This paper offers a new perspective on the relationship between the contested terrain of race and the politics of heritage and belonging in postcolonial Europe. Presenting material from the Netherlands, I argue that instead of reproducing the dyadic white‐majority–black‐minority framework, we must situate the negotiation of race in the triangular relationship between the persistent ‘whiteness’ of Dutch nationhood, the country’s postcolonial Afro‐Caribbean population and its more recent African postmigrant population. Discussing ‘African heritage’ projects by young Dutch people of Afro‐Caribbean and Ghanaian descent respectively, I discern two different critiques of the racialised exclusivity of Dutchness. Struggles for ‘Black citizenship’ seek recognition of African heritage as part of Dutch colonial history and seek to inscribe Blackness into Dutch nationhood; ‘Afropolitan’ celebrations of ‘being African in the world’ not only question the primacy of Dutch national belonging but also resist hegemonic formulations of Blackness. In this ‘trialogue’, race gets done and undone in intersection with other axes of difference and inequality, including citizenship status, migration trajectory and African origin. The triadic framework the paper advances not only conveys the complexity of racial dynamics in heritage‐making, but also sensitises to alternative understandings of belonging and alternative sources of critique.
