Point taken, and maybe I'm just defending a tradition we do for generations.
You should see it as if we would change Santa Clause to a skinny sporting purple person because it's an offense to picture an obese white person be pulled by reindeer's. Also the red costume is hidden commerce from Coca Cola and I find it offensive because Cola isn't good for our children...
You see what I did there. I started bitching over a tradition which most of the American people do their entire live.
One culture bitching over another culture would just create a lot of hate between those parties.
The worse part of all this is that 99% of both black and white belgian/dutch people doesn't see this as racism but as the child feast for which it stands. When I go to a Sinterklaasfeast Zwarte Piet is always singing, laughing and giving candy to children. How can that be an insult.
It's that 1 percent that creates these hate movies and put it all into a bad daylight...
If the costume is an insult this could also be said about Santa Claus (Cola, bad for children), Jesus (Why is Catholics most holey man white?), Eastern Bunny (There are no talking bunnies, nor are they laying eggs)...
There is a big difference in dressing up as a rabbit or friendly obese white man on the one side and dressing up as a black man using stereotypes that originated from an era where segregation was normal.
The whiteman stereo type is not a negative one, the blackface stereo type does have a negative origin. White men have never been oppressed, been looked down upon as inferior or been exhibited in a zoo(not so long ago:
http://www.doorbraak.eu/gebladerte/11507f99.htm in dutch)
The discussion explodes every time because of the underlying problem of the racism that still lives strong. Dutch people are more racist than they are willing to admit. They still feel superior. it is not just 1%. 1% does not get mr Wilders and his Princenvlag friends enough votes to sit on the pluche.
Children do not care, that is what the experiment someone else talked about illustrates very nicely, they just want a fairytale to believe in and they will believe whatever you tell them and show them, if you dress up as someone else, they believe with their shortsighted minds that there is someone else and the other person is gone. They will fill the gap with their vast imagination. If Zwarte piet changes their minds will accept with no hessitation. It is the racist parents and adults with their fixed unimaginative brains that do not want to see that change is not a problem.