Online Interview

Issue 31/3 (2007/3)

“Wanting to know everything in a complex world”

An Interview with Allison Blakely

By Suzanne de Graaf

In the fall semester of 2007 Professor Allison Blakely visited the Netherlands, a
country that he studied extensively for his acclaimed book on racial imagery,
Blacks in the Dutch World: The Evolution of Racial Imagery in a Modern Society
(Indiana University Press, 1994). His other work on the black experience in
Europe, Russia and the Negro: Blacks in Russian History and Thought (Howard
University Press, 1986), won the American Book Award in 1988. Professor
Blakely published numerous articles in a myriad of national and international
journals. Blakely is currently Professor of European and Comparative History and
George and Joyce Wein Professor of African-American Studies at Boston
University. In 2006 he was elected president of the Phi Beta Kappa Society, and
in the spring of 2008 he will be a visiting fellow at Harvard University’s W.E.B.
Du Bois Institute.

On the 6th of November, I had the opportunity to attend his seminar “The Other
Culture Clash: Is colour prejudice a thing of the past?” at Leiden University.
During these two hours, we discussed the evolution of racial imagery in the
United States and Europe from early modern times to the present, as well as the
increasingly complex questions that surround the formation of identity in a multicultural
society. This proved to be a good starting point for the following interview,
in which I was able to ask Professor Blakely not only more about these
issues, but also about his career, his current research, and—especially interesting
for a Dutch MA student like me—his experiences in the Netherlands, which ultimately
led to Blacks in the Dutch World. And so a conversation followed about
the appeal of history, the development of a career, the joy of researching new subjects
and the challenges of investigating an ever more complex world—all with
a slight Dutch flavour.

How did your interest in history begin?
It began seriously when I was a teenager in Portland, Oregon. I cannot really explain
it in logical terms, but I trace it back to one experience that I had while riding on a
bus in the early 1950s. It was one of these buses with electronic attachments to a
cable. Somehow the cable became disconnected, and the bus had to stop. While I
was sitting there all of a sudden I started wondering, “Where do I fit in all of this?”.
As I grew older I became a really passionate reader. I spent a lot of time in the
library. It was a good way—from my mother’s perspective—to keep me off the
streets and stop me from getting into trouble with some of the other boys in my
neighbourhood. So I made her happy, and it made me happy when I was not in
school to spend a lot of time in the public library. I became very interested in academic
subjects and I enjoyed school. When I went to college at the University of
Oregon I did not know what I wanted to major in for certain. I thought I wanted to
become an engineer, so I began thinking of engineering as my chosen profession.
But I discovered there were very few electives in terms of choices of subjects for
classes to take in an engineering program. So I became more interested in the
liberal arts—history, philosophy, literature, and the life sciences. I wanted to learn a
lot about a lot of different things, and when I came to a choice in the advanced
years of college I discovered that history seemed to be the one formal discipline that
included a lot of my interests. So history for me was a way to not make a choice of
specialising. By the time I decided to go on to graduate training you had to choose
some specialty; I decided I would specialise in Comparative History or something
broader than just U.S. history. At that time there was no formal field in comparative
history or world history, so because I am an American, and because I had taken
almost exclusively American history in my undergraduate training, I decided to specialise
in European history.

Because you had not covered that previously?
I had taken one course. I decided deliberately to specialise in a broader kind of historical
area. By studying something beyond what I mistakenly thought I would naturally
know because I was an American, I would have a more comprehensive kind
of competence in terms of understanding history when I got a degree. I thought
I could know American history on my own but if I wanted to understand the world,
I should specialise in that broader framework and then I would have more at the
end. And not only that, I decided to specialise in Russian history because I was very
interested in revolution. I was very interested in Russian literature—that was one of
the things I had begun to read as a teenager. And I have been very happy with the
way it turned out. My doctorate is in modern European history with a specialisation
in Russia—but once I had the degree I could finally pursue that dream of doing
comparative studies, and that is what I have done with my career. I started with a
focus on Russia but I branched out in a way that made me more of a scholar of the
history of democracy. Even in Russian history my specialty was the Russian revolutionary
movement, but focusing on popular democracy, which that movement was
aiming at. I have always been fascinated with that. It was only later in my career that
I developed this interest in European dimensions of the African diaspora. And of
course that was an outgrowth of my own background, being of black African
descent and noticing, as I progressed in my studies, that this was a neglected area
of history. So it was some place where I thought I could make a contribution
because in the meantime I had gained a number of foreign language competencies
so I could do formal research in five languages. I could go deeper in trying to piece
together some of this history of the African diaspora than a person who had the
interest, but didn’t have the tools to be able to do primary research.

