Disrupting whiteness: Exclusion and belonging in the Dutch academy,from a mixed-race perspective

Abstract

Based on two autoethnographic moments of inclusion/exclusion, in this article I set out the struggle to make sense of my own whiteness through the experience of being mixed race in the context of the neoliberal Dutch academy. In order to understand the indeterminate position of mixed race – white in some cases and disrupting whiteness in others – the two moments need to be read together. Interpersonal relations illustrate how race, gender, and precarious working conditions interrelate, sometimes in bringing people together, while at other times setting them against one another. My main argument is that mixed-race positionalities are to be understood as context-contingent and hybrid. These indeterminate and hybrid positionalities call for conciliation and offer new possibilities to think beyond strict dichotomies and divisive boundaries.

No es blanca ni negra, es de colores, la vida es de colores, muchos colores.

– Aida Bossa

Introduction: White or …?

Since a young age I have presented myself as ‘half-half’. I was born in Bogotá to a Colombian father and a Belgian mother. I grew up on two continents, speak two languages, and carry passports of two citizenships that permit me to vote in two countries. I feel simultaneously at home and a foreigner in both countries. This double nationality has empowered me with a nomadic mind, through which I understand sedentarism, fixity, and essentialism as alienating and deeply exceptional to my daily experience (Hazan and Hertzog, 2012; Wilson, 2019). The downside of being half-half is the feeling of incompleteness. Similar to Anzaldúa, I too carry a border within (Anzaldúa, 1987) – and I struggle with it every day. In this article, I unpack racial indeterminacy and analyse what it means to fall between social orders and be difficult to classify. Despite my mixture of races, I consider myself primarily, and in most contexts, white, and looking beyond white privileges did not come easily (see also Moosavi, 2020; Zembylas, 2018). Even if, as a woman, my accomplishments receive less recognition, and as a person from the so-called Global South I am often deemed too emotional in my work, I still enjoy the explicit and implicit advantages of whiteness in a world that is governed by colonial legacies. A European Union (EU) passport endows me with mobility capital and permits me to travel across many nation-state borders without complicated visa requirements. Moreover, as a white European descendant, I have access to the cultural capital and the socioeconomic spheres that continue to dominate the world and that come with social wealth and opportunities.

I begin with these personal details because in decolonial theory positionality matters. Some elements of positionality are considered immutable, such as ethnicity, origin, race, and gender (Holmes, 2020). However, there is a danger in fixing positionality; in many cases, as illustrated by the moments of inclusion/exclusion discussed below, positionalities are contingent on social context. Furthermore, views evolve (Rowe, 2014). A mixed-race perspective reintroduces nuance by highlighting the possible in-between spaces instead of focusing on opposing extremes. Nuance is not understood here as shaded greyness, a state of post-political balance (Schor and Martina, 2018). In line with the quotation from Colombian singer Aida Bossa above, a mixed-race perspective is about acknowledging the multiple colours that disrupt polarized and essentialist readings in a novel and timely manner by reintroducing fluidity and hybridity to stagnated decolonial debates. In line with Bhabha’s notion of a third space, mixed-raced perspectives are situated in a space that does not know fixity, a space where a political object can be constructed anew. Mixed race is a site of continuous translation upon which to construct heterogeneously (Bhabha, 1994). For Cusicanqui, a mixed perspective respects the individuality of its components; she uses the Aymara metaphor Ch’ixi, a colour that consists of the juxtaposition of small dots of black and white that stand next to one another but do not mix (León, 2022). Ch’ixi reflects the idea of something that ‘is and is not at the same time: it is the logic of the included third’ (León, 2022). Ch’ixi acknowledges difference, without forcing different positionalities into creolization (Cusicanqui, 2021); thus, in a Ch’ixi world, a mixed-race person is not mixed but is the sum of her dots.

While in the Dutch academy it is rare for most whites to experience a sense of not belonging (Diangelo, 2011: 62), the same cannot be said for mixed-race individuals. In fact, for most of us, not (fully) belonging is the constant. The concept of the outsider within (Hill Collins in Williams, 2001), which was first used to describe the marginal position of Black feminist thought, is useful here. The outsider within appears under different avatars in literature related to migration and racism – for instance, as the strategic outsider (Khosravi, 2016; Khosravi Ooryad, 2023), or as an imaginary outsider who navigates unfamiliar systems (Wekker, 2016). Outsiders within come in different shapes, and mixed-race persons are another manifestation of the outsider within.

It is challenging to write about personal narratives and retain their authentic character without revealing too much detail about the people with whom we work, because the interactions that formed the material for this analysis took place in lived experiences (Ellis and Bochner, 2017; Rahbari and Burlyuk, 2023). Here, the focus on individuals contributes to critically questioning the structure in which people are embedded. Inspired by Viaene et al. (2023) and in order to guarantee some level of anonymity, I will not use pseudonyms but name people by describing their relationship to me; and because the distinction between holding a permanent or a temporary contract at a university is essential to understanding the precarious context under discussion, contractual positionings will be disclosed (Viaene et al., 2023). The degree of anonymity that conceals the identities of my colleagues stands in contrast to this article’s autoethnographic detail. My goal with autoethnography is not to reveal myself to others by navel-gazing, but to reach perspectives on my experience that can be useful to others. Hence, after explaining how I experimented with autoethnography, I will turn to two case studies that underline the tension between inclusion and exclusion in Dutch academy.

