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On November 2nd, 2016, the news was published that Dutch governement, spearheaded by Centraal Bureau voor de Statistieken and Wetenschappelijke Raad voor het Regeringsbeleid (WWR), abolished the term ‘allochtoon’ and ‘autochtoon’ from their jargon. Being a pivotal moment for cultural divers Dutch urbanites, both De Volkskrant as well as NRC.next sent their reporters out into the streets to find out what the ‘vox populi’ was. De Volkskrant went out to Rotterdam Central Station and NRC.Next took Amsterdam CS, to searched for the ‘allochtoon’ and him/her asked for a response. Let’s look closely to the search results.
NRC.Next representation of the allochtoon
De Volkskrant’s representation of the allochtoon
What do we see? What is presented to us? Do we see an image of the allochtoon? Do we see a representation of a person of whom “at least one of the parents is born outside of the Netherlands, regardless of its own country of birth.”. Or do we see something else?
I was not there when the reporters made the decision to approach specifically this selected few, but what is presented to us, is a series of ‘non-whites’. The photos in both newspapers, show that the selection was based on visual identifyers as skin-color, non-western appearance and islamic symbolism (i.e. headscarf). Most of all, it repeats this image to the reader: the ‘allochtoon’ equals ‘non- white’ and therefore the dichotomous classification based on etnicity overlaps the classification of race.