What made you study so many languages? Did you study them out of interest,
or did you need them for your research?
Initially I started with Russian in high school because I wanted to read Russian literature
in the original. And then I discovered I enjoyed learning the languages so I
added German (at least the reading knowledge). For my doctoral degree [at the
University of California, Berkeley] I had to be able to conduct research in at least
two foreign languages, and then in the course of the actual research I wanted to
pursue, I had to learn French and Dutch because of my chosen areas to explore.

Was there a specific event that triggered your interest in the history of the
Netherlands?
There was a specific event. I was actually in the Netherlands conducting research
in Russian history at the International Institute for Social History (IISG) in
Amsterdam. I was looking at archives that were not yet officially open containing the
original documents from one of the Russian revolutionary parties, the socialist revolutionaries.
I made a couple of visits to the Netherlands to explore those materials
just in summer research trips. And I happened to be in the Netherlands in the midnineteen-
seventies, when Surinam became independent [in 1975]. And what triggered
my interest in actually studying Dutch history was experiencing a certain
amount of racism after the sudden increase in the black population in the
Netherlands itself. I had no warning that there would be this kind of experience
because I had found the Netherlands so different from the United States up until
that point. But then all of a sudden, because I began to speak a little Dutch in the
shops and on the street, I began to be treated as if I was a Surinamer. And to my
surprise, that was not very pleasant in those days. And that was such a surprise that
I wanted to know: what were the historical reasons that something like this could
occur in the Netherlands, which had a reputation for tolerance?

That’s very interesting! Originally we wanted to ask you if you had found any differences
between the Dutch self-image of tolerance and your own research. Now
it turns out you did not even have to do research, because you experienced it
yourself…
That’s right, it was not about reading other people’s accounts. But I had the positive
image also from my own experience because I had been treated so well during
those first visits in the mid-1970s. I just thought this place that had sheltered the
American Pilgrims and Jews from Iberia, that had sheltered Huguenot refugees
from persecution in France, and was a major place to give asylum to people suffering
various late-twentieth-century kinds of turmoil in their own countries, was a safe
haven. Then I was brought down to earth by this realisation that even here you
could have these changes in public attitudes. I think it was mainly because of the
sudden appearance of the new population in the late 1970s, which put a certain
pressure on housing, or maybe the job market. It is not clear to me whether it was
really competition for jobs or just the perception of competition. Maybe the perception
is more important than the reality. I think there was a perception among the
Dutch population that there was this unwanted sudden influx of outsiders who
looked and acted differently. Maybe this was just too much of a shock to take without
some kind of backlash. I did not really understand it because I had just assumed
that these kinds of things were not there at all. I just thought this was such a wonderful,
peaceful, civil society. Don’t get me wrong, I still recognised that the Dutch
laws and the Dutch social system were some of the most advanced and inclusive in
the world. I still realised that, but I was just surprised at what I perceived as nevertheless
the presence of some of the same kinds of negative attitudes that I was so
familiar with in other societies. The Netherlands, France and Scandinavia had a reputation
that for being places that especially African-Americans, musicians and just
ordinary people, had often found to be a relief from the racism they routinely experienced.

