From exploitation racism to competition racism

Anne-Ruth Wertheim

In this piece I describe how I came to predict in 1993 that in the years to come the prevailing racism would change its character and become more vicious. There would be a shift from exploitation racism to competition racism. I did research in adult education where immigrants from many different countries were taught in the Dutch language. Unfortunately, it seems that my prediction has come true.

From exploitation racism to competition racism

My father, the lawyer and sociologist Wim F. Wertheim, taught me about the difference between two kinds of racism – something that would be very important for my later research into adult education. If you look closely, you can see that exploitation racism is now increasingly making way for competition racism.

It all began with what I learned from my father, the scholar and activist Wim F. Wertheim (1907-1998). From 1936 to 1942 he was a professor at the College of Law in Batavia (as Jakarta was known when Indonesia was still a Dutch colony), and from 1947 to 1972 professor of South-East Asian Sociology and History at the University of Amsterdam. The books he wrote included Evolutie en Revolutie, de Golfslag der Emancipatie (‘Evolution and Revolution, the Tide of Emancipation’, 1970) and Third World, Whence and whither, Protective State versus Aggressive Market (1997). From 1965 to 1998 he was a fierce opponent of General Suharto’s 32-year dictatorship in Indonesia, in which thousands of intellectuals were imprisoned without trial for many years. In all that time the Suharto regime was never challenged by Dutch governments.

In 1931, the young legal official had travelled out to the Dutch East Indies to work for one of the landraden – courts where those of the sixty million Indonesian inhabitants who broke the law were tried during the colonial period. The approximately 300,000 Dutch inhabitants of the colony (0.5% of the total population) were not required to appear before landraden; instead they were tried by proper courts similar to those in the Netherlands, where defendants were guaranteed a fair judicial process. Although my father knew before he went there that these arrangements were unfair to Indonesians, he and my mother did not yet have major objections to the colonial system. But once they saw it for themselves they very soon changed their minds, and they were glad he was able to find other work within six months. Their doubts about the fairness of the system would eventually make them unconditional supporters of Indonesia’s independence struggle.

My father taught me that racism is not a uniform phenomenon, but occurs in two guises: exploitation racism and competition racism. The targets of exploitation racism are looked down on as backward, stupid, lazy and superstitious. They do hard, dirty work in appalling conditions for meagre wages, and those responsible for the system try to justify it by propagating such prejudices. Competition racism is very different, and almost the opposite: its targets – who are serious competitors on the labour market – are claimed to be devious, untrustworthy and even dangerous. And the people who propagate such prejudices use this to try and justify why these competitors are excluded, scapegoated and, in extreme cases, deported and even killed.

Experience of antisemitism

An important aspect of my parents’ perception of their experience during the colonial period was that my father was Jewish and had experienced antisemitism at first hand. My mother was not Jewish, but always supported him. He was born to Dutch parents in St. Petersburg in 1907, when Russia was still ruled by the tsars and pogroms were a regular occurrence. Jews could only live in St. Petersburg if there were no non-Jews available to do their jobs, and so my grandparents kept the fact that they were Jewish well hidden, even from my father and his brother. When the Bolsheviks came to power in 1917 and the family fled to the Netherlands, there was no longer any way to keep the secret, for in this country the name Wertheim was immediately identifiable as Jewish. Although antisemitism was less virulent here, my father still experienced a lot of it.

In colonial society, apart from the Dutch minority which effectively wielded political power, there was a minority of a larger size: Indonesians of Chinese descent. Their ancestors had come to the Indonesian archipelago from the Chinese mainland centuries earlier, and the community played an important part in trade. They were governed by the same colonial legislation as the Indonesians, and so they also had to appear before landraden rather than proper courts if they broke the law. But the main point here is that they competed with all the inhabitants who also made their living from trade – from Indonesian street vendors and market stallholders to the staff of Dutch firms trading in the rubber, coffee, tea and tobacco that were harvested for Dutch plantation owners by Indonesian labourers. Soon after my father began working in colonial society he noticed that there were prejudices not only about the Indonesian population, but also about this Chinese trading minority. And here he easily recognised what was so familiar to him from antisemitism: they were said to be devious, untrustworthy and sneaky, as well as dangerous, because they were determined to take things over. Because such insinuations were intended to undermine Chinese competition, he called this kind of racism competition racism. It was his own experience of antisemitism, and the attitudes to the Chinese minority that he observed in the Dutch East Indies, that made him come up with the idea of competition racism.

