White Innocence in the Dutch Academy | Gloria Wekker

In my talk, I will focus on „White Innocence“ (Wekker 2016) in the Dutch university. In line with this dominant Dutch sense of self, our universities are characterized by the centrality of a (mostly) silent, but self-flattering conception of whiteness. The dominance of whiteness is evident both in terms of the demographics among professors and, to a lesser extent, among students and staff, but also and importantly in terms of the content of education. „Show me your curriculum, and I will tell you who is in power“: a quip borrowed from South African educator Professor Jonathan Jansen, that is unfortunately equally applicable in many European academies. The chances that a student in the Social Sciences or the Humanities will be exposed to knowledge about, for example, the Dutch colonial past, the slave trade, slavery, colonialism and even current multi-racial/ ethnic society are slim. Calling attention to whiteness in the academy, how it is manifest and what its detrimental consequences are for society as a whole and for all students, is not done, as „race“ has, by dominant consensus, been declared missing in action in The Netherlands: „we do not do race“. I will reflect on these and other pressing issues during my presentation.

Gloria Wekker is a feminist intellectual and a social and cultural anthropologist, specialized in Gender Studies, Sexuality Studies, African American Studies and Caribbean Studies. Her research interests include the following themes: constructions of sexual subjectivity in the Black Diaspora; the history of the black, migrant- and refugee Women‘s Movement in the Netherlands, gendered and ethnicized knowledge systems in the Dutch academy and society, and Higher Education in the Netherlands. In April 2006, Columbia University Press published "The Politics of Passion. Women‘s Sexual Culture in the Afro-Surinamese Diaspora" for which she received the Ruth Benedict Prize of American Anthropological Association (2007). Another recent publication which she co-authored is "Je hebt een kleur, maar je bent Nederlands. Identiteitsformaties van geadopteerden van kleur" (with C. Asberg, van der Tuin, I. en N. Frederiks, Utrecht University 2007). Her new book "White Innocence; Paradoxes of Colonialism and Race" will be published by Duke University Press (2016)).