You mentioned that around this time, you were starting to speak some Dutch. Did
you encounter these negative new attitudes when talking to people, or just walking
on the streets?
In a way, I think both. In the shops I was looked at more suspiciously than before. I
was accustomed to that at home but not in the Netherlands. And then when I started
to speak Dutch, little did I know that would make it worse! I should have spoken
English and then I suppose there would have been a sigh of relief from the shopkeeper
and I could have perhaps experienced my earlier kind of reception. But I was
not yet sophisticated enough to realise that. The other way that I experienced it in
public without verbal communication was in the public transport. The seat next to
me would always be the last one to be occupied, if at all. I felt that this had changed.
I felt there was more apprehensiveness from the Dutch. Still, if I had to put my
reception and my experience in the Netherlands on a scale of one to ten, it was still
somewhere around a seven. But it had been a ten, and I didn’t understand why. And
then, after all, I was a historian and so it just tweaked my curiosity. I asked myself:
“Is there a reason for this? Is there something that I can identify that might be useful,
that could help people to understand better that we have got to learn how to
get along?” It was probably pretty naïve in itself, but that was my motivation.

Do you still feel that your research can contribute something to the way people
interact with each other?
I am less confident now than I was before that I can contribute something that will
be useful. I have a sense that it has all become much more complex now, with this
new element of the clash between Islam and the West. I think my concerns have
been somewhat overshadowed in some ways, and it is more complex because part
of the Islamic population is also black. In France for example, they estimated that
about thirty percent of those youths in the banlieux, the people at the heart of the
disturbance, were black as well as Muslim. And then there were blacks living in
these poor areas who where not Muslim as well. So it is a very complex kind of
social dynamic that I had not bargained on when I started doing this kind of
research over twenty years ago. I never realised how complicated it could get. So I
am also not certain at how helpful the products of my investigation will be or how
much attention they will be given, because so many people have their attention
riveted on violence and other kinds of more conspicuous clashes. What I’m talking
about may just be a little bit too subtle and too academic. Or it could be that, with
things swirling at such a pace, people just do not have time to even think about
these issues so much as simply responding to crises. I hope I am not being too pessimistic...
I am still not pessimistic enough to just stop what I am doing and try to
take Voltaire’s advice and just go tend my own garden, stick my head in the ground.

You could also be researching for the sake of knowledge.
There are certain kinds of intellectual activity that I enjoy just because I enjoy it. I
enjoy translation of certain kinds of materials, poetry, for example. I enjoy trying to
write a little poetry. I enjoy trying to write music and to play a little bit. So I do those
kinds of things just because I enjoy it. Most of my more academic kinds of efforts
have been pragmatically motivated. I started out thinking—and again, perhaps
naïvely—that a lot of what is wrong with the world is a lack of understanding, both
in terms of race relations and in terms of other kinds of societal problems. I thought
that all I had to do was become a good teacher, and perhaps influence the next
generation of leaders in society. I thought that everything could become better with
education and understanding. Yet the longer I have lived and the longer I have
taught, the less optimistic I am that people learn from history. And it’s not because
we can’t learn from history. What I have learned is that we don’t. It is not that the
history does not teach us useful lessons that might be applied beneficially. It is
because the will is not there among key elements of society to put into practice the
lessons we have learned from history. If you look at what is taking place at this
moment for example in the Middle East, it is not for lack of knowledge—at least not
for the lack of knowledge being out there about what could be done to improve
things. It is the lack of will by those who are in power, who are in positions to actually
enact policies, to bring about what is desirable. So what I have learned is that
the critical points of intervention into world affairs—to the extent that human beings
can influence world affairs—are often not under the control of those with the knowledge
and with the values that I would prefer. And so that has given me a whole different
perspective on how effective anything I teach can be in influencing the way
of the world.

Coming to your book Blacks in the Dutch World. What kind of effect do you think
that raising awareness about racial imagery will have? Will it be beneficial in
some way?
My hope has always been that there are enough people of good will out there who,
even if they might be unconscious racists, might be influenced enough to be
brought into an awareness that might do some good. But of course this is the kind
of hope that you can never actually confirm whether it has been realised or not. It
will often happen out there without feedback. One encouraging thing is that I have
seen an increase in the number of people actually engaging in related research of
their own, which tells me that at least my efforts have been reinforced, projected
further, by the energy of others. And sometimes into areas that I would not have
tried to explore. So that is one of the kinds of things I think that university professors
hope for; but you can never really plan on it. So I guess that is the brightest
kind of result that I have ever achieved. But I am continually reminded how unhappy
a story I have gotten myself into. There are so few happy endings along the trails
that I try to follow and in the different aspects of this research.

