Turning Point Pim Fortuyn Series 2 – Shit from Kollum and the racialization of migrants and Muslims

After establishing the importance of Fortuyn in the Dutch political landscape in the first post of this series, I will now introduce the concept of racialization in this post and the next. Before I get into the question of how Fortuyn racialized Muslims, it should first be established that he did so and what racialization actually is. In this post and the next one I will explain that through racialization we single out a set of people, where the idea exists that all individuals in this group belong together and have specific characteristics. Examples from the past include the racialization of Jews, black people, Roma and Sinti and the Irish by groups that were dominant in the areas where these minorities lived. Here, racialization refers to a very diverse group of people in ethno-cultural, religious and socio-economic terms who are grouped under one category, Muslim, as if they were a homogeneous bloc. To show how Fortuyn does this, I will first address his argument about the culture of asylum seekers in a 1999 column. I then discuss what this cultural argument has to do with racialization by further explaining the concept of racialization in relation to Fortuyn’s ideas about culture. The relationship between ideas about culture and racialization may not be self-evident because what does religion have to do with race? I will deal specifically with this in the next post.

‘From a different culture’: culture as an explanatory factor

In 1999 Pim Fortuyn wrote the column ‘Kollumerstront’ [Shit from Kollum]:

‘Last Friday there was an extensive report by Netwerk, the program immediately after the eight-hour nos-journaal, about the riots in Kollum. Led by the politically correct journalist Fons de Poel (kro). The report showed us the facts. De Poel asked the questions and commented. These were terrible racists who opposed the relocation of an asylum seekers’ centre from outside their village to the outskirts of their village. Shame! De Poel was supported by the editor-in-chief of the Leeuwarder Courant, who also called it a disgrace and called on B and W to keep their backs straight and to continue the relocation against the will of the people.

Now for the facts. In the Spring, the community of Kollum in Friesland was startled by the brutal murder of Marianne Vaatstra (16 years old). She was found after a night out with her throat slit in a meadow near her parental home. Slitting a throat is something a Frisian does not do. In the village there were immediately rumors that it must be a foreigner, from a different culture, and yes, they lived in the asylum seekers’ center outside the village. A reasonable thought. Not for the Public Prosecution Service, which considered this line of thought to be racist.’ [my emphasis]

Here, Fortuyn uses an idea about ‘the other culture’ as an explanation for the notorious murder and rape of Marianne Vaatstra in 1999, a young girl from the northern region of the Netherlands. The column contains various ingredients that we constantly see in the ideas of Pim Fortuyn. For now, I’m mainly concerned with the italicized part. We see how Fortuyn responds in agreement to the idea that specific behaviour can be traced back to a ‘different culture’ that is located within the Netherlands: in the asylum seekers’ centre. That is a remarkable argument, because culture is by definition diverse and not always coherent but also contradictory. People’s actions are never determined solely by culture. In addition, ‘the culture’ of the foreigner is a very broad concept. Moreover, all population groups in the world have severe sanctions for murder and rape. The point here is not that culture never plays a role in crime, but with all the diversity and with the existing sanctions on rape and murder, culture is not an explanatory tool. We now know that the crime was not committed by an asylum seeker, but by a ‘native’ from the area: a white Dutchman. If it is indeed the case that a Frisian does not slit a throat, why now dan? After the actual perpetrator became known, there was no discussion about how Dutch culture had played a role in this crime. And given the above arguments, that would not have contributed at all to the understanding of such a horrible act. For an excellent analysis of how ‘race’ featured more broadly in this horrible case, see Amade M’Charek’s (2022) article Race and sameness: on the limits of beyond race and the art of staying with the trouble.

Fortuyn’s writing shows the construction of an ultimate inferior Other, which is seen as a threat to property, to ‘our’ way of life, ‘our’ valuable symbols, ‘our’ self-determination and ‘our’ culture or ‘our’ race. How the idea that Muslims are such a group arose and how important divisions in society are constructed, legitimized, and reproduced is the subject of study of racialization of Muslims. In this blog essay I use that concept to analyse how Fortuyn reproduces ‘the Muslim’ as the ultimate Other with his political doctrine, and in what way his ideas are both a break and a continuation compared to earlier periods in Dutch politics and in minority policies.

Revisiting racialization

There are many different ways to conceptualize racialization and a really good starting point for me was Murji and Solomos’ edited volume (2005) Racialization: studies in theory and practice and Barot and Bird’s (2001) article Racialization: the genealogy and critique of a concept as well as Reeves’ (1983) book British racial discourse: a study of political discourse about race and race-related matters. I will turn to the latter later on to explain a little more on how I use the concept of racialization but basically always in combination with other concepts such as interpellation, securitization and surveillance.

