The differences that matter

By Stijn Rombouts

Last Thursday, we had an activity with Sarita Bajnath on microaggressions. Microaggressions are small forms of derogatory insulting or offensive behaviour towards someone's identity. This often happens unconsciously. Sarita's workshop was also a call for all of us to speak out against these microaggressions and against discrimination. To answer that call, I would like to share a story I had the opportunity to tell for GroenLinks Province Utrecht earlier this year.

Piet, a general board member at GroenLinks Province of Utrecht, asked me in January if I would like to give a talk at the province's New Year reception together with GroenLinks De Bilt and Zeist.  Diversity was his preferred topic. For a moment I hesitated, because I wasn't sure if it was so ideal now as a white cisgender straight man to start talking about diversity. It's not really my subject either: I'd rather talk about windmills. But like most men, I like hearing myself talk just a little too much, so in the end I couldn't resist the temptation.

GroenLinks often expresses its ambition to become a more diverse association and this is no different at DWARS. Our organisations are largely made up of white people who once studied at university somewhere or lived next door to a university. Our diversity is the result of the choices we make, or the choices we don't make. Indeed, by not considering a possible choice, we automatically choose the norm. If you were born in the Netherlands and you have never thought about what you eat, you probably eat meat. After all, the choice to eat meat is the norm here. I will give a few examples of the choices we make within DWARS and GroenLinks.

During the summer tour of DWARS, we make choices at which schools or courses we will and will not visit, within our association we use words like gremia and a congressional presidium, and political nerds like myself use far too long sentences in talks that in no way resemble B1 Dutch anymore and where at the end of the sentence you already don't know where it actually started. This makes us less accessible. Not only within our association, but also in our language to the outside world, we make choices. For instance, some of GroenLinks's job applications still say M/F instead of M/F/X. The topics we address are also choices. The topics we see as important and the words or frames that we choose determine who represents GroenLinks.

Kitchen minis and plastic koalas

I learnt more about this while working. I work in home care. As a home care worker, I help people who still live at home with housework they can no longer do themselves. This story passes by three of my addresses.

The first address is at a residential care centre in Kanaleneiland. Somewhere at the top of one of the residential towers, I cleaned for a Dutch woman in her late eighties late last year. I was filling in for her regular help. In the course of my work, I often come across remarkably furnished flats and this one was no exception. From behind the bed, I was stared at by a large porcelain doll and I honestly shouldn't think that would be the first thing that would look at me in the morning. The rest of the flat was not much better. With my duster, I went from picture frames to Albert Heijn kitchen minis and from plastic koalas to some kind of pink elephant she had gotten from her granddaughter.

Over coffee, I asked her what it was like to live in the care home. She started a whole story about one of the residents behaving strangely. He had casually burst into a woman's flat below him and started smoking. He had been very intimidating, but that was logical according to my client because, after all, he was Moroccan and those people are naturally angrier. It's in the blood. The sons, according to the lady, were even more annoying, as they worked against the process to get him admitted, when of course he shouldn't be living here at all. He was a danger to everyone. She then ate her lunch, which had been brought to her by her Moroccan sister from the care home.

My second address that day was with the aforementioned Moroccan gentleman. His name is Hassan, and he suffers from dementia or something similar. This causes him to sometimes lose the hoover when I am vacuuming, and using the lift sometimes turns into an extended walk through the whole building. Sometimes he forgets to open the door for me and he watches Animal Planet all day. He has not been admitted yet because it is difficult for him to cope with changes. Changes stress him out and the care home cannot meet all his needs. Halal food, for example, is a problem.

So because communication is sometimes a bit difficult, I have good contact with one of his sons: Adil. I talk to Adil about all sorts of things. He gives me advice on my job applications and we regularly talk about politics. We talk about the housing market in Utrecht, the greenery in the neighbourhood, but also about the hardening of society. Society is becoming tougher towards people with a different background: migrants like Adil. In this, Adil also blames GroenLinks. GroenLinks (and other left-wing parties) have shifted too much and gone along with the thinking of right-wing parties: reducing people to what they contribute economically to society.

The arbitrary yardstick

This reminded me very much of an article I read by Zihni Özdil on tolerance as a condition for immigration. In the article, he wondered: why, as an immigrant, are you not allowed to integrate as a welfare mother? Immigration, according to Zinhi, has for years been measured along three rulers: education, work and crime. Therefore, if you are well educated, have a job and are not a criminal, you are well integrated. The Dutch left is also guilty of this. Migration would be good to combat an ageing population, crime rates would drop, and more and more migrants find a place in the labour market. In this frame, demented Hassan is a burden and the sister who brings soup is well-integrated.

In the fear of especially not wanting to be dismissed as naive or ‘looking away’, left-wing parties make strange leaps, and start talks about the maximum number of migrants that can be admitted. We call this realism. Or worse, we don't respond. Engaging in debate on cultural issues would be political suicide or play into the hands of right-wing parties. We react with shock when Baudet or Wilders make another racist statement, but play an away game every time. More and more the conversation drifts away from what should be our story: fundamental equality. I am not entitled to a bigger slice of the pie because I was born in the Netherlands. After all, I haven't done anything for that. The debate drifts away from our values and Adil no longer feels represented by us.

To come back to integration for a moment, let me describe a third address where I recently came to help. Close to my home in Kanaleneiland, I was allowed to fill in for a regular help for a Moroccan woman of around 70. She was annoyed that I came to help as a man (there are not many men in home care), but after some grumbling she welcomed me into her home anyway in poor Dutch. Quickly she grabbed a headscarf, so I would no longer see her hair, and showed me the way to the all-purpose cleaner.

I could be cranky right now about the fact that this conservative Muslim woman treats me nastily, that she doesn't speak Dutch even though she has lived in the Netherlands for at least 20 years, but then I put the focus back on the ruler Zihni mentions. The ruler that only applies to outsiders. Indeed, when I look around the apartment, I see my grandmother's home in everything. From the still-wrapped soaps on the toilet, because she liked the packaging too much to unwrap them, to the birthday calendar. From the photos of the children and grandchildren to the heavy wooden pieces of furniture that you barely get off the wall when vacuuming. My grandmother's girlfriends probably also think a man can't clean and being snappy conservative is not exclusively a phenomenon among Moroccan elders. In short, I could focus on the differences that don't matter. Rooibos tea versus mint tea, Jesus statues versus a picture from Mecca.

The differences that do matter

I could also focus on the differences that do matter. The fact that when her grandson walks into a shop the shop staff are told that a suspicious young man has walked in and if he can be watched a bit more closely. The fact that her daughter has probably already had to talk to her children about racist bullying at school. That she did get directly affected by the statements of Geert Wilders and Thierry Baudet.

Now I want to go back to my conversations with Adil for a moment. Adil came to the Netherlands about 30 years ago. He voted alternately for GroenLinks and Labour Party in the elections. During one of our conversations, I asked him what he had actually voted for in the last year's provincial elections. He had not voted. He had lost confidence. He did not feel represented by any left-wing party.

We won't have an election in 2020. But that doesn't mean we have a year's rest. We have exactly one year to show Adil that GroenLinks can also be his party. A year in which we do not respond to right-wing frames, but show what we stand for. Because of the corona crisis, we are forced to be flexible in a lot of ways. We will have to connect in a different way with people who have the same ideals as us. Let us then use this crisis as an opportunity to engage with new groups as well. Then 2020 will be the year when DWARS AND GroenLinks become more inclusive and diverse associations.