Well, I'm dutch, and while in general the dutch are way more lenient about what they consider offensive than, say, Americans, that's not the whole issue here..
What happened here is that some ignorant (probably old?) reporter with an obvious lack of international experience or 'feel', writing for a bloody
fashion magazine, tried to write an article in a hip, young, street-language style without having a clue what they were actaully writing.. nor did the magazine's editor-in-chief, as she did not set this straight, and she meanwhile has resigned her job because of this article.
The article was
never meant to be racist though.. it was just a
VERY unfortunate choice of words.
In their defense, I must add that in dutch, the word "neger" which is the literal translation of the english word "******", is not considered an offensive word. Instead, the word "zwarte" literally meaning "black person" is considered way more degrading and very disrespectful.
(If any dutch member of African or coloured descent reads this and disagrees, please say so!)
And "bitch", well, there's a word that has become so common even in dutch nowadays (among our youth that is) that while it still does bear a negative meaning, it is hardly considered very offensive anymore.
While this article barely made the news here in the Netherlands for longer than 5 mins, I think foreign (english speaking) media are making way too much of this and blowing this way out of proportion.
So please Mohammed, please don't think all dutch are evil racist pigs, as really most of us are not. We of course do have our share of ignorant rednecks and hicks here (Oh boy, now I'm sorta discriminating as well!! :eek: ) but the average dutch or european person will not discriminate against people from Africa or other continents, (who actually do account for a substantial part of our population.)
It's just that some dutch folks think their English is great when actually it isn't.. (No I don't
)
