Bronze statues of colonial icons have been spray-painted. Black Lives Matter protests have broken out. And now the Dutch parliament has backed a petition by three teenage women requesting the addition of racism to the school curriculum. Winds of change are swirling around the cobblestones of The Hague. Faced with a strong colonial past and a legacy of slavery, the Dutch are being asked to take a more impartial look at their history. "We're still a very white nation," says Mirjam de Bruijn, an anthropologist at Leiden University. "Our colonial legacy is visible every day in our streets. There's an inherent racism and acceptance of inequality. Racism is inside all of us." How the protests began What happened in Minnesota found echoes here too. In June, more than 50,000 people knelt during demonstrations across the Netherlands. "We have deaths of people who died like George Floyd, but still no arrests," explains poet and campaigner Jerry Afriyie, who has been detained at a number of anti-racism protests. He points to two recent deaths in Dutch police custody. Tomy Holten died an hour after he was arrested on 14 March, after reportedly causing a nuisance in a supermarket in the central city of Zwolle. Images appear to show one of the arresting officers pressing his foot down on his face. In 2015, Mitch Henriquez died after being arrested for allegedly claiming he had a gun at a music festival in The Hague. An officer was given a six-month suspended sentence for applying the neck grip that killed him. Mr Afriyie believes the Netherlands has problems with "white-supremacy" sentiment and he has his own experience: "I was put in a choke-hold and had to struggle for my life." Protesters complain of institutional racism and a disconnect between a society that sees itself as anti-racist and the actual experience of black people within it. There is a distinct absence of black MPs in the current Dutch parliament. And that reflects a sense of invisibility felt by many. "It's a strange country," says Mirjam de Bruijn, who finds it impossible to see the Netherlands as truly democratic when part of society is silenced or told the racism they endure is imagined.