Earlier this year I wrote an outspoken post following the online protests when the young author Marieke Lucas Rijneveld was commissioned to translate Amanda Gorman’s poem The Hill We Climb into Dutch. Rather than pointing out their non-existing experience as a literary translator, the protest centered around their clear lack of epidermal pigmentation. The job should have been given to a person of color. Rijneveld returned the assignment with the usual undignified and probably disingenuous apologies for having wounded certain sensitivities. I side with Ricky Gervais on this one: just because you’re offended doesn’t mean you’re right.
You may think this is the typical stance of a white Gen-X male, university educated and raised in an affluent, traditional rural Dutch milieu. And you would be spot on. My background colors everything I do and opine, including the previous paragraph, the next ones, and everything I have written and will write on this blog. I could not be neutral if I wanted to.