Can you give some examples of what scholars elaborating on your research are
working on?
One current example in the Netherlands that immediately comes to mind is Esther
Schreuder, who a few years ago completed a master’s thesis at the University of
Amsterdam in art history. She says she was initially inspired by my book Blacks in
the Dutch World and is at the moment hard at work on a major exhibit on Africans
in Dutch and Flemish art, to be mounted next summer at the Nieuwe Kerk in
Amsterdam.
A recent example of some influence from my book Russia and the Negro: Blacks
in Russian History and Thought can be seen in an anthology on Russian literature
by several authors who are mostly unknown to me; yet a number of them cite my
book in their chapters.

Several times in your research you have written about the Dutch Santa Claus tradition,
in which Saint Nick (Sinterklaas) is accompanied by a black figure whom
the Dutch call “Black Pete” (Zwarte Piet). As you note in your book, this figure has
been highly controversial for years.3 Recently, Dutch television has consciously
tried to alter the image of Pete as a black man by introducing Petes who are blue,
orange, lilac or shocking pink, explaining to the children that this happened
when Pete sailed through a rainbow. Nowadays, there are also more St. Nicholas
figures made out of brown chocolate and Pete figures made out of white chocolate.
What do you think about these developments?
It is very complicated and obviously associated with this whole broader identity
question. It strikes me that the Sinterklaas tradition is very closely associated with
traditional Dutch culture. And I suppose the ideal would be to come up with some
resolution that would still allow a certain amount of distinctive character to this tradition,
but at the same time remove its offensive character. That’s why I thought the
solution I came up with in an unpublished, rejected essay, was not a bad one. And
that is to have Zwarte Piet be zwart but not in the old negative, highly derogatory
stereotypical forms. Have Sinterklaas and Zwarte Piet as companions, and have
them as a symbol of national unity, rather than one being a saint and the other
being a devil that hauls bad children away. This has been a more complex question
since I wrote that essay because now increasingly the issue of Islam and the Muslim
community has surfaced. The question is, if it is going to be a unified Netherlands
how do you prioritise the white saint and the black companion, leaving out the other
groups? So perhaps there might be some way of honouring the multicultural nature
of twenty-first century Dutch society without totally renouncing what was bicultural
and now could be multicultural.

You have mentioned the complexity one encounters when asking questions about
racial identity in Europe. Did this complexity make it harder to research black
history in a European context than it would have been in an African-American
context?
What I have always found about research in the Netherlands is accessibility to
sources that I think is actually freer than what I find at home. It may be in part
because there had not been this kind of research before when I was working on the
topic between 1982 and 1993. If only I could come up with the right questions to
ask I could find sources that were not viewed as in any way questionable by the bibliographers
or the establishment if you will. I was able to find a lot because I had
done enough initial investigation to know where to look for sources, and because I
found a considerable amount of assistance from people who knew about this kind
of source material but did not want to deal with it themselves. In the United States
I could not have found very much about this kind of subject matter; there is that
kind of distance.

I can also imagine that it was not the kind of topic that was researched at the
time.
Well, not at all! That’s why it was waiting there for me. It was a sensitive subject for
Dutch scholars—and I found the same thing in France. I don’t think they would
have wanted to be the ones to write about this. Maybe now that is more possible
than before because now you have a society that is more multicultural and so there
is a greater interest in these kinds of subjects as legitimate scholarly subjects. But
they were not thought of as important earlier within the established academic circles
in Europe. And the people who would logically have pursued this kind of
research of course would be people of predominantly black African descent from
the former colonies; but very few of them were highly educated. Very few of them
had doctoral degrees or were in a position to do this. And if they did have such credentials
and if they wanted to advance in the profession they might have been very
hesitant to pursue subject areas that might be considered embarrassing.

