Rethinking Policy to Dismantle Racial Injustice: Examining the Dutch Context

• In Event: Advancing a Transnational Comparative Framework for Racial Equity in Higher Education

Abstract

Developing policy to dismantle racial injustice in higher education takes structural effort from many stakeholders on different decision-making levels: national, regional, institutional, and local. Institutional racism is historically embedded in systems and has been a process of systemic reproduction. Eduardo Bonilla Silva argues, “systemic in systemic racism means that we all participate in the reproduction of the racialized order. Furthermore, this reproduction depends fundamentally on behavior and actions that are normative, habituated, and often unconscious.” (Bonilla-Silva, 2021, p. 513).

For the Dutch context, Black Lives Matter as a global social movement supported a paradigm shift in efforts to centering ethnicity and race or color as parameters to prove and understand the impact of racial discrimination and racism as a systemic and institutionalized phenomenon. Black Lives Matter catalyzed a sense of awareness of the impact of racism in Dutch society in general, higher education and the labor market more specifically. It created a sense of urgency in efforts to understand the impact of racism in policy and practice in (higher) education. The national Government has taken the lead in the aftermath of nationwide BLM protests and since then coordinated efforts have taken place in collaboration with many formal and informal stakeholders. Although the Netherlands has a thriving landscape of institutional entities and departments within universities that focus on equity, diversity and inclusion, an intentional focus on racial equity and racial injustice has been absent. The study “Let’s do Diversity” at the University of Amsterdam stated “that many people are confident in speaking about gender and internationalization but are uncomfortable in speaking about race and ethnicity” (Wekker et al., 2016, p. 7). Tackling racism requires acknowledging race and color in addition to ethnicity in quantitative and qualitative data collection to show existing disparities in opportunities and injustices due to different power positions in public and institutional spaces.

ECHO was established by the Ministry of Education (1994) to improve equity and success of students with a migration background in higher education. We have therefore partnered internationally and globally to develop sustainable joint efforts to tackle global phenomena like racism to further support changing policy and practice in collaboration with communities of scholar-practitioners. ECHO is actively involved in EAN, European Access Network, GAPS, the Global Access to Postsecondary Education initiative and more recently in ICARE4Justice, the Intersectional and Comparative Advancement of Racial Equity for Social Justice.

This paper presents recent developments in the Netherlands on a national and institutional level. It further uses the contention raised by of Bonilla-Silva (2021): “that we all participate in the reproduction of the racialized order” (p. 513), to discuss how and by whom intentional efforts are necessary. These are very much inspired by reflections as part of the ICARE4Justice activities. For the Dutch context, a consistent multi-stakeholder, long-term critical approach is needed when developing and implementing policy and practice to improve racial equity.

Author

• Mary Tupan Wenno, ECHO, Expertise Center for Diversity Policy