Thus wrote Harmannus – better known as Harry – Hoetink, in his seminal work The Two Variants in Caribbean Race Relations (1967).

Four decades later, this quotation may seem to border on the tautological. Yet at the time of its writing, ‘race’ and essentialized racial identities were widely understood as the unchanging core issues modeling the societies of the Caribbean, and the Americas at large. Harry Hoetink was a pioneer among the first generation of post-World War II scholars who helped to rethink the meaning of ‘race’ and color in the wider Caribbean.

Departing from a comparative historical and sociological perspective, Hoetink did not shy away from bringing social psychology into his analysis, as in his introduction of the concepts of ‘somatic norm image’ and ‘somatic distance’. At the same time, however much he may have been educated in a Western mold, his writings demonstrate a resolute rejection of unjustifiable generalizations based on ‘the ideal-typical Western homogeneous society, which unfortunately keeps producing the conceptual framework for the sociological analysis of completely different types of society’ (Slavery and Race Relations in the Americas, 1973).

Harry Hoetink developed such insights as an outsider to the region. Born in the town of Groningen, in the north of the Netherlands, he studied social geography in Amsterdam and embarked for Curaçao in 1953, at the age of only twenty-two, to become a secondary- school teacher on this Dutch Caribbean island. After this first arrival in the Caribbean, he immediately became an observant outsider and soon an honorary insider. In Curaçao, he met his future wife Ligia Espinal, who strongly contributed to his initiation into Curaçaoan society as well as into the society of her native Dominican Republic.

In 1958, he defended his dissertation on the social structure of pre-twentieth-century Curaçao, written while on the island, at Leiden University.