In 2007 I moved to the Netherlands to pursue my education in African Studies, a field which with time became my profession. Aside from two short periods of unemployment, I have not left the Dutch academy since. The two case studies are best understood as moments in a continuum of inclusion/exclusion in which I was included as a participant primarily in order to represent the Other – the exception that proves the rule – or excluded, yet yearning to belong. The first case study narrates my participation in teaching a course on critical thought. In this study, I try to come to terms with my own white discomfort and the ways in which it intersects with gender and university hierarchies. In the second case study, I describe the opposite: that of the exotic outsider within. Job precarity is a common denominator to both cases. Even if written in two separate sections, the two cases are contradictory yet complementary and I analyse them jointly in the discussion. Here the indeterminate positioning of mixed-race people comes to the fore. It should be noted that the two cases are not mere anecdotes, nor do they stand alone; they are representative of many more examples in my experience that include teaching seminars and attending conferences, as well as informal interpersonal exchanges, emails, and conversations with scholars, colleagues, and students in the corridors of Dutch universities.

From fieldwork to homework: Autoethnography as valid knowing

It was a feeling of frustration and of being denied the ability to determine my own identity (Sanchez, 2025, this volume) that led me to engage with autoethnography. The practice of autoethnography offers the opportunity to probe human experience by using personal life situations and dilemmas by treating one’s ‘own lived-through experiences as primary data and sites of moral responsibility’ (Ellis and Bochner, 2017: vii; see also Nicotera, 1999; Williams, 2001). Already in 1996, Lavie and Swedenburg insisted on rethinking ‘fieldwork’ as ‘homework’, by intermingling sites of research and writing instead of replicating binaries between a hegemonic Here and a peripheral There (Lavie and Swedenburg, 1996: 170). Homework is when the White West is de-hegemonized and differences within the self are not repressed (Lavie and Swedenburg, 1996: 171). Autoethnography is a radical homework that profoundly interrogates the terms of social identity through the everyday act of attempting to understand oneself (Sanchez, 2025, this volume, but also Antohin, 2025; Gutierrez Garza; 2025; Lewis, 2025 – all this volume) and investigating what nobody besides the self can see: that which is happening inside. Autoethnography sheds light on shifting contexts and shifting positionalities, and it allows for knowledge derived from emotional responses that acknowledge the fuzzy divisions between the subject and the object (Williams, 2001). Autoethnography is an invitation to combine rational (critical and reflective) and visceral (emotional and affective) knowledge with the goal of constructing narratives that are intellectually generative, from which we can extract theory (Williams, 2001: 88). Such autoethnography compels us to use our theory on ourselves, because as scholars we cannot ‘step out of the wholeness of human experience to theorize’ (Nicotera, 1999: 458).

For Khosravi, autoethnography focuses both inward and outward. He describes autoethnography as a form of self-narrative based on personal experiences that places the self within a social context and thereby connects human experiences with one another (Khosravi, 2016: 54–5). I position this article as both a look inward that helps me to better understand my position in Dutch academy, and a look outward that takes the social context into account. My aim is to link experiences so as to write back and resist being invented and consumed by others or absorbed into dominant discourses (Khosravi, 2016: 56). On a deeper level, practising autoethnography helps scholars to ‘reveal themselves to themselves’ and to others, while ‘seeking a perspective on their experience’ that they did not have before conducting autoethnography. As such, the process integrates the ‘emotional, spiritual, and moral parts […] with the intellectual and analytical’ (Ellis and Bochner, 2017: vii).

Writing about our own positionalities is a starting point for autoethnography, yet it is not the same thing. Even if it is becoming more widespread, being transparent about one’s own positionality is not expected of all. Massoud shows that it is only those who are marginalized (e.g. non-white, non-male) who are compelled to make their positionality explicit (Massoud, 2022). Revealing one’s positionality is an exercise in courageous vulnerability, but one that is unequally distributed. Here too lies an anxiety about shifting the attention away from the theoretical contributions. There are benefits to positional transparency: it allows one to establish connections and credibility with other scholars; it challenges structures of oppression; it opens up new possibilities for science; and it is empowering. Autoethnography, too, is empowering.

In this section I will not write about my positionality in detail; I believe it is sufficiently identified throughout the article. However, there are two elements that I do wish to underline. The first, inspired by Anzaldúa’s work, relates to the pain that comes from the internal ‘struggle of borders’, the ‘inner war’ that criss-crosses the experience of being of mixed-race descent (Anzaldúa, 1987). The second element relates to speaking from the position of the accented (Khosravi, 2016), in which certain accents are devalued and mark language as racial (Hill, 1999).

