KCan we still talk about racism without immediately going into panic mode? Anyone who has still not kicked the hellish addiction called X (it’s harder than you think) will probably think not. For example, if the newspaper decides to headline this piece with the word ‘racism’, online chatter will mainly be about ‘woke nonsense’ and ‘left-wing nonsense’. Anyway, it is of course already too late for a constructive conversation, especially at X.
Yet that constructive conversation is exactly what presenter Sosha Duysker aims for in her three-part documentary series Out of the cramp. Duysker wants us to ‘get out of the jam’ when we talk about racism, and wants to do this, for example, by offering history lessons and manuals.
To find out whether such a constructive dialogue is possible, Duysker, who grew up in West Friesland, also examines her own past. In the second episode, for example, this leads to the reading of a blog in which a very young Duysker writes that she ‘just’ comes from the polder, ‘would rather eat Dutch pot than Surinamese’, and that she is probably the ‘whitest n**** in is who you’ve ever met’. Duysker is very dismayed: apparently this is what growing up in a predominantly white environment did to her.
The triptych gradually develops into a self-examination into how Duysker has started to arm himself against forms of racism. For example, how she called herself a ‘bounty’ as a teenager, because her white friends always called her that. The program becomes ‘a Pandora’s box’, because Duysker has apparently hidden her feelings about racism for years.
In addition to this in-depth self-examination, Duysker and her team want to outline the historical, biological and semantic background to racism. All this, of course, topped with a nice, smooth and playful NPO 3 sauce (imagine if the younger viewer drops out!). In the meantime, through voicemail messages and from an ‘anonymous confessional’, we hear stories from people who tell their stories about the many sensitive examples of that ‘cramp’.
It is fascinating and it is important, although throughout the series I kept wondering which target group exactly is being tapped. After all, the group of viewers who will probably benefit most from this will probably not be ready, but will probably start tweeting angrily based on the announcement.
Partly for this reason, Duysker’s conclusion that we should continue to engage in discussions is quite commendable. We also heard in the documentary series how difficult that is, because several people of color appeared to have little desire to participate. Too much hassle, and afraid of all the shit they would have to deal with again.
Keeping talking may sound like a not very original solution to a complex problem, but in 2024 such a dialogue about racism seems more utopian than logical.
