Guy refused internship for being ‘dark-coloured’
Saying sorry profusely and ‘distancing oneself from the incident’ is purely being done not to get sued. And suing does not happen that often, but this time the guy from Arnhem who was refused an internship for being black went straight to the police and filed a complaint.
An electronics company in Arnhem refused a candidate based on his skin colour and sadly, the internal e-mail in which this was done was sent to the candidate by mistake.
“I had a look, it’s nothing. First of all he’s dark-coloured (nigger). And he has little experience with computers etc. on his resume.”
The nigger part is in the e-mail as such, and ‘it’s nothing’ means ‘it won’t work out’. The employee that sent the mail by mistake never would have apologised had they not been caught. So basically, they really are racist and the candidate has a point.
A run of racist and discriminatory remarks have plagued the Netherlands as of late, and co-blogger Branko has been writing them up on another blog, calling it ‘The coming out of the racists’.
And after the racist remarks towards a Chinese student that hit television recently, here’s a column by a Canadian of Chinese descent married to a Dutchman of Chinese decent and their takes on it.
(www.deondernemer.nl, Image: Wiering Software’s video game Zwarte Piet)
Just a friendly suggestion…. I think that it’s not a good idea to translate “neger” as the epithet “n***er” because the latter term is incredibly offensive, maybe the most offensive word in American English (to the extent that I’m not willing to type it here), but my understanding of the word “neger” is that it is not meant as a slur. It would be like translating “poep” to “shit.” I know a lot of Dutch people do use the N-word in English, but…. they really shouldn’t.
I used the word ‘nigger’ because that is what is implied. ‘Neger’ is judging someone based on their skin colour and used pejoratively.