Since childhood I have experienced and embodied an inner border that both divides and adds up to my identity. This inner border is my starting point from which to understand the world. As a starting point, it is divided and never homogeneous, though in its mixing and heterogeneity it forms a whole. There seems to be a constant internal struggle taking place, popping up at unexpected moments and in certain social situations: ‘back and forward, one side hating the other, the European submissing the non-European, the non-European standing up in rebellion’ (Anzaldúa, 1987: 45). I relate to Anzaldúa’s internalized rage and contempt, where one part of the self (in my case the Colombian part) is forced, for its very survival, to use defensive strategies against another part of the self (the Belgian), which is the object of contempt (Anzaldúa, 1987: 45). Each of these halves includes part of the self that stands up against the other half. For instance, in my Colombian half too, there is a mixed non-white part that stands up, for its very survival, against another, much whiter, sub-part.

Even if I defined myself in double nationality terms from a young age, in terms of race or ethnicity, especially growing up in Colombia, I saw myself as white. Also in the eyes of other Colombians I am racialized as white. Whiteness grants me privileges inside and outside Colombia – for instance, when travelling and crossing borders. Being white, however, did not mean I was a foreigner in Colombia. On the other hand, when I moved to Belgium as a young teenager, I did become a foreigner. At first my whiteness was not questioned in Belgium in terms of physical traits, and in my teenage years I felt different but not necessarily because I was racialized. The problem was my accent, which I will discuss below. It was only when I moved to the Netherlands that I began reflecting upon my own foreignness, not in terms of nationality but in terms of race. Migrating to the Netherlands ‘blackened’ me (Curiel, 2018). Even if I continue to be white in the Netherlands, I am white with a kleurtje. In its diminutive form, kleurtje, with the suffix -tje, literally means ‘small colour’ and is a euphemism to refer to someone who has an exotic air. While it is used politely and affectionately, it carries a belittling undertone. Through my kleurtje I disrupt whiteness. People who know me and do not know me, in private and professional spheres, have used this type of well-meaning language. While in most parts of the world I pass as white, from many perspectives in the Netherlands I am not white enough. In my experience, whiteness is not essential but contingent on the place and country where I find myself, as well as on the people with whom I interact. If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, race is too.

Going back to my accent: I speak Dutch, my mother’s language, ¹ with an obvious accent, yet one that is difficult to pinpoint. Having an accent that is difficult to identify relates closely to the mixed-race experience, because it cannot be classified under any binary (Hill, 1999). As Khosravi suggests, speaking with an accent simultaneously disqualifies and legitimizes the accented speaker. In his case, as a scholar originally from Iran and naturalized in Sweden, his accented Swedish disqualifies him as an intellectual but legitimizes him as a migrant (Khosravi, 2016). Across time, I have also found myself in interesting paradoxes in the world of academia owing to my accent. As an undergraduate student, my lack of sufficient academic Dutch threatened to disqualify me from being a potentially successful candidate. Based on the first essay I wrote as a first-year student, one of the lecturers raised the question of whether I was made for the academy. As a young adult who had spent four years of her childhood in Belgium, this comment left a deep mark and undermined my confidence in speaking and writing Dutch for years. The irony lies in the fact that two decades later, speaking Dutch, albeit with an accent, has become one of my biggest assets within the Dutch academy. Just as for Spanish-speaking populations in the United States, my linguistic behaviour is highly visible and closely monitored; my accent in Dutch racializes my identity (Hill, 1999). In the Netherlands as in Belgium, I feel like an ‘outsider within’ (Williams, 2001), a foreigner who is not that different from the norm, exotic and familiar at the same time (Khosravi, 2016: 45). Speaking with an accent is a position that is not neutral, nor given (Khosravi, 2016: 59). In my case, it reflects indeterminate speech and is readily linked to the experience of mixed race. In some cases, it comes across as a threat: it causes discomfort and creates uncertainty. That which cannot be tamed is often considered something dangerous (Anzaldúa, 1987; Sanchez, 2025, this volume). Yet in other cases, the fluidity turns into an asset that ticks different boxes simultaneously; I pass for both: diverse and Dutch-speaking. Mixed raceness and an indeterminate accent allow me to sustain contradictions and to turn ambivalence into opportunity (Anzaldúa, 1987). This ambivalence and my struggle to make sense of it inform the two case studies described in this article.

