De luide roep van Black Lives Matter: contestatie en politisering van het Belgisch koloniaal taboe

Abstract

The Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 placed issues of the colonial past and structural racism more prominently on the political agenda in Belgium. The politicized debates around coping with this past and historical accountability stand in stark contrast to what was previously described as a historical taboo around Belgium’s colonial past. Whereas any public debate on this past was previously systematically avoided, contemporary politicisation seems to question whether we can still speak of a colonial taboo in Belgium. This article studies the impact of the politicisation of the Belgian colonial taboo on different levels using text analysis of news reports, discourse analysis of parliamentary questions and survey analyses of Belgian public opinion. Despite increased media coverage of Belgium’s colonial past, we conclude from the survey analyses that colonial amnesia – ignorance about the colonial past – persists in Belgian public opinion. In contrast, parliamentarians take an unequivocal condemnatory position towards the colonial past but do so with a discursive distinction between this past and the contemporary after-effects of Belgian colonialism. Thus, despite the partial recognition of the problematic colonial past, the historical taboo is not fundamentally questioned.