Day 2 – Black Heritage Tour 3-11-2023

The weather today is sunny with little to no wind. This is the perfect day to be cruising the Amsterdam canals!  Dating back to the 17th century, the canals are icons of the capital city and were placed on the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage list in 2010. The canals were carefully designed and constructed to transport food and other goods to the city without being impacted by the water and keeping potential enemy armies at bay.

The Rotterdam crew met with the Amsterdam-based group at 2.15 p.m. by the tour boat to embark on the Black Heritage Tour.  You may be wondering, what is the Black Heritage Tour? According to their website, this tour aims to “inform, inspire, and educate. Whether you are a descendant, educator, student, local or international traveler, the tour is for everyone interested in learning more about these ‘hidden histories’.” While on the tour, one "will learn about a recently revealed 'Black community' of men, women, and children that lived in Amsterdam as early as the 16th Century alongside the history of the wealthiest merchants who were Directors of the WIC (West India Company) or the VOC (United Dutch East India Company), shareholders or owners of plantations in the Dutch colonies." This afternoon was devoted to gaining knowledge about the African Diaspora. 

African Diaspora is the term commonly used to describe the mass dispersion of Africans and their decedents to various parts of the world during the Transatlantic Slave Trades, from the 1500s to the 1800s. This Diaspora took millions of people from Western and Central Africa to different regions throughout the Americas and the Caribbean. During the Black Heritage Tour, we not only had the opportunity to move within Amsterdam via its canals but were able to also survey the city through its racial symbolism. Our tour guide explained how buildings manifested a painful racial history through the symbols depicted on them.

Jennifer, our guide and captain on board, lead the one-hour-and-a-half-long conversation stressing the concept that the tour intended to bring to light personal stories, voices, and the painful social consequences of those large-scale events. The most remarkable lesson that stayed with me is the importance of looking at and carefully studying logos and insignia on buildings. It was so revealing to be able to connect such a global history of trade and people to the buildings we observed. These ornaments revealed to passers-by of the time, through displayed symbols of pride and wealth, what trade or professions were housed in a particular building. Black life in Amsterdam is displayed on the gable stones that adorn hundreds of houses in Amsterdam.

Jennifer shared her many years of studying records and stories of Black people living in Amsterdam, and the Netherlands. She pointed out that there is much evidence of Black life in the city dating back many hundreds of years and that their presence is everywhere. At the end of the tour, after opening our eyes to the evidence written on the buildings, we all remained with the big pending question: does the Netherlands exclude and marginalize people of color?  Can SA+P students and all our Baltimorean friends draw a comparison between the Netherlands' treatment of black people and Baltimore’s systematic racist practices such as lower rates of labor market participation by Black Americans, institutional racism through the exclusion from higher education, racial profiling by police, and the practice of delivering harsher sentences compared to those given to than white people for similar crimes?

In Baltimore, people of color are discriminated against in the housing market and face higher risks of death correlated with lower socioeconomic status. The answer is complex: the perception is that the Dutch refuse to acknowledge race or racial discrimination using a sort of socially adopted color-blindness. The general perspective is that the Dutch claim that race has no impact on the material conditions of one’s life and that they, as a society, are not involved in acts of inequality. This is, to me, still an open question that, perhaps, my students will help answer through their travel testimonials. Yet, one thing is for sure, ignoring racial inequalities or inequities reproduces the very same racism that color-blindness claims do not exist.

Day 1 – UNStudio Visit

Day 3 – Amsterdam Walking Tour

Day 4 – Delft-Rotterdam – Back Down Memory Lane

Day 5 – Architecture Evolving

Day 6 – Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen

Day 7 – Office for Metropolitan Architecture

Day 8 – Time to Say Goodbye