Context: The Dutch academy

Neoliberal universities are spaces of precarity and uncertainty (Berg and Seeber, 2016; Burlyuk and Rahbari, 2023), and my own experience in the Netherlands confirms that Dutch universities are no exception. Standard operating procedures such as the ‘revolving-doors’ – whereby, after multiple precarious temporary contracts, the university fails to provide a permanent contract by rehiring the employee after a period of time off – are commonplace and have become structurally standard (Casual Academy, 2022a: 10). The casualization of the university stands in contrast with, on the one hand, the passion many temporary-contract scholars invest in their work, and, on the other hand, the contradictory (at times even hypocritical) discourses about diversity and care that are widely used within university. The Dutch Casual Academy initiative succinctly describes the vicious circle of temporary contracts in their motto: ‘The university won’t love you back’ (Casual Academy, 2022b). Despite important gatekeepers and well-wishing people who facilitate one’s way along the academic trajectory and open doors to opportunities, for many young scholars navigating through the Dutch academy is like being in a relationship that is never good enough for marriage (Lazaroms, 2022; Zijlstra, 2020). Within this context, in which administrative employers shirk their responsibilities (Casual Academy, 2022a), the creation of safe(r) spaces is rather utopic. As in a toxic relationship (Zijlstra, 2020), the dissonance finds expression in terms of career possibilities and finances; psychologically, the unilateral relation leads to self-doubt, feelings of worthlessness, and impostor syndrome. Thus, the neoliberal university thrives on deep contradictions: discourses about excellence, care, inclusivity, and decolonization go hand in hand with corporative functioning, which overvalues grant hunting, journal rankings, media exposure, and reputations – all to the detriment of the quality of education, deep research and writing, originality and innovativeness and, especially, the mental health of its employees (Berg and Seeber, 2016; Casual Academy, 2022a).

On another note, while the academy proclaims its ‘pledge to diversity and interdisciplinarity, allegiance to one origin and one disciplinary model [continues to be] routinely requested, performed, and internalized’ (Rahbari and Burlyuk, 2023: xxii). This leaves the responsibility to diversify and think outside of the box in the hands of individuals, while the structures continue to produce and reproduce anxiety. Discourse changes far more rapidly than structures do. In the Netherlands, as elsewhere, while some scholars engage reflectively and critically with decolonization theory, for the majority the topic of decolonization is merely a bandwagon on which to hop, without real engagement (Moosavi, 2020). A disengaged discourse that is not translated into action transforms the academy into an institutional site of oppressive micropractices (Nicotera, 1999). Herein, diversity is accepted as long as it ticks the necessary boxes and does not take up too much space, and as long as diverse voices do not make too much noise (Rahbari and Burlyuk, 2023: xix). One of the ways to neutralize such voices is by ‘claiming greyness’ (Schor and Martina, 2018). Daring to be grey was an invitation to stand up against polarization, which is in fact an expected one-sided movement, by those who do not belong to the majority, that obscures whiteness as a structural feature in society (Schor and Martina, 2018). In the context of shaded greyness, mixed-race people are a useful asset, as they can be co-opted as outsiders within who represent sufficient diversity without being too explicit about it. Mixed-Race Theory should move away from co-optation. Moreover, diversity discourses need to be set against the broader background of contemporary national public discourse in the Netherlands. Just as in other European countries, Dutch public discourse does not foster inclusivity or diversity. The discussion over reintroducing Dutch as the main language in higher education, for instance, is indicative of a political climate that goes against intensive and successful efforts in the past to make Dutch universities more attractive and competitive by internationalizing their teaching staff and student body. This description of the precarious university sets the scene for the two case studies that form the core of this article. In particular, the contradictory presence of a discourse around diversity and inclusion helps to better situate my argument. I will now turn to the two case studies.

Moment of inclusion/exclusion #1: Teaching critical thought

Soon after starting yet another temporary position, I was asked to coordinate an elective course encouraging critical thought on historical injustices. The course had been initiated as an inclusive reading group that offered a discussion space for academics, students, and outsiders. With time the group was formalized into an elective in the curriculum. However, when I joined, the course risked being discontinued owing to a switch in personnel. My supervisor, knowing that I was interested in the topic and eager to teach, approached me and another colleague, who was also on a temporary contract and had recently joined the department, to teach the course. The teaching team comprised four colleagues (two women and two men) who shared an interest in colonial history, had worked in research projects in the Global South, and had a migrant background. The first colleague was a woman of colour who had received her doctoral degree in the Netherlands. Despite being in her seventh month of pregnancy, she was extremely motivated to teach. The second colleague was a senior staff member with a permanent position, who had migrated to the Netherlands from the Global North long before. With time he had grown disillusioned with the Dutch academic system; his presence in class was consistent, albeit virtual. The third colleague was a man of colour working on a temporary contract who had been involved in the course for a couple of years. Initially, he alone coordinated the course, but on account of his other professional obligations, I was asked to step into the coordination role.

The transfer of the coordinator’s role was not clearly communicated to my third colleague, and when I stepped forward in one of our meetings he reacted defensively. The coordination role – which included tedious managerial tasks such as replying to students’ emails, updating the syllabus, bringing the lecturers together, keeping the virtual environment up to date, being present during the sessions, maintaining the attendance list, and calculating the final marks in the grading system – was to be shared. On account of technical restrictions, however, my name did not appear as coordinator of the course description on the university’s web page; it appeared only as a lecturer. The lectures themselves were divided among the four of us. As the weeks went by, I ended up doing the majority of the coordinating tasks, including attending all sessions. In one of the two sessions when the junior male colleague was present, he apologized for not preparing the class due to a lack of time. His taking things for granted in not preparing class and his assumption that his frequent absences would be taken care of by others, once even without prior notice, angered me and my female colleague. Moreover, not having my name on the web page meant that my role as a coordinator came down to one of invisible labour: I was doing most of the work without being recognized for it. When I complained, my supervisor logged me, retroactively, as having done these hours, even if my new role on the web page was not visible. For outsiders, I was one of the lecturers and not the coordinator. I took up a caring role in this course, towards the students and my colleagues; unfortunately, collegiality and care in academia, even if time-consuming, are rarely recognized (Berg and Seeber, 2016).

