Translation of an interview with Ewoud Butter for the Dutch opinion website and monthly journal De Kanttekening, dated 12 March 2025
How did you get involved with racism?
My childhood in the Dutch East Indies had a fundamental impact on my thinking about racism. I grew up in a colonial society in which white Dutch people were at the top, Indonesians were at the bottom, and the Chinese community were somewhere in between. I took it for granted – until the Japanese invasion in 1942.
Everything changed overnight. We Dutch were arrested and locked away in internment camps, the men separate from the women and children. Suddenly we were the ones who were oppressed. In the camps we saw how the power structures in society were repeated in a completely new form. People who had previously been privileged now had to submit to others. This greatly influenced my view of how power and racism work.
Halfway through the war the Japanese, imitating their Nazi German ally, began to isolate Jewish internees. My sister, little brother and I were in a women’s camp with my mother, and my father was in a men’s camp. My father was Jewish, but my mother was not. That meant we were half-Jewish, and the Japanese threatened to transfer us to a Jewish camp without our mother. She had to pretend to be Jewish in order to stay with us. We were then moved with her to a Jewish camp which was worse than the camp we had come from, but not so bad as the Nazi camps in Europe. After the war, nearly all of our family in Europe turned out to have been killed in the Holocaust. My Jewish grandparents committed suicide on the day the Netherlands surrendered to the Nazis. These experiences greatly affected my ideas about racism. I learned from childhood what it means when your life is determined by your identity.
Your father, the sociologist Wim F. Wertheim (1907-1998), was the first researcher to distinguish between different kinds of racism. Can you tell us what these were?
As a child and young person in Europe my father experienced for himself the discrimination suffered by Jews. Later, as an adult in the colonial Dutch East Indies, he was confronted with two different forms of inequality. He saw how the Indonesian population were exploited and mockingly stereotyped, while the Chinese commercial minority suffered from racism that greatly resembled the antisemitism of his youth. On the basis of this my father distinguished between two kinds of racism. First there was exploitation racism, based on contempt and a sense of superiority. This was visible in colonialism, with white rulers believing they were bringing ‘civilisation’ to ‘primitive’ peoples. He also noted the existence of competition racism, based on jealousy, distrust and fear. This occurs when an oppressed group becomes economically stronger and is seen as a threat by the dominant group. Later I examined these different kinds of racism more closely and applied them to today’s situation.
You have always emphasised the part that jealousy can play in racism. How did you gain this insight?
I only really began to realise it when I was working in adult education in the 1990s. I was doing research at a training centre in the eastern Netherlands for people giving Dutch language lessons to migrants and refugees. Similar signals had come from various educational institutions in that part of the country. Their teachers said that they increasingly caught themselves expressing racist ideas. They said things like ‘If a student does something negative, I immediately think “Of course, he’s Iranian, or Ethiopian, or whatever.”’ They knew it was wrong, but they couldn’t help it, and they asked our training centre to look into it. I attended the lessons, and I saw a pattern: the teachers’ negative feelings were not just based on contempt, but also on jealousy. Many of the teachers had to teach highly educated refugees – for instance, engineers and doctors from Iran. That caused friction, for they themselves were usually less highly educated. The teachers tried to impose their authority, and some of them deliberately applied stricter rules to these students. What at first seemed to be individual prejudice became a collective pattern of exclusion. People don’t like thinking about jealousy, and if it happens it’s mainly about the person who is jealous, and that jealousy is really a bad thing, but still happens. But it’s almost never about the target of the jealousy, the person who has to suffer the jealous person’s aggression – which can be terribly fierce.
I talked to my father about this – he was then still alive – and asked him ‘Could it be that this competition racism will only increase?’ For at the time this still only involved highly educated refugees, but the children and grandchildren of migrant workers would eventually also become highly educated. And that would greatly increase jealousy.
My father found this fascinating. He was writing an article for the Dutch literary journal De Gids, and included this idea in it. He didn’t quote the source, and at the time I was rather cross about that. Of course he didn’t think of me as a sociologist, but as a biologist – even though this was my idea! But his enthusiasm did encourage me to explicitly mention my prediction in the final report on my research, which was published in 1993.