In my understanding of racialization, I follow the approach of the sociologists Anthias and Yuval-Davis who, among other things, advocate attention to groups that are racialized in ethnic or religious terms. From a historical point of view, the classification of mankind is in ‘races’ not only dependent on biological ideas about ‘races’, but also based on ideas about culture and religion, for example in the case of Jews and Irish. How this mixture of ideas comes about is highly dependent on place and time. As historian and anthropologist Stoler shows in her study of Dutch rule in the Dutch East Indies, the Dutch administrators were constantly trying to regulate the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized. This was not as heroic as it seems, all the more so because both groups were not homogeneous and because there were constant contacts between them and children were born from mixed relationships and marriages. The definition of colonizer and colonized was ultimately a mixture of ideas about “race,” gender, culture, religion, and class. European history mainly concerns the Roma and Sinti, the Jews, Muslims, Arabs and black people (there may of course be overlap between these groups). In other words, there are ideas about ‘culture’, ‘race’, ‘religion’, ‘class’ and ‘gender’, and with the help of the concept of racialisation we dissect the creation, expressions and consequences of such ideas.

For understanding how this happens, I will turn to Hochman’s defense of the concept of racialization. His article is an interesting one because he provides a useful (but perhaps slightly to strong of a) distinction between thin and thick concepts of racialization (p. 1247):

“In offering a definition of racialization, my aim is not merely descriptive: to capture how race scholars have been using this term. My aim is ultimately stipulative: to show how the concept ought to be defined and used. A descriptive approach would be unsuccessful because “racialization” is not used in the same way by all race scholars. Some use the term in a thin sense, where it is a shallow descriptor or tag applied when a group is explicitly labeled as a “race.” Others use the term in a thick sense, where the concept tells us something about how racialized groups are being understood, and so has content.”

He rejects the thin concept as unhelpful, misleading and counterproductive and sets on to come up with a thick definition by first trying to define what ‘race’ is. Here it is probably useful to note that Hochman is an anti-realist (Hochman 2013, 2021): he does not accept the reality of race and dismisses it as a useful analytical category which is why he rejects racial formation theory (Omi and Winant 2015) because it presupposes the existence of race, according to him. I have some doubts here. It seems to be that racial formation is first and foremost interested how racial ‘groups’ emerge whereas racialization tries to explain how racial ‘groups’ are done as an ongoing process.

Hochman comes up with a definition of racialization, basically a form of biologization in a constructivist sense, but his writing on the topic is actually most clear when he answers to the critics of the concept, such as (and in particular Goldberg). In short, Hochman (2019: 1256) states in response to the criticism that the concept is ambiguous, that “racialization is a descriptive concept, rather than a normative concept with some necessary connection to racism.” The concept is not able to distinguish between what counts as racism and what does not and does not mean that we can do away with race. Racialization in Hochman’s words is a process of false biologization of large groups of people which leads “groups to be understood as major biological entities and human lineages, formed due to reproductive isolation, in which membership is transmitted through biological descent.” (Hochman 2019: 1257). Racialization is then a word to describe different things that can be done to particular selections of the population. Hochman’s quite consistently uses the word ‘racialized groups’ or ‘groups’ and even though the thinks Brubaker’s critique of ‘groupism’ is not applicable; I think we should be careful with that.

In a recent article Rethinking racialization – the analytical limits of racialization, Deniz Uyan (2021) criticizes Hochman’s conceptualization for not identifying the agents and mechanisms behind racialization, not clarifying the relationship between racialization and racism, naturalizing racialization, groupism and that it does not identify the origins of racialization. To a certain extent I share this criticism. Although I would agree with Hochman that racialization does not equal racism and racism is only one of the potential outcomes of the process, I’m not so sure if it wise to leave out racism all together. Because in that way categorizing a particular section of the population as Muslim would be independent from longer histories of racism in which in fact the figure of the Muslim already plays a role. In particular if he says that ‘race’ is the operative word as it difficult to see ‘race’ without racism or does it mean that, according to him, racism is the consequence of thinking in ‘races’ instead of ‘race’ as the product of racism?