The description of this type of nonchalant attitude results in an incomplete picture of the power relations that were at stake if not placed into a wider structural context. I spent a lot of time and energy mulling over whether I was experiencing a sexist attitude or not, while questioning myself about whether or not I was being aggressive and unfair towards my young male colleague in terms of race. In addition to this, it is important to underline that in the course of that semester, I applied for and received a permanent position. While as a man and someone who had been at the department longer than me, the young male colleague had an advantage and took for granted the interactions described above, as an employee on a temporary contract and a person of colour, he stood at a disadvantage. There is an ambiguous and layered intersectional power relation between white women and men of colour in the context of the workplace. On a hierarchy of otherness, both white women and men of colour are simultaneously privileged and marginalized. Just as white academic women exist as Other and as members of the scholarly elite (Nicotera, 1999: 436), men of colour also exist as Other and as members of the scholarly elite. While the latter seize the advantage to define racialized experience, white women do the same through gendered experience (Williams, 2001: 92).

From a mixed-race perspective, however, I want to further dwell upon race – or rather, on my own experience of race indeterminacy. From the point of view of migrant and racialized scholars, both my colleagues ignored my individualized subject-position and readily racialized me as white. They seem to consider whiteness as fairly homogeneous, just as from the perspective of a European white person someone from India is just an Indian and not necessarily a member of a certain category of Indian. Even if their framing is not completely incorrect (I am white), it is incomplete (I disrupt whiteness). In line with Lavie and Swedenburg, my positionality as an indeterminate white ‘nibbles’ on the edges of whiteness, makes it visible, and contributes to contesting a homogeneous notion of whiteness (Lavie and Swedenburg, 1996). This is how a mixed-raced perspective introduces more nuance to essentialized racial categories. Whereas initially I assumed comradeship with the young male colleague, I soon came to realize that his perception of my whiteness stood in the way. I became my colleague’s opposite not only in terms of gender, but also in terms of race, which can make sense only from an essentialized perspective on race. In a way, he denied my ability to determine my own identity (Sanchez, 2025, this volume), especially its non-white component. The opposite, the denial of my ability to identify as white, was true during another moment of inclusion/exclusion: my participation in an implicit-bias workshop that racialized me as non-white and in which white innocence was violently projected onto me.

Moment of inclusion/exclusion #2: Implicit bias workshop

I had been part of the institute for many years on a temporary contract. It was a large institute that employed over a hundred people. Needless to say, in a context of contract precarity visibility was a survival strategy on the road to permanent positions. At the time, questions of diversity began to be discussed more openly and I took part in these debates. When I shared with the head of the institute, in passing, that in one of these meetings a student had complained about the whiteness and conservative nature of the institute’s curriculum, I was promptly invited to meet in person with the head of research and the head of the institute, as well as the diversity officer of the university. This meeting took me by surprise and felt intimidating. I remember also feeling out of place; I was certainly not the most active nor outspoken member in decolonization debates in our university. I believe that in the context, my ‘outsider within’ position – a foreigner yet not that different from the dominant group, assimilated and not too actively engaged – made me a convenient tool with which the institute could take part in the diversity debate without really having to engage with it; in other words, ‘addressing the symptoms [rather than] the structure underlying racism’ (Kapoor and Cavanagh, 2024). Soon after this meeting I was invited by the head of the institute to participate in an implicit-bias workshop organized for staff. I felt flattered, perhaps even finally noticed. I interpreted my being a valued candidate as due to my professional focus (on African history) and methodological approach (oral sources), yet I also had a sense that it had something to do with my background as a migrant, a woman, and an individual with roots in the Global South. I readily accepted the invitation.

Diangelo writes that for many white people, a single required ‘cultural competency training’ in their workplace is the only time [white people] may encounter a direct and sustained challenge to their racial understandings’ (Diangelo, 2011: 55). The workshop I was invited to was such a training. I was unaware of the implicit, or unconscious, intentions of my hosts for including me. The bias workshop was held in an uninspiring room outside of the institute, where the chairs had been set against the walls so that we could all sit facing one another. There were two trainers, an elderly, white, well-intentioned woman and a jovial man of Surinamese descent, and there were around thirty participants, who included teaching staff, administrative staff, and the head of the institute. A colleague from India, also working as a temporary lecturer, and myself were the only two junior scholars without a permanent contract present; and as I write this text, it dawns upon me that we were both young women, born in the Global South, and both accented scholars. In addition, we both worked on topics that did not focus on Europe or Europeans and actively engaged with decolonial theories in our work.