Do you feel your findings and those of your colleagues who have researched the
history of blacks in the European diaspora have challenged prevailing views
among historians?
Yes, absolutely so. I think the main achievement in that regard is the extent to which
we have revealed the actual presence, and at times significance, of blacks in
European societies. I have found that once this presence and significance is known,
other scholars in various disciplines have become attracted to the subject area.
There are literally countless works with interests related to mine that have been
published over the past several years.

What are you working on now?
What I am trying to do is to look at the respective histories of blacks in different
European societies and do a comparative overview of those narratives. There is
more of a history in, let’s say, England, France or The Netherlands than there is in
the rest, but I want to do a comparative overview of all of those histories, coming
down from the Middle Ages to now and see what that history is. Then I want to see
how those respective histories are converging with the present in which you have a
larger actual black population in Europe than ever before. And the kind of negative
stereotypes that I was sharing with you today, and that can be found in my books,
illustrate how history can clash with the present. Even the controversial nature of
Zwarte Piet now is a case of history clashing with the present. But you can also see
a similar kind of clash in terms of other aspects of the social interaction of
Europeans with these groups that were formerly part of their empires—but not
actually people you had to live with at home. You could live with them in the
colonies, where you dominated them, but now, living with them at home, sometimes
in the same neighbourhoods, in the same jobs, without the hierarchical earlier
structure, that is an interesting kind of dynamic to try to sort out: how are the
histories melding with the present?

Do you think that the results of this research will yield new viewpoints that could
also be useful for African history or African-American history?
I’m counting on it! You could look at my frame of exploration as sort of circum-
Atlantic. We are talking about the African-American-European exchange, because
that is what has been going on in terms of this African diaspora history and my
interest in the European dimensions of it. And so I think there should be an audience
in all these different parts of the world that should be interested in what I have
to say. Especially with the new interest now in the new immigration to Europe, only
a small part of which is this black population.

Notes
1 Suzanne de Graaf is an MA student at Leiden University, where she is specialising in the history of
migration. She is currently writing her thesis about Dutch perceptions of people from the Dutch East
Indies who visited the Netherlands during their leaves-of-absence, and how inhabitants of the colony
saw the metropolitan Dutch, between 1920 and 1940. Suzanne did her BA in history at Humboldt
University in Berlin and she is broadly interested in the history of cultural exchange.
2 C.T. Nepomnyashchy, et al., eds. Under the Sky of My Africa: Alexander Pushkin and Blackness
(Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2006).
3 The figure of Zwarte Piet has always had a somewhat ambiguous role. Descended from a devil hauled
through the streets by St. Nicholas on horseback on 5 December, he has evolved into a black- or
brown-skinned man who acts as a servant to St. Nicholas and is both a clown and a bogeyman to
children. His ambiguity also shows in the way he is depicted: he carries both a sack full of sweets and
toys to reward obedient children with, and a bundle of birch twigs to punish disobedient ones. Zwarte
Piet is also said to put especially disobedient children into his sack and take them to Spain, were he
and St. Nicholas reside during the year. The bogeyman aspect has been softened over the decades,
but Zwarte Piet still shares traits that have been used to stereotype blacks, both in appearance and in
behaviour: he has thick, black, curly hair, full red lips, brown skin and he wears big golden earrings;
he is dressed in the attire of a sixteenth-century page; he is a servant more than a companion; and
often acts clownish and childlike. For more information on the Dutch St. Nicholas tradition, see Allison
Blakely, Blacks in the Dutch World: The Evolution of Racial Imagery in a Modern Society
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 39-49.
4 For fairly recent examples, see: David Dabydeen, John Gilmore and Cecily Jones, eds. The Oxford
Companion to Black British History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Peter Martin and
Christine Alonzo, eds. Zwischen Charleston und Stechschritt: Schwarze im Nationalsozialismus
(Hamburg: Dolling und Galitz Verlag, 2004); Tyler Stovall. Paris Noir: African Americans in the City
of Light (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996); and Maxim Matusevich, ed. Africa in Russia, Russia in
Africa: Three Centuries of Encounters (Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 2006).