Racism
A school booklet from publisher Van In has caused a lot of outrage because of the images it contains: “Racist stereotypes by an educational publisher, Flanders is apparently great at that too.”
The school booklet “Later I will be” contains exercises in which students have to guess the profession of the parents of different children. The mother of the white child is a ski instructor, his father a water sports instructor. In the black child, the mother is depicted as a cotton picker and the father plays a djembe. On another page, black children are depicted in thatched-roof huts, while white children live in the city. An Asian girl has a dad who works in a wok restaurant and a mom who seems to work in a toy factory.
An angry parent of a first-year student at a primary school in Antwerp forwarded the notebook to political scientist Nadia Nsayi. She shared the images on her Instagram and Facebook pages, which provoked many indignant reactions. The booklet is used in world orientation lessons in several Flemish primary schools. It is unclear how many schools use the script.
Nsayi sent an email to the publisher after receiving the images. “This is a complete shame. This is again about the same colonial story that Africans live in huts. There is also an urban Africa and children go to school there too. What we plant in their heads has an impact on the black children themselves, but also on how white children view them.”
“Escaped the attention”
The notebook was first printed in 2016, but the images circulating on social media are in a reprint from 2022. Gillian Mathys, professor of African history at Ghent University, also received a message from angry parents. “Racist stereotypes by an educational publisher, Flanders is apparently great at that too,” she wrote on X.
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Uitgeverij Van In tells De Standaard that the writing “simply escaped our attention”. “Luckily that doesn’t happen often, otherwise the media would be full of such examples. A lot has changed socially in recent years, but here and there there is still older teaching material in circulation. However, we screen all of that. In any case, we will immediately change the script.”
A new version should be available online in a week. The publisher says it will notify teachers about this. “Fortunately, we can make changes very quickly online,” says Van In.
