With this ruling, the court has lumped together skin colour and nationality – it cemented the idea that to be Dutch is to be white. Of course, this was something racialised Dutch people already knew, but the court ruling made it official. The ruling is the legal, and seemingly sophisticated, stand-in for its uncritical and banal version: “Well, ‘we’ are white, and ‘they’ are Black, is it not so?” As a result of decades of migration and colonialism, thousands of people from different corners of the world – some voluntarily, some not – ended up in the Netherlands. And their presence in the country cracked the notion of “Dutchness as whiteness”. The post-colonial migration from the Dutch East Indies and the Moluccas, and later Suriname and the Dutch Antilles, the labour migration from Turkey and Morocco, and the more recent arrival of refugees from Bosnia, Somalia, Iraq, Iran, Congo and so on, shook up the whole idea that being Dutch equals being white. Or so you would think. But, being “white” or “Black” are not objective indicators of anything. These racial classifications are political, not biological. What we are dealing with here is a colonial legacy.

Source: A court just confirmed: To be Dutch is to be white | Opinions | Al Jazeera