now underway and may result in yet another coalition in which a radical-right party, JA21, plays a role.
Wilders’ party does not function in the same way as traditional parties — it has no formal membership — and the previous government it was involved in lasted less than a year. It struggled to address urgent national issues, from agriculture and nitrogen regulation to the housing market, and largely scapegoated immigrants and asylum-seekers for long-standing policy failures.
These developments mirror trends in other European countries, where radical and far-right movements are gaining ground. According to Sylvana Simons, a public intellectual, former Amsterdam council member and lawmaker for the radical social-progressive party BIJ1, the Dutch example is rooted in a long historical pattern. “For generations, the Netherlands has told itself that it is always on the right side of history, that we are never the villain,” she explains, “not during colonialism and slavery, not during the Holocaust, when a high percentage of the Jewish population was deported and murdered. We embraced that comfortable ‘truth.’ We never dig deeper or take an honest look.”
Several parties in parliament are challenging the growing recognition of the Netherlands’ colonial past and history of slavery. They reject the formal apology King Willem-Alexander issued in 2023 during Keti Koti. Meaning “the chain is broken” in the Sranan Tongo language, this refers to the annual celebration of the abolition of slavery in Suriname on July 1, 1863, which has recently become a day of commemoration in the Netherlands. On the same date, the Netherlands also officially abolished slavery in its other Caribbean colonies, including Curacao, Aruba, Bonaire, St. Maarten, Saba and Sint Eustatius.
The movement to commemorate the event gained momentum after Suriname gained independence in 1975, sparking a wave of migration that brought some 40,000 people to the Netherlands. In addition to organizing the annual Keti Koti festival, Amsterdam unveiled a monument to the victims of slavery in 2002, a milestone that has since inspired other towns and cities to follow suit.
The “Kick Out Zwarte Piet” campaign also aims for July 1 to become a national holiday, similar to Juneteenth in the United States, which commemorates the end of slavery and celebrates Black freedom and culture.
But with the current shift to the right, this may not be realized anytime soon. Several right-wing parties dismiss institutional racism entirely, including framing Black Pete as cultural heritage in need of protection.
This dynamic makes the disappearance of Black Pete “paper thin,” says Simons. “The Netherlands is an inherently right-wing, racist country. Yes, society has shifted on Black Pete, but the change has not been internalized. With the rise of the extreme right, the reins may be loosened again.”
Similar developments have taken place in other Western countries in recent years. In the United States, military bases were renamed to remove Confederate commanders, though some names later reverted under the Trump administration. In the United Kingdom, the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 and 2021 saw statues of colonial-era figures toppled, sparking debates over whether such monuments should be removed entirely or instead “put into context,” a response aimed at preserving them.
Research on how populations in former colonial powers view their colonial past shows that the Netherlands ranks particularly high in pride: 50% of respondents said they were proud of the country’s colonial history, while only 6% expressed shame. By comparison, in the U.K. 32% said they were proud and 19% said they were ashamed.
“From a helicopter view, the fight against Black Pete was won years ago,” Simons said. “For me, the real turning point came when businesses stopped using Black Pete altogether — no more wrapping paper, no shop displays, none of it.” She was referring to the countless Sinterklaas-themed products that appear in November and early December: Everything from gift wrap to dolls, biscuits and decorations once featured the character. Today, images of St. Nicholas, his horse, presents and steamboats remain, but Black Pete has disappeared from the shelves. “Recently, I saw a Black Pete at a demonstration and people looked at him with disgust. But institutionally, the battle isn’t over,” Simons said.
Afriyie agrees. The fight against Black Pete was always part of a broader struggle against institutional racism. “Our role was to take up this specific theme,” he said. “An activist must have a vision. Without one, you move with the wind and never feel urgency. We set a 2025 deadline, and we were determined to meet it. We forced the breakthrough. Now we trust we’ve activated enough people to continue the work where necessary.”
He offers advice for those people, including Blom: “You can act alone, but acting in a group, with comrades, is better. If in your municipality, things go wrong, you can send letters to the council and have it signed by as many people as possible. Send it to the mayor too. There are [templates] that you can use online.”
Anthropologist Francio Guadeloupe places Afriyie’s strategy in a broader historical context. He is not surprised Black Pete was dismantled in under 15 years. “There had always been objections, but never a movement like this one. Having a movement behind you is essential.”
He links that movement to the trajectory of Black communities in the Netherlands, many of whom arrived from the Dutch Caribbean and Suriname in the 1970s and ’80s. “They didn’t immediately have influence,” he said. “They resisted Black Pete from working-class positions, but only later gained access to spaces where their voices carried further.” This applies to activists like Gario and Afriyie, who are highly educated, articulate and often artists, traits that helped them reach white, middle-class audiences. “The middle class likes talking to itself,” Guadeloupe notes, “so it helps to have activists from that group too, who can eloquently express themselves.”
The next phase of the anti-racism movement will require new leaders, he says, and they will emerge around issues that affect Dutch society more broadly while also having racialized dimensions — such as housing and workplace exploitation. “Refugees are unjustly blamed for the lack of housing, and it is often immigrants who are being exploited in precarious jobs. These struggles are intertwined.”
Recognizing those intersections, Guadeloupe argues, is essential for moving anti-racism forward. “The extreme right is getting stronger, but I see it as the last gasp of the old order. If emerging movements for justice and equality stand together, those clinging to the old order will not win.”
Simons agrees. “This is the tragedy of emancipation and resistance: It is a never-ending battle. People want to check a box — struggle won! But the work is never done. We must keep explaining and defending what has been achieved.” She sees groups of white people who now paint their faces even darker in defiance, but she also sees a broader shift: “Fifteen years ago, those fighting Black Pete were the exception. Now they are the norm.”
Yet the rise of the extreme right frightens her. “I have grandchildren. They do have something to fear.”
In Hengelo, a town in the east, dozens of children recently dressed up as Petes for a local St. Nicholas celebration. They wore colourful outfits and berets, but none were in blackface; some had a bit of “soot” on their cheeks. This generation is growing up without blackface. The shift is clear, helped, perhaps, by the fact that a little soot is far easier to remove than a thick layer of face paint.
For Afriyie, the point is not that a few Black Petes remain. It is that blackface is no longer considered innocent. When he began his campaign in Dordrecht, he did not blame white Dutch people for the tradition. “They never had the choice to understand Black Pete as racist,” he said. “People were kept ignorant.” The campaign aimed to end that ignorance, and to transform the St. Nicholas holiday into a celebration “for all children,” white and Black.
Now, he is more direct. “If you know the history and still choose blackface because you claim it’s tradition, then you are a racist. Then you care only about your own child, not about all children.”
“Spotlight” is a newsletter about underreported cultural trends and news from around the world, emailed to subscribers twice a week. Sign up here.