The Brussels public transport company (STIB) announced on Wednesday that it will remove the terms "black passenger" and "black travel" from its vocabulary for passengers who do not pay, reported the local news portal The BrusselsTimes.
According to the company, it may seem like a negative discrimination if blitzers are labeled with the Dutch word "zwartrijders", which means "black traveller". (The Belgian capital region, wedged into Flanders, is officially bilingual, so the use of French and Dutch is equal.)
STIB spokeswoman Ann Van Hamme told the Belgian press: this is the first time they have thought of this term in a "discriminatory sense", but they definitely want to find a different wording to indicate the violation.
The Belgian national railway company has also indicated that it has stopped using this term for some time, while the public transport company De Lijn, which is under the supervision of the Flemish government, will continue to use the term, "as it has never received negative feedback from its passengers in this regard."
Bus and train companies in Germany's three biggest cities, Berlin, Hamburg and Munich, last weekend stopped using the word "schwarzfahren" - the German equivalent of "zwartrijden" - because a growing number of people believed the term had negative connotations for black people looking at.
MTI
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