“You have to deeply analyze the history and colonial reality. The one of dutch enslavement and domination of a Black race in order to liberate your people.” _ Helmin Wiels
The gospel of Wiels reminds Curaçao every time that the creole white and dutch white ruling elite systematically degrades Black political, economic, financial, social and cultural leadership. They do it slick in a camouflaged manner that destabilizes a structural power build up of Black futures on the island or straight up in your face under the guise of ‘dutch bluntness’. This time around it wasn’t from an elite corner but more so out of the serpentine depths of the dutch white hooligan economic class.
This week the co-owner of the Miles Jazz cafe Hans Andriessen enraged and financially frustrated by Covid regulations hurting his business in the dutch white gentrification district Pietermaai called Curaçao a monkey island. A disgraceful act for a venue embraced by Black musicians on the island and named after Miles Davis a Jazz legend, who he himself endured heaps of violent US racism.
Its a sad but sobering racial reality check to see how dutch white entrepreneurs have the boldness and feel that comfortable to spew raw racist vernacular on facebook to express their natural hidden racial hatred and ill perceived white might against a people that put food in their mouths and money in their pockets that they could never make back in the netherlands.
Online media research in Curaçao reveals that discussions of Black souls by the dutch public is a pestering epidemic. A daily doses of dutch racism can be found at news site knipsel krant curacao, the prime example of digital Black character assassination. A space where the lives of Caribbean Blackness is dehumanized with full approval of the dutch community. The normalization of calling Curaçaoans of African descent on their island “apes and jungle monkeys” has been going on for years on the internet if not for decades, centuries when the dutch are within their own private circles.
However the until now digitized backlash this has caused doesn’t have its origins in this week’s specific hate speech. The root problem is that this racial denigration is an expression of a dutch white hyper plunder ideology. It’s anchored in the mind of the average dutch on the island and in the Netherlands. Black people are still enslavable to them, still seen as their property and Curaçao is their treasure island to become rich and wealthy on the backs of the people. And thankfully there’s a growing Black minority who understands the importance for a power struggle to take back the economic and financial ownership out of the hands of white thievery to design their own destiny.
The outrage forced the other co-owner(s) of Miles Jazz cafe after several days of stalling and scheming to issue a statement that they suspended their partner. The fiery pressure of Black breath made them close their facebook account and instagram. The silence and white privileged defense of the dutch community and the Chamber of Commerce and VBC (Curaçao business association) is telling and not surprising because by nature they have to stand by their racist hooligan to prevent a domino effect and maintain an injust white wealth dominance in Curaçao. Calls for boycotting or shutting down the cafe have been send out. The ancestral normal would most obviously be to enforce a Black owned entrepreneurial takeover and bring back life in Pietermaai the way it was before it got gentrified by dutch vulture project developers. Only 8 days are left to commemorate the May 30th 1969 racial labor revolt and this dutch Corona induced racism has all the atmospheric opportunities to spark a creative liberating flame to burn down this colonial calamity that has been a genocidal catastrophe for ages. Backing up our words and sentiments is essential and transforming them into a real life moves is the ancestral normal of taking steps on the journey for Black freedom.
Triunfo di Sablika 