‘Crossing the line’ was one of the exercises used to reveal biases at work. The exercise went as follows: The facilitators split the group in two so that two halves faced each other across an imagined line drawn in the middle of the room. Then the facilitators asked a series of questions, starting with straightforward easy ones but getting more serious with every question. If the answer to the question was affirmative, the participants were invited to stay where they were standing. If the answer to the question was negative, or the participants chose not to respond, then they should step forwards, cross ‘the line’, walk towards the other side of the room, and then turn around and face, without speaking, those who stayed behind. This exercise was repeated several times. The questions included: Who has parents that are non-Dutch? Who speaks a different mother tongue to Dutch? Who was born outside of the Netherlands? Who believes in (a) God? Who went to school outside of the Netherlands? Who has a temporary contract? and the like. As the gravity of the questions increased, the number of participants who stayed behind and who were stared at by a majority of the group decreased. With every question, it felt that my Indian colleague and I were, more than once, the ones who ‘stayed behind’ and were looked at. A feeling of heaviness envelops me every time I recall this moment: I see the greyness of the room. I remember that each question, asked in a slower and more weighty tone, felt heavier than the preceding one. I also remember the stares of my colleagues, which also grew heavier with each question. I remember turning my face to my Indian colleague and looking into her eyes, as we gently nodded to each other in recognition. And I remember the tears that we both shed, just the two of us, after this exercise. These were not just a few tears; we had been deeply hurt and wept openly and full-heartedly.

The exercise was physically exhausting, emotionally draining and confusing. Why had we, my Indian colleague and I, been invited in the first place? Where were our other colleagues in similar positions? Why were other of the institute’s spokespersons in decolonial thought and from non-Western backgrounds not part of the workshop? Each question dissipated the initial joy of being invited to participate. It dawned upon me that we had not been invited to be part of the group; we ourselves were the workshop. Without us, this exercise would not have functioned, or at least it would not have had the same impact. We were used in order to convey a message to a majority, so that this majority could be made aware of their implicit bias, their embodied privilege while claiming not to be racist (Srivastava, 2024). But what about us? Undergoing this oppressive micropractice breached our sense of social safety. We had to endure our difference, to feel our otherness, even to cry it out. I felt I was pushed to make a public fool of myself for the pleasure of mainly senior employees with fixed contracts – all of whom observed and remained silent (Kapoor and Cavanagh, 2024). When taking a closer look, these colleagues were mostly white, mostly born in the Global North, and spoke Dutch. In hindsight, it dawned upon me that these workshops, instead of critically questioning the power structures and dynamics, reinforce them and do so at the expense of employees who do not conform to the dominant norm, and who often find themselves in vulnerable positions with temporary contracts. In fact, this supposedly anti-bias work reproduces inequalities (Kapoor and Cavanagh, 2024).

Soon after the workshop finished, most colleagues hurried to their homes. My Indian colleague and I stayed for the joint dinner and were continuously asked questions throughout dinner, perhaps in an attempt to make us feel heard and at ease. The questioning had the opposite effect, because it avoided dealing with the elephant in the room: What had actually taken place and why did no one really stand up to protect us? More experienced scholars who are not part of the dominant norm tend to refrain from participating in these practices (Fatah-Black, 2020) – and with good reason.

Looking for the edge

In relation to the spaces that we occupy in academia, the concept of the edge is useful to further unpack mixed race. Pascoe et al. (2020) define the edge as a ‘situated space that exists in relation to privilege’; finding the edge refers to ‘locating, exposing and being explicit about our positionality to the edge, both our precarity and privilege, in relation to others’ (Pascoe et al., 2020). In combining the two case studies above, I see that two themes stand out: my relation to whiteness and the role of context. Let me start with the latter.

As a self-identified white mixed-race person, I am seen differently depending on the context in which I find myself. Race difference leads to different migration experiences (Curiel, 2018); it does not necessarily travel across borders unchanged. Talking about the late Argentinian scholar María Lugones, Ochy Curiel, an Afro-descendant Dominican scholar, explains that colour was the result of Lugones’ migration: ‘The lighter-skinned [Latin American] migrants who arrive in Europe become blackened and are confronted by structural racism; their identity changes accordingly’ (Curiel, 2018, my translation; Lewis, 2025, this volume). While in Argentina Lugones passed as white and benefited from socioeconomic privileges and access linked to whiteness, in the academic context of the United States she turned less white – migration coloured her. In the exchanges on the impact of migration on our social position within university, my Indian colleague and I agreed we did not have the same privilege of race in the Netherlands as we did in India and Colombia respectively. When I migrated from Colombia to Belgium, and later to the Netherlands, both my body and my speech were racialized. While in Colombia I pass as white and receive the privileges attached to being white, in Belgium and the Netherlands I stand on the edges of whiteness. But how appropriate is it to ‘apply the category of “white” to migrant scholars whose pathway to academia started where whiteness had a different meaning’ (Rahbari and Burlyuk, 2023: xxiii)? My racialization is contingent on context. The whiteness bestowed upon me in Colombia stands in stark contrast with the exotic lens through which many Dutch view me. Moreover, race seems to have a dialectical relation to context: because I am ‘otherized’ in the Netherlands, I started portraying my Colombian identity more consciously.

