Gloria Wekker Quotes & Sayings

Questioning this most dearly held core of the Dutch sense of self not only is felt as a direct attack, it also means that the nonbeliever, the antiracist killjoy, is putting himself or herself above "us," which in itself again runs deeply counter to another strand in the Dutch sense of self: "gelijke monnikken, gelijke kappen" (literally, equal monks, equal cowls), which invokes the deep egalitarian strand in Dutch self-representation. Critical self-reflection, moreover and ironically, is a scarce commodity in a culture that delights in imagining itself as "nothing," "just normal" (Ramdas 1998), without specific characteristics, much less infused with deep racializations. The point of not knowing, racial ignorance, and innocence has long passed. — Gloria Wekker