Reading the work of Gloria Wekker for the first time, I could only guess what to expect from her book White Innocence and was happy about her broad spectrum of research and perspectives when starting with the introduction. Even though her positioning is clear, Wekker gives us a very wide angle on race, gender, sexuality and how they are intertwined within society focusing on the Dutch context. The author combines her embodied knowledge and experiences with in-depth research and facts. Her starting point is that the Dutch society as a whole carries an innocence that fails to recognize whiteness as a crucial part of white Dutch self-representation (p.2&5). This is partly caused by the cultural archive, which has a big influence on our society today since ‘it is between our ears and in our hearts and souls’ and therefore appears in the way we think, do things and look at the world (p.19). Another to me very interesting point she makes is the fact that the traumas that have been caused by the German Holocaust overshadow and even erase all traumas that came before this period (p.4&12). This is something I could especially recognize during the in 2020 re-invoked Black Lives Matter movement. Unlike in past faces of the movement this time social media functions as a new force, which enables for information to spread way faster. An idea that kept appearing on social media was the praising of German responsibility on educating their population and in particular students on the horrible past of the German Holocaust. The Instagram posts suggest for other countries to take Germany and the way they deal with their recent past as an example to educate, for instance, the Dutch population on their history as one of the biggest colonizers. Even though it is understandable where this statement might come from, it doesn’t make sense since Germany was just like the rest of Europe largely involved in slavery and colonialism and is not moving forward when it comes to educating their society on this part of history themselves. What happens instead is that ‘the memory of the Holocaust as the epitome and model of racist transgression in Europe erases the crimes that were perpetrated against the colonized for four centuries’ (p.4). This erasure and twisting of history contributes largely to white Dutch and German self-representation but also the understanding of race and racism, its origins and impacts on today's society.

RELFECTING ON THE INTRODUCTION CHAPTER OF GLORIA WEKKER'S WHITE INNOCENCE

'The memory of the Holocaust as the epitome and model of racist transgression in Europe erases the crimes that were perpetrated against the colonized for four centuries. This excision coincides with the representation that the history and reality of Europe are located on the continent and that what happened in the colonies is no constitutive part of it. This frame of mind—splitting, displacement, in psychoanalytical terms—is still operative to this day, for instance, in the way that the memory of World War II is conceptualized. It is the memory of what happened in the metropole and of the many Jews who were abducted and killed, not about what happened in the colonies at the time (Van der Horst 2004).Trying to insert those memories into the general memory often meets with hostility and rejection.' (p.4)

'Fourth, innocence, furthermore, enables the safe position of having license to utter the most racist statements, while in the next sentence saying that it was a joke or was not meant as racist.20 The utterer may proclaim to be in such an intimate, privileged relationship to the black person addressed, that he or she is entitled to make such a statement. I pay attention to this preferential mode of bringing across racist content by means of humor and irony [...].' (p.17)

'What does it mean to think in terms of dominant white Dutch selfrepresentation? I understand the Dutch metropolitan self, in its various historical incarnations, as a racialized self, with race as an organizing grammar of an imperial order in which modernity was framed (Stoler 1995; McClintock 1995). Racial imaginations are part and parcel of the Dutch psychological and cultural makeup; these imaginations are intertwined with our deepest desires and anxieties, with who we are.' (p. 20)

'Intersectionality is a theory and a methodology, importantly and initially based on black feminist thought, which not only addresses identitarian issues, as is commonly thought, but also a host of other social and psychological phenomena. It is a way of looking at the world that takes as a principled stance that it is not enough merely to take gender as the main analytical tool of a particular phenomenon, but that gender as an important social and symbolical axis of difference is simultaneously operative with others like race, class, sexuality, and religion.' (p. 21)

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