My research

In the talks I had with my father, racism – and of course the comparison between competition racism and antisemitism – were often mentioned. Since I began my research into racism in the 1990s, I had witnessed less exploitation racism and more competition racism following the arrival of foreign workers in the Netherlands.

In the early 1990s I studied racist ideas and behaviour among teachers at several adult-education institutions spread throughout the East of the country. I was then working at the rural training centre ‘De Hunneschans’ in Uddel which had been asked to carry out such research. Teachers of Dutch to immigrants in four different institutions turned out to have approached their superiors with questions of their own. Their students were Moroccan, Turkish, Kurdish, Tunisian, Libyan, Somali, Eritrean, Ethiopian, Nigerian, Indian, Iranian, Afghan, Sri Lankan, Malaysian, Filipino, Indonesian, Vietnamese, Chinese, Surinamese, Dutch Caribbean, Yugoslav, Spanish and Australian immigrants, including refugees, as well as native Dutch-speakers with minimal schooling.

The teachers stated that they were sometimes shocked to discover they had prejudiced, negative ideas about whole groups of people from particular countries, and feared that such ideas might find their way into their teaching. They were also worried about the irritation they felt in conflicts with certain students, and their own tendency to blame everyone from the same country in such cases. They had started doing this work precisely because they were concerned about the fate of immigrants who were finding it hard to cope with life in the Netherlands, and the last thing they wanted was to succumb to racist feelings or behaviour. To me it seemed incredible that they had summoned up the courage to report this to the management of their institutions.

During their lessons I took notes of what I observed, not only in what they said but also in their body language. I also held extensive interviews with the teachers, in which I confronted them with each other’s statements and asked them to put their ideas about all this on paper. What struck me most of all was their tremendous commitment to their students and their ability to deal with groups of people from so many different cultural and linguistic backgrounds. They turned out not only to know a great deal about those cultures, but also specific features of the students’ original languages and the problems they created for people learning Dutch. They did their best to put the students at ease, tried to persuade those who were about to drop out not to do so, especially women and illiterates, and even made home visits where necessary. But what impressed me most was their readiness to think about, and seek solutions to, what they saw as the risks of developing racist feelings and behaviour.

When I started my research I really only expected to find the prejudices that are part of exploitation racism. The instructions I had received for my research project had given me the feeling that this mainly involved underestimation and low expectations based on the painfully widespread ideas about people’s countries of origin. And I did indeed encounter such ideas and feelings. Teachers often said they were despondent about how slow some students were, and were then tempted to judge everyone from that country of origin negatively – or else they said they increasingly caught themselves putting the blame for students’ shortcomings on opposition from their home situations, especially if these were Islamic. More evidence of contempt could be found in what teachers saw happening among various students, usually between Dutch-speaking and what were still known as ‘foreign-born’ (allochtonen) ones – the N-word was used to one Nigerian student, followed by the comment that he was still basically a nice guy. But teachers also observed signs of such contempt among foreign-born students, such as Vietnamese who were mocked by people from other countries for their pronunciation of Dutch.

What I never expected to find were signs of the prejudice that are part of competition racism, such as distrust, fear and envy. Looking back, I must admit that I was led astray by my own prejudices. I thought of the immigrants from all those different countries who came to learn Dutch primarily as people who deserved sympathy because they had suffered so much and were simply trying to survive in a completely new situation. I only expected feelings of distrust, fear and envy towards groups that were successful, such as the Jews in pre-war Europe and the ethnic Chinese in the colonial Dutch East Indies, or the Asian trading minority who were expelled from Uganda in 1972. All those minorities faced envy in the countries where they lived from people who were competing with them in the same labour markets and therefore had an interest in discrediting them. But this was the Netherlands in the 1990s – and surely no-one here could feel threatened by such immigrants, who were disadvantaged in every respect and could not even speak Dutch properly. Yet during my research I came across signs of this – not so very many, but they were unmistakable.

