Thread by @alexandreafonso

A thread about a peculiar interaction about social privilege on Dutch television.

Author Joris Luyendijk is invited to one of the biggest talk shows in the country, Buitenhof, to talk about his new book. The book is an exposé of how the Netherlands is dominated by people like him: white, male, straight, highly educated, with privileged parents.

He says it's a problem. Luyendijk adopts a fairly confrontational style, highlighting for instance the privileged social background of the host, another white man. He says that being a white man who did not experience discrimination makes him less suitable as an interviewer.

The panelists here to respond are MP Sylvana Simons and former EU Commissioner Neelie Kroes, both of whom confess not to have read it.

Sylvana Simons is sympathetic to the goal of the book, but is very critical of the fact that it takes yet another white man to talk about structural inequalities.

Luyendijk actually engages with this quite a bit in the book: he calls it the Arjan Lubach effect: the fact that a problem only becomes prominent when white men engage with it. He deplores it, but it also justifies the existence of the book.

Now that's when it becomes interesting. When Neelie Kroes intervenes, she is asked by the host to comment on the specific mentions on her in the book, where she features.

Luyendijk writes that Kroes is the daughter of a strongly calvinist father from Rotterdam and has, over the course of her life, decided to lose the accent of her place and social milieu, admittedly to sound more like the elite.

Kroes says that these two elements are false. Her father was not calvinist, not strict, but liberal. Besides, she has always spoken in this way. She asks what his sources to pretend these things are.

Visibly surprised and not informed by the program that he would be questioned on this particular point, Luyendijk says that it was in an interview, but doesn't have it at hand. He offers his apologies. This was a painful moment to watch.

Kroes then says that she won't read the book because these inaccuracies make her doubt of its quality. The whole thing appears as unserious. If she reads a book, she wants it to be serious.

*However* in 1997, in an interview with Trouw (presumably one of the sources used by Luyendijk) Kroes declared "I come from a Dutch Reformed family, heavily Calvinistic" trouw.nl/nieuws/ook-zon…

In this 2014 portrait in De Groene Amsterdammer, it's stated that her father instilled a strong calvinistic ethos onto his children, and that her father required absolute silence in the house in the evenings. groene.nl/artikel/de-sch…

I am not Dutch myself but this sounds fairly calvinistic to me.

So as a writer you have two converging sources from reputable outlets saying that her father had calvinistic values. Maybe Kroes understood it in the strict religious sense, not cultural sense as Luyendijk wrote it.

Admittedly the claim that her accent may have been lost is more difficult to verify. But can one really asses one's own voice and manner of speaking over a lifetime? I am stunned when I hear myself and don't recognise it.

Anyhow, in spite of there being verifiable sources of his claims, Luyendijk came out of this 5mn painful segment as someone who doesn't check his sources, and therefore his critique of the dominant Dutch establishment is tarnished.

...and because of a fairly minor claim in the book; but it made for entertaining TV. None of the other guest had read the book.

What is interesting is that what Luyendijk calls the "Lubach effect" only seems to apply to problems that don't concern privileged white men: the Uighurs, etc. When it comes to criticising the Dutch elite itself, the elite is not credible either. Maybe that's the Luyendijk effect

And to the idea of Kroes that you can perfectly make policy without having experienced social hurdles yourself, I'll just leave this quote (also in JL'book) from Mark Rutte about what he's learned teaching a vmbo class each week.
nrc.nl/nieuws/2015/03…