On the other hand, I have observed myself falling into the trap of enacting white fragility. Different scholars have described the self-defence mechanisms used by white people when discussing racism. Robin Diangelo, for instance, defines white fragility as the incapacity to tolerate racial stress, leading to a range of defensive mechanisms that include anger, fear, guilt, and silence (Diangelo, 2011). Barbara Applebaum delves into white discomfort in educational contexts that arises when white people are confronted by their ‘unconscious habits of white privilege’ (Sullivan in Applebaum, 2017: 866–7). Instead of accepting these privileges, they react through ‘discursive practices of escape’ (Applebaum, 2017). The danger of comforting white discomfort lies in the dislocation of the focus of attention from structural inequality to individual soothing. As such, comforting white discomfort re-centres whiteness and reinforces safety for individuals who are already in dominant and safe positions (Zembylas, 2018: 94), while ‘the suffering endured by the marginalized continues without outrage’ (Applebaum, 2017: 869). The danger of sentimentalizing white discomfort is not that it makes room to express emotions, but that it obscures the production and maintenance of the underlying white colonial structures (Zembylas, 2018: 88).

The Surinamese Dutch scholar Gloria Wekker coined the term ‘white innocence’. Innocence, she writes, is a cherished self-identification that evokes the need for protection. White innocence refers not to not knowing about racism, but rather to not wanting to know; this leads to aggressive ignorance, the maintenance of racial hierarchies (Wekker, 2016), and ends up in a ‘complicity in perpetuating racism’ (Zembylas, 2018: 91). In my interactions during the course with my two non-white colleagues, I enacted white privilege. When I spoke up about my irritation with regards to the sexist micropractices described earlier, I was repeatedly swept away by emotions and reacted on different occasions with anger and tears. Diangelo writes that white racism is a white problem and that the burden for interrupting it belongs to white people (Diangelo, 2011: 66). As a white mixed-race person, I want to carry some of this burden. At the same time, it should be noted that discomfort does not need to be paralysing; it can also be transformative (Boler in Applebaum, 2017). The empowerment that we are speaking of for white people becomes concrete by their standing up for and with others in public through supportive words and gestures (Zembylas, 2018) – and writing this article is a small step in that direction.

While mixed-race academics, as well as those from the Global South, bestow prestige on the Dutch academy, it is not easy for those who are not white, or Dutch, to become fully part of Dutch academia. The question of why there are not enough coloured scholars in the university landscape remains a poignant one. White innocence, described above through my own individual experience, is also to be applied at the level of institutions. One of the reasons to present the above two case studies jointly is that their comparison allows me to shed light on the ways in which racial engagement takes place half-heartedly. As an ‘outsider within’, I am simultaneously exotic and familiar, different and foreign – but never an opposite to the norm. The outsider within occupies an in-between space in a predominantly white academic context (Burlyuk and Rahbari, 2023: xviii). When the course on critical thought risked being discontinued owing to understaffing, my female colleague and I were able to step in at the last minute because our positionalities fitted: migrant women, one of colour, the other racially indeterminate. As such, we served the diversity objectives of the university. In a sense, better-positioned colleagues in the academic hierarchy, with permanent contracts, had to rely on minoritized colleagues, holding temporary contracts. While the individual level is characterized by genuinely good intentions – our two permanent-contract colleagues fought the structures tirelessly – at the level of the institution the solution was characterized by tokenistic efforts and window-dressing practices that did not lead to real structural changes.

While I enjoy benefits from white privilege, I have also experienced moments of exclusion when racialized as someone from the Global South. In the second case study, my Indian colleague and I were invited to the implicit-bias workshop because here too we were useful outsiders within: different, yet integrated young scholars who spoke Dutch. Western universities looking for ‘diversity’ are happy to employ such outsiders to mitigate the risk of critical engagement. While the institution remained unshaken, the set-up of the ‘game’ we were subjected to was harmful: Did anybody think, empathetically but also critically, about what the exercise would do to us? Creating this kind of arbitrary interval, a pause for institutional reflection, did not lead to feelings of more safety; on the contrary, we found ourselves in an emotionally violent and unsafe space. The workshop was an example of aggressive ignorance enacting white innocence. This is yet another example of box-ticking practices at a university that does not want to engage critically with the hierarchies it (re)produces. The workshop worked to the advantage of the majority group at the expense of individuals in vulnerable professional positions, who ended up being exposed to benefit the unequal structure that the game itself tried to contest. Here I was not at all comforted by white discomfort; on the contrary, it turned against me. While for most of the participants it was certainly uncomfortable to have two young women crying in front of a group, for us, the two young women, it was belittling. And at the same time, the exercise could not have taken place without us; we served the structure by educating a majority and by comforting whiteness at our own expense.

