Are Santa's elves promoting "cozy racism"?
Children’s holiday entertainment, a prime example of Denmark’s trademark “coziness,” is haunted by bogeymen from Christmas Past
The debate over racism and cultural appropriation resurfaced in Danish media earlier this month. This time it concerned portrayals in mainstream media itself, specifically two children’s Christmas programs from the unenlightened twentieth century. Are we learning anything from the controversy?
Throughout the month of December, the TV2 network runs a program for children known as The Christmas Calendar, which features nisser (elves) and Julemanden (Santa Claus). The series are sometimes rebroadcast in later years. In the 1997 edition, “The Best Santa Claus,” with the popular Pyrus character played by Jan Linnebjerg, a scene depicts children dancing with nisser and singing a song demanding candy. Three of them are dressed in costumes as creampuffs with their faces painted brown (DK).
Chocolate creampuffs used to bear the slang nickname negerbolle. Neger is the equivalent of the unquotable English n-word—considered boorish but not quite as taboo in Danish—and bolle in this case means “ball.” In another episode, based on a book from 1845, three nisser tease a fourth for being darker than they are, calling him a neger. The first three are afterward scolded and dunked in a vat of ink.
The Chinese to the rescue
TV2 had planned to run the program again this year but has canceled it. It had received complaints from viewers who saw the chocolate creampuffs as blackface and a racist caricature. The creators of the program and the actors protested that the scenes don’t degrade blacks. The second one is actually antiracist, they say; its moral is that no one should be bullied because of their skin color. But TV2 didn’t care about the writers’ intentions, as Mette Nelund, TV2’s Acting Head of Fiction Programming, explains:
We will not take a risk that some children misunderstand the content and feel that their skin color is wrong when they watch The Christmas Calendar.
The network’s solution was to replace “The Best Santa Claus” with another Christmas Calendar program, “The Best Adventure,” which depicts two girls dressed in bamboo hats who sing, “In China they say ‘pingeling’ every time they get rice” and ” women have a little foot, much smaller than a carrot.” That’s acceptable, said Nelund, because the portrayal isn’t derogatory and the girls’ faces aren’t painted.
Cost-cutting casting
The second provocative event, Nissebanden i Julemands land (The Band of Elves in Santa’s Land), is a family theater performance based on a TV series from 1984, Nissebanden i Grønland (The Band of Elves in Greenland). The play includes ethnic Danish child actors portraying Inuit Greenlanders as “eskimos” in anoraks and black wigs. This triggered indignation in a young Inuit, Michael Bro, an arctic studies student at the University of Copenhagen. On a TV panel, Bro, an avowed “decolonizer,” called the portrayal, which he hadn’t seen, cultural appropriation (DK) and accused the play’s creator, veteran actor Flemming Jensen, of racism.
These two incidents launched a heated and confused debate in social media between progressives, who find the portrayals reactionary and hurtful, and conservatives, who find the progressives hysterical and opportunistic—krænkelsesparat (“ready to be offended”). It follows the familiar pattern in the culture wars: a controversial incident, then an objection, then capitulation, then ridicule of the capitulation, then ridicule of the ridicule, and so on.
Reciprocal derision
Except in the second case, Jensen refused to apologize. He defended the portrayal, somewhat tangentially, by saying that in the theater piece the story doesn’t even take place in Greenland. In a more blatant slur, he added that if he had portrayed indigenous Sami (aka Lapps, or “reindeer people”), it would have met objections from “drunken Finns.”
This led to a name-calling exchange with another participant in the TV panel on the normally rather dry and sober political news site Altinget.dk. The columnist David Trads called the two shows an expression of “cozy racism” (DK), adding sarcastically, “That is, that it is almost OK to have a little racism and discrimination like this because we still have freedom of expression, don’t we?”
Don’t take our blackface!
Trads wrote that a “choir” of prominent conservative politicians “are furious that they may no longer see ‘eskimos’ and ‘blackfacing’” and singled out Liberal Alliance MP Henrik Dahl for comparing the treatment of Jensen to “the Chinese Cultural Revolution, which as is well-known cost millions of lives.”
Trads, a former candidate for Parliament as a Social Democrat, is normally a knowledgeable and insightful political commentator, but here he got carried away with his hyperbole. An image of these MPs raging over the loss of blackface could play only to Trads’s own choir. And Dahl hadn’t characterized the criticism of Jensen. In fact, he for one explicitly refrained from commenting (DK) on shows he hadn’t seen. He’d written that wokeism generally, by using a personal sense of violation as a pretext for censorship and by severing messages from the senders’ intention and the historical context, reminded him of the Cultural Revolution “minus the violence.”
You disingenuous nalussorssuaq!
Jensen, responding in Altinget.dk (DK) to Trads’s piece, complained that it was ludicrous that Trads and other critics, like Bro, condemned as “morally reprehensible” something they still hadn’t observed. He concluded that Trads, who calls himself an author and journalist, is more accurately described by the Greenlandish word nalussorssuaq. It’s hard to find a reliable translation of that epithet. Online databases render it variously as “snowstorm,” “glacier,” “arctic char” (a fish in the salmon family), “good morning,” and “good luck.” It suggests, in any case, that Jensen knows Greenland better than his Danish accusers. The show completed its three-week run.
These disputes don’t seem to have dampened the yuletide spirit much, but entertainment producers will be more careful next year. At least no one complained about the creampuffs’ sugar addiction as unhealthy role-modeling. Questioning sweets may be the last taboo for both sides of this cozy land.
Happy Holidays and Glædelig Jul, everyone!