Fortuyn and ‘our way of life’

In the case of not identifying the agents and mechanisms behind the process I agree with Hochman that it not useful and probably even detrimental to do so, because they differs per context and identifying these should be part of the analysis (Hochman 2021). It does mean however that racialization should be used in tandem with other concepts such as securitization, interpellation, social movements and so on. But there are some general dimensions that usually occur in the process. In sum, and following Reeves’ (1983) work, the process or cycle of racialization has four dimensions:

1) Categorizing a diverse set of people into a homogenizing label foregrounding one particular aspect of their ascribed identities;

2) Explaining the behaviour of these people based upon stereotypical and prejudicial accounts of their ascribed culture, phenotype, religion;

3) Evaluating their behaviour and presence in such a way that it puts them lower in the social hierarchies

4) Prescribing particular practices of how to engage with the individuals and collectives within this category.

In the process of racialization, it involves categorizing a minority (labeling it as a Muslim, for example), giving certain generalizing explanations for behavior (‘Islam made them do it‘), giving value judgments about that group based on a negative generalizing idea about culture, ‘race’ and/or religion (Islam as a backward culture as Fortuyn would argue later) and finally an idea of how to deal with such a group. These four dimensions can be intertwined. For example, the label ‘Muslim’ can immediately imply a negative value judgment. In short: Muslims do the things they do because Islam would determine their actions, Muslims do not integrate because of Islam since their religion is at odds with Dutch culture, and that religion is dangerous and backward and therefore something must be done with Islam.

The way in which Fortuyn uses the concept of culture in his column is nevertheless in line with how people themselves often see their culture: as coherent and something that can be clearly distinguished from other cultures. What this essay is about is how Fortuyn transforms such a view of culture into a political ideology. Fortuyn wrote this column in 1999, exactly between the first and second publication of (Against) The Islamization of Our Culture, in 1997 and 2001. This text is telling and typical of how Fortuyn used his views on ‘culture’ as an ideology to defend an idea about Dutch identity on the one hand and to present specific groups of Dutch people and their faith as the unacceptable Other on the other. In his work (Against) The Islamization of our culture, mainly Turkish and Moroccan Dutch and / or Muslims are portrayed as the Other. Given the current discussions about Islam and Muslims, this is perhaps not surprising and many opinion makers and politicians ‘mention’ Islam and Muslims as a problem for today’s society. This usually refers to 9/11, the murder of Theo van Gogh, radicalisation and Salafism. But even in the nineties, Turkish and Moroccan Dutch are already at the bottom of the social ladder, according to studies into ethnic hierarchies (with white, so-called native Dutch people on top). That position at the bottom of the ethno-racial hierarchy is therefore older and predates Fortuyn’s political rise. Furthermore, Fortuyn alternately refers to Moroccan and Turkish Dutch and migrants from Muslim-majority countries and reduces his image of their culture to Islam.

When we then look at Fortuyn’s ideas in the forthcoming blogs, we will see that he mainly uses the concept of culture to racialize Muslims. In the nineties, this cultural doctrine was used in the policy and political debate with regard to the increasing migration to Europe. That migration would threaten ‘our’ way of life by importing alien cultures that would be invigorate with ours. The emergence of such cultural doctrine in policy and debate in Europe must be seen in the context of conservative politics in England, in response to the inability of anti-racists to provide a cohesive response to the electoral success of the Front National France and as a way for political elites to regulate the distinction between residents of a country and migrants without the use of the word “race.” In the  next post, coming on 5 May I will elaborate on this a little more.

Literature

Anthias, Floya. en Nira Yuval-Davis (1992) Racialized Boundaries: Race, Nation, Gender, Colour and Class and the Anti-Racist Struggle. London: Routledge

Barot, Rohit, and John Bird. 2001. ‘Racialization: the genealogy and critique of a concept’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 24: 601-18.

M’charek, A. (2022). Race and sameness: on the limits of beyond race and the art of staying with the trouble. Comparative Migration Studies, 10(1), 1-16.

Hochman, Adam. 2013. ‘Against the New Racial Naturalism’, The Journal of Philosophy, 110: 331-51.

———. 2019. ‘Racialization: a defense of the concept’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 42: 1245-62.

———. 2021. ‘FURTHER DEFENSE OF THE RACIALIZATION CONCEPT’, Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race, 18: 31-48.

Murji, Karim, and John Solomos. 2005. Racialization: Studies in theory and practice (Oxford University Press: Oxford).

Reeves, Francis W. 1983. British racial discourse: a study of political discourse about race and race-related matters (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge).

Stoler, Ann Laura. 1992. ‘Sexual Affronts and Racial Frontiers: European Identities and the Cultural Politics of Exclusion in Colonial Southeast Asia’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 34: 514 – 51.

Uyan, Deniz. 2021. ‘Rethinking Racialization: The Analytical Limits of Racialization’, Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race, 18: 15-29.