These two cases together illustrate how the university exploits individuals in precarious contractual positions in order to serve its own diversity objectives. There is a discrepancy between the discourse of care and diversity at Dutch universities and the actual structural changes that reflect this discourse. In the case of the scholars who deviate from the norm, being grateful to work in the academy can only be felt so deeply because one is made dependent on a dysfunctional structure for one’s basic survival. Wekker (2016) is correct to claim that the Dutch academy (still) refrains from fully engaging with racism, which leads to taking advantage of racial hierarchies, at times reflected in contractual hierarchies. Contractual precarity feeds the fragility of solidarity among like-minded individuals (Williams, 2001: 92), making us unable to look beyond our differences and to focus, instead, on what brings us together in order to ‘collud[e] and conspir[e] against the precarity and extraction that force us apart’ (Pascoe et al., 2020). As critical scholars with decolonizing ambitions, we remain susceptible to the competitive corporate ethic of the university. The young male colleague and I succumbed to these divisive forces.

Conclusion

When I first took note of a call for papers to participate in the workshop on Mixed-Race Thought, I was feeling misunderstood by colleagues and frustrated by the system. The call appeared like a lifebelt inviting me to turn frustration into writing. This article is an autoethnographic exercise in which I analytically dissect my experience of contingent racialization by looking critically at two moments of inclusion/exclusion in my academic path in the Netherlands. The first moment racialized me as white; the second exoticized me as someone coming from outside the Global North. Viewed separately, these two moments of inclusion/exclusion cannot illustrate my positioning in the Dutch academy; they have to be read together. I consider myself white, even though my degree of whiteness changes with the social context. While in many contexts I benefit from white privilege, in the Dutch academy I am otherized by a white-dominant majority. On the other side, non-Western colleagues racialize me as white, which at times ends up denying my ability to self-identify. While I can relate to white innocence as someone who has enacted white discomfort, on the other hand, white discomfort has also been projected violently onto me. Standing at the edge of whiteness, I disrupt social readings of whiteness as seen both from a white and non-white perspective. What makes my position different from that of my non-white colleagues lies in its fluid and hybrid nature. While my Indian colleague knows she comes from India, my position is more complicated for me. The everyday condition of being unclassifiable is both a richness and a fissure: a richness because I can relate to different positionalities from within; a fissure because I tend to be apologetic for not fully belonging, repeatedly having to over-explain my origins.

Cusicanqui’s concept of Ch’ixi is a way out of this fissure. Just like the colour Ch’ixi, mixed race is not a homogeneous outcome but consists of different dots. Ch’ixi allows me to look at myself not in terms of two halves, but as a doubled whole. From afar these dots give the impression of being a single colour, but from close up one realizes they are not blended and are far from homogeneous. In this article, inspired by Anzaldúa, I have described this tension between the dots as the border within. Ch’ixi allows for the tension between positionalities to coexist. In other words, through Ch’ixi I am not forced to fully embrace whiteness nor to distance myself from my non-European part. I can be distinctively both. In their dissonance, hybrid positionalities of mixed-race people are tiresome for the individual embodying them but extremely useful as a way out of polarizing academic practices. Dissonant positionalities are a reminder that complexity is at the same time acceptable and an invitation to include nuance and fluidity in racial (and other) classifications, instead of further essentializing them. Looking at whiteness from its periphery, this article aims to bring nuance to the notion of whiteness and highlight the fluidity of its boundaries.

In the introduction to this volume, Sanchez writes that indeterminacy is experienced as both liberating and formative. Disrupting racialization in the academy can lead to creative moments of solidarity, instead of replicating static moments of exclusion. We affirm, by validating feelings of not standing alone, a robust solidarity with other scholars who recognize themselves in the moments of exclusion/inclusion described in this article – but also solidarity in terms of active listening, practising care, engaging and holding space and time for each other (Pascoe et al., 2020). We need to forge connections with those who do not think alike in order to initiate, and continue, a complicated conversation. At the same time, indeterminate positionalities feed creativity, because one has to constantly generate new ways of positioning and reinventing not only oneself but also the social orders in which indeterminate individuals do not fit. Shaking up the status quo is accompanied by tension in the face of resistance. This tension, however, is productive. Anzaldúa even identifies it as a step towards liberation from cultural domination. At the same time, she writes that tension cannot be a way of life (Anzaldúa, 1987: 78–9). It is exhausting to be in the modus of a continuous combatant; at some point one will have to leave the split between the two mortal combatants in order to heal, not choosing between one shore or the other but being on both shores at once (Anzaldúa, 1987: 78–9). Alternatively, one can also choose to disengage from the dominant culture and cross the border into a wholly new and separate territory, to walk a new route. The possibilities are numerous once we, as mixed-race individuals, decide to act and not react (Anzaldúa, 1987: 79). The permanent indeterminacy of mixed-race experience is a provocative and reconciling call to disengage from binary understandings. It is in this call that I hope to find the liberation that will allow me, and others, to move beyond fixed categories and to heal the fissure(s) we experience within.