Emily Raboteau

Biography

Emily Raboteau is the author of Searching for Zion (Atlantic Monthly, 2013), which won the New York Book Festival’s Grand Prize and was named a Best Book of 2013 by the Huffington Post. Her essays have been published in the Guardian, the Believer, and the Oxford American. She is an associate professor at the City College of New York, in Harlem.

See Work

ESSAYS / Winter 2014

Who Is Zwarte Piet?

By Emily Raboteau

A holiday tradition in the Netherlands involving blackface has sparked a debate about race, the legacy of slavery, and the vestiges of colonialism. Emily Raboteau told the story in our Winter 2014 magazine.

The arrival of Sinterklaas (Saint Nicholas) and Zwarte Piet (Black Pete) in a Frisian village in the Netherlands on November 24, 2012. (Patrick Post / Hollandse Hoogte)