White Innocence - introduction chapter reading

I had quite a few notes on this reading, primarily writing down the key sentences that conveyed Wekker's ideas most clearly to me. I've attached the document to this webpage, but will also list a few quotes whose ideas I found the most compelling.

“Slavery broke the world in half, it broke it in every way. It broke Europe. It made them into something else, it made them slave masters, it made them crazy. You can’t do that for hundreds of years and it not take a toll. They had to dehumanize, not just the slaves but themselves. They have had to reconstruct everything in order to make that system appear true.” (Interview by Paul Gilroy 1993, 178) - Toni Morrison

In the public sphere the assimilation model of monoethnicism and monoculturalism is so thorough that all signs of being from elsewhere should be erased. Those who can pass as white are in an advantageous position here. // Within the category of autochtoon there are many whose ancesters came from elsewhere, but who manage, through a white appearance, to make a successful claim to Dutchness

Until the last decade of the 1900s, there's been a stark juxtaposition between the Dutch imperial presence in the world since the 1500s, and its almost total absence in the Dutch educational curriculum, in self-image and representation such as monuments, literature and debates about Dutch identity.

The claim of innocence is a double-edged sword: it contains not-knowing, but also not wanting to know.

Notes:

👀 at my art:

Further reflctive writing:

Will be added asap