And primarily among the immigrants themselves. Teachers told me they had expected to see solidarity among the students from the various countries, since they had all shared the same fate, but on the contrary they saw a great deal of intolerance – when taking the best seats during lessons, obtaining personal advantages when timetables were changed, or when the pupils were divided into groups. Still more remarkable were the examples the teachers gave of student behaviour that annoyed them personally, especially because they said they were worried about their own thoughts and feelings. One example: ‘Iranians provoke conflicts and try to make you take sides – they’re clever, often highly educated, and sometimes refugees.’ Other teachers who agreed with this statement said that such experiences made them inclined to think of all Iranians in the same way – or, whenever something annoying happened, to think ‘probably another Iranian’. Similar things were said about Somalis, who supposedly had a tendency to be ‘uppity’. And I noted comments that you could not rely on Somalis, Eritreans and Ethiopians to do their homework even if they said they would – you always had to check.

Such observations gave me food for thought, and I discussed them with my father. This was not about disrespect or contempt for people, but the very opposite. The teachers displayed feelings of distrust, sometimes even fear. And their references to the high levels of education of the students who annoyed them perhaps pointed to a degree of envy – for by no means all the teachers were themselves highly educated. These were small clues, and there was no proof, but what we appeared to be seeing here was a mixture of different prejudices – suggesting a combination of exploitation racism and competition racism. But if in the 1990s some competition racism still existed alongside the still surviving exploitation racism from the colonial period, what would this portend for the future?

Increasing competition racism

To me it seemed most likely that the children and grandchildren of foreign workers who had arrived here during the 1960s would since have received an education that enabled them to compete more and more effectively on the labour market with the ‘original’ population – and so increasingly become targets of competition racism. At the same time, there would be less and less reason for the ‘original’ population to look down on these descendants, and the remnants of exploitation racism would gradually be disappearing. So there was now a shift from exploitation racism to competition racism. My father found this an interesting new idea, and in my final report Schurende culturen (‘Clashing cultures’, 1993) I eventually wrote this:

‘What we are already seeing, and what will probably continue in the future, is that racism towards foreign-born people will increasingly be competition racism rather than exploitation racism. We could currently speak of a “mixture” of the two kinds of racism. But in the light of what has been said above, it may be feared that this process will continue, and that what was once relatively mild racism will make way for increasingly violent forms.’

‘Gevestigd, maar niet thuis’ (‘Settled, but not at home’), a recently published report by the Netherlands Institute for Social Research, expresses surprise that the children of immigrants are experiencing more discrimination than their parents did – an integration paradox, for it might be expected that such children, having grown up here, would suffer less discrimination than their parents who first came here as foreign workers. The report provides interesting explanations for this, for instance that the second generation feel more subject to discrimination because they were born and bred here, and are citizens of the country and part of society. But the researchers seem to assume that there has been no change in the nature of this racism in all those years. In a reader’s letter to the Dutch daily newspaper NRC I therefore wrote that the discrimination experienced by descendants of immigrants has become increasingly malevolent:

‘What the foreign workers faced was the ancient colonial exploitation racism with its contemptuous assumptions that they were stupid and backward. But they had children and grandchildren who received an education and could compete more and more effectively with the “original” inhabitants. Because these descendants were now so like them, they feared them all the more. The nature of the prejudices changed: you no longer heard people saying that the newcomers were “backward”, but instead that they were sneakily grabbing Dutch people’s jobs and houses, were untrustworthy and had a dangerous religion. The second generation have faced envy and fear, which are the mainsprings of competition racism, and they are well aware of it.’

That there would be a shift from exploitation racism to competition racism was something I also mentioned in an article in the NRC in 2004: ‘If we are not careful, our fear of immigrants will culminate in mass racist violence.’ After my father died in 1998, I continued my research into whether the shift was continuing, and it became increasingly clear that my prediction was coming true. I repeatedly wrote about this on my website, not only in Dutch but also in English on the Islamologist Juan Cole’s authoritative website Informed Comment – and eventually in my latest book, De poster met de blauwe ogen, Getuigenissen tegen rassenwaan (‘The blue-eyed poster: testimony against racial prejudice’).

And now, in 2023, there can no longer be any doubt that racism towards the descendants of immigrants is increasingly competition racism. This is bad enough, and all the more reason to fight racism in all its forms – especially while the threat of the mass violence that can accompany competition racism remains. The way in which asylum seekers are now treated, and the response in this country from a not inconsiderable part of the population, are not a good omen.

Anne-Ruth Wertheim (b. 1934) studied biology at the University of Amsterdam, where she taught the subject for many years. Later, her childhood experience in Japanese internment camps and her Jewish background led her to study and fight racism.
www.Anne-RuthWerthem.com