Dutch government to admit to institutional racism at Tax Authority

Oh no, not anymore. That age is long over, since 9/11 or even before (9/11 was the trigger I suppose). Also, Portugal and USA have a more progressive drugs policy than we (NL) do.

Ah so then NL shouldn’t allow other Europeans in either? Or is this opinion only about non-white people.

Either way, the Dutch should’ve thought of that before colonising and enslaving other countries. And then importing slaves to their “Dutch only” land. Quite odd.

How do you prove these things are caused by socioeconomic factors? At a minimum we have nowhere near the genetic understanding to control for those aspects. At a higher level, human society, culture, and the systems created by it are infinitely complex. Grouping people on 1 axis then saying the reason for this grouping is “socioeconomic” seems…optimistic at best.

There are so many reasons one racial grouping may be disparately impacted by something. We should focus on fixing the downsides of that impact for all people, not asking why X arbitrary category we came up with doesn’t match Y (because the answer to question is far beyond our technical ability).

And our metric of success cannot be “x group more affected” - if we make that our metric, we’ll find a way to hit that target, correct or not.

Enacting a policy without race in mind, then have that policy impact one race more than another is not racist unless the intent was specifically to oppress a given group. Are laws against killing racist, even though some groups are disproportionately represented in the statistics?

Intent matters.

Also you cannot apply US or CA values to the rest of the world.

They changed it to a native sounding last name and were able to integrate into society.

However, on her side of the family, some of the relatives choose to go back to the old last name, so when we have reunions there is a mix of people with the native and original last name.

What makes me most hopeful: These investigations and reporting demonstrates a functioning democracy is able to audit itself -- either internally or externally via media. Years ago, I had a Japanese co-worker. We were discussing recent news events in Australia. For whatever reason, Australia was in one of those mini-bubbles of political corruption. To him, it seemed like everyday was some new corruption in Australia! He asked me -- in all seriousness: "Is Australia a corrupt country? Look what we see in the news." I am not Australian, but I mentioned that it was positive the gov't and media was investigating and being transparent about it. That part was the most important to me. In the end, he seemed satisfied with my explanation -- and not excusing the scandal.

It's part of a larger problem in the Netherlands. There is a lot of segregation in the Netherlands based on social class and education level. A Dutch person immediately judges someone's social class based on looks -- clothing, tattoos, obesity, hairstyle, et cetera. And lower social classes are predujiced against.

And people with non-Western, especially Moroccan or Turkish names are recognized as immigrants and automatically thought of as lower class. People with Western foreign names are thought of as "expats" and mentally put into the highly educated / high social class group.

Yes, foreigners must adapt, but I hope that over time as Dutch society becomes more integrated with the world, this aspect of Dutch culture will also be weakened. This racism is a side effect of our classism.