Holy Cross Professor Discusses Her Book on Racism and Colonialism in the Netherlands

Melissa Weiner, associate professor of sociology at the College of the Holy Cross, has spent years studying racial identity formation, most recently in The Netherlands.

In an article for Dutch news outlet The Northern Times, Weiner talks about the recent publication of "Smash the Pillars: Decoloniality and the Imaginary of Color in the Dutch Kingdom," a book she co-edited with Antonio Carmona Báez, arguing that to fully decolonize Dutch society, the current social organization in the Kingdom of the Netherlands relying on separate pillars for each religious and racial group, must be dismantled.

"The way the pillar system was set up always excluded people, even though it worked theoretically for some folks historically," Weiner says. "The pillars are a larger analogy for the whole country, where people have been excluded under a model that is perceived as being democratic when it’s really anything but."

To read the full article, go to NorthernTimes.nl.