Face Our Racism
Taika Waititi, one of New Zealand’s most successful creative exports, was recently interviewed by an artist and friend, Ruban Nielson. When Ruban posited: “I think I’ve got quite an idealised vision of New Zealand as being like Australia but without the racism and the blokeish sense of humour.” Taika replied: “Na, it’s racist as f***.” This entirely true statement managed very quickly to get under the skin of many New Zealanders, upset at being painted with such broad strokes. To clarify — it got under Pākehā New Zealanders’ skin. I noticed that there wasn’t a public onslaught of vocal minorities jumping at the chance to correct him. The likely reason for this is that there was nothing to correct. Perhaps Taika’s comment was not couched as everyone would articulate it, and it probably makes people uncomfortable to hear it said in such strong terms, but it doesn’t in any way deter from the fact that his response was, is and remains, true. The negative reaction was both unfairly dismissive and revealed a deep misunderstanding about how most New Zealanders think that racism is and the forms it takes.
It is inarguable that in New Zealand there is a significant imbalance in the way Māori, Pacific and Asian populations are treated when compared with our Pākehā population. Māori are disproportionately represented in prison and more likely to be arrested for crimes that Pākehā are committing in equal measure. In New Zealand a Māori person is three times as likely to be apprehended and charged for possession of marijuana, even though levels of use among Māori are only marginally higher than among Pākehā. I’ve been in places where Pākehā have been smoking weed, both in private and in public and have even been spotted by the police.No one ever got in any kind of trouble. The system is built in our favour.
We must acknowledge that we developed a society that actively promotes white people over and above others. We cannot treat the actions of our past as if they exist in a vacuum that we put behind us. The ongoing effects of the harm caused still exists in the organisation of our society. We’ve structured all of our major institutions around a European framework, forcing Māori, the indigenous people of New Zealand, to adapt to us. We did not meet this half way. We assumed cultural superiority. The hubris of that is astounding and the effects of this history cannot be wiped clean from our society today.
Racist behaviour exists on a spectrum. Racism is not confined to only bigoted language, segregation, or active subjugation. We have to evolve our understanding of what forms and vehicles racism takes. It’s everything from daily micro aggressions to macro structural inequality. I can only imagine how exhausting it is to face this reality day by day. Not to mention how tiring it must be to tell people about your experience only to have them deny it’s very existence. When a person of colour says New Zealand is racist, it’s not the job of Pākehā to tell them all the ways they’re wrong. It’s our job to listen and figure out how we can be better.
It’s