In your later publications you state that racism in our society is increasingly taking the form of competition racism. How do you account for that?
The nature of racism is changing. It’s no longer just about contempt, but increasingly about jealousy. The old colonial structures are fading, which means that minorities are no longer in their traditional subordinate position. That is creating resistance. But there is also a refusal to see it.
For years I wrote about the shift from exploitation racism to competition racism. And then in 2022 the Netherlands Institute for Social Research (SCP) produced its report Gevestigd, maar niet Thuis (‘Settled, but not at home’). This showed that children of migrants suffer more discrimination than their parents did. According to the report, greater participation in society means greater exposure to exclusion. And I thought ‘At last – just what I’ve been saying all along!’
To understand the dynamics of racism in this context, it is interesting to consider a theory my father had developed about the emancipation of minorities. In it, he identified three different stages. First the ‘Us too’ stage, in which a minority group seeks equal rights and access to the same opportunities as the dominant group. In this stage the focus is on social recognition and integration. Second comes the ‘Only us’ stage, in which the group seeks to define and identify itself, sometimes at the expense of other minority groups. The third and final stage is ‘All of us together’, a utopian situation in which full equality has been achieved and the various groups no longer see each other as competitors, but as part of a shared society. Some people are still clearly in the second stage and focusing entirely on their own group, whereas others believe that true emancipation only occurs in the third stage, when solidarity with other oppressed groups is taken for granted.
So competition racism is manifested not only in terms of money, housing or jobs, but also in cultural power?
Absolutely. Look at the heated social debate about Zwarte Piet (‘Black Pete’), whether or not this figure in the Dutch Sinterklaas (‘Santa Claus’) tradition is racist. People think it’s only about contempt. But I think the real problem is about who determines what ‘Dutch culture’ is. It’s a power struggle about national identity. Who is to decide what is or is not a Dutch tradition? The established group doesn’t want ‘newcomers’ to have a say in this – and that’s pure competition racism.
“Swarte Piet and Sinterklaas,” Digital, ChatGPT, 2025
Racism as an addiction
In order to understand racism better, Wertheim believes it is important to realise that it can also be psychologically addictive. ‘It gives people a sense of group identity. Think about how bullying works – a group feels strong by joining forces against one person. Racism works in precisely the same way. It increases the feeling that you’re part of an in-crowd by having a common enemy. Racism activates the same reward mechanisms in the brain as addiction. The idea that you are “better” than someone else, or that you are part of a group against an outsider, creates a feeling of euphoria. That’s what makes racism so hard to eradicate.’
The sociology of not knowing
Wertheim also uses another of her father’s theories to explain the difficulty of fighting racism: ‘The theory of “not knowing”, or rather of “not wanting to know”. Some things are deliberately ignored. Racism continues to exist because people choose not to see it. You see the same mechanism everywhere: in how Dutch people repress their colonial past, or how institutional racism is played down.’
How do you see the recent focus on antisemitism in the light of your own and your father’s theories?
Of course, antisemitism never left Europe. When I tried to make light of it in talks with my father, he always said ‘Don’t underestimate it!’ He himself never wanted to go to Israel, as long as the Israelis continued to treat the original inhabitants, the Palestinians, in that way. If that ever changed, he said he would like to visit a few good friends who had gone to live there after the Second World War. But
it never got that far, and he died in 1998. Afterwards the Israelis gradually managed to stretch the concept of antisemitism further and further by making it include any criticism of how they were treating the Palestinians. I don’t think that there has been more focus on antisemitism, but that the whole concept has been stretched, so that anyone who supports the Palestinians is considered suspect. And that has been accompanied by a disturbing increase in Islamophobia.
I think it’s crazy how few people seem to see the resemblance between antisemitism and Islamophobia. They’re always treated as if they were each other’s opposites. But there are more similarities than differences between antisemitism and Islamophobia. And both are closely connected with competition racism. The focus is not on contempt, but on jealousy, distrust and fear. European Jews were not massacred because they were so greatly despised – quite the contrary. And the increase in Islamophobia is also more about distrust and fear than contempt.
English version printed here with author’s permission.
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