The accusation that Black Pete—the blackface character at the center of the annual Sinterklaas festival—is a racist caricature has recently become a staple of the Dutch culture wars, leaving media and cultural producers in a quandary over the figure’s meaning and fate. This essay focuses on two recent seasons of the widely popular children’s television program Sinterklaasjournaal. The show deployed new storylines to maintain the innocence of the traditional celebration in the face of mounting antiracist critique by refabricating truths that not only erase the colonial roots of Black Pete’s blackness but also deny any connection to race altogether. In so doing, however, these storylines further destabilized the main Sinterklaas narrative, akin to an everyday lie that is about to be discovered. Endeavors by storytellers to disconnect the Black Pete figure from racial blackness resulted in representing the character as racially white but covered in soot, while conveying the message that the origin of dark skin is dirt. The narrative strife over Black Pete illustrates the fragility of the Dutch absencing of race, as the latter proves to resurface in the very effort to obliterate it. Instead of artificially reconstructing the semantic unity of discrete stories, the essay introduces a deconstructive approach that apprehends consistency as an effect of power. It shows how various actors work at making changes in the hegemonic story to maintain its coherence in response to threats from alternative accounts, in the process generating new contradictions and challenges that require further narrative work.

中文翻译：

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从来没有种族主义

指责黑皮特——一年一度的圣诞老人节中心的黑脸人物——是一个种族主义漫画，最近成为荷兰文化战争的主要内容，让媒体和文化制作人对这个人物的意义和命运陷入困境。本文重点介绍广受欢迎的儿童电视节目《圣诞老人日报》的最近两季。该节目部署了新的故事情节，在面对越来越多的反种族主义批评时保持传统庆祝活动的清白，通过重新编造真相，不仅抹去黑皮特的黑人的殖民根源，而且完全否认与种族的任何联系。然而，在这样做的过程中，这些故事情节进一步破坏了圣诞老人的主要叙事，类似于即将被发现的日常谎言。讲故事的人努力将 Black Pete 形象与种族黑人分开，导致将这个角色描绘成种族白人，但身上覆盖着煤烟，同时传达了一个信息，即深色皮肤的起源是污垢。关于 Black Pete 的叙事冲突说明了荷兰人没有种族的脆弱性，因为后者证明在努力消灭它的过程中重新出现。这篇文章没有人为地重建离散故事的语义统一性，而是引入了一种解构方法，将一致性理解为权力的影响。它展示了各种行为者如何改变霸权故事以保持其一致性以应对来自替代帐户的威胁，在此过程中会产生新的矛盾和挑战，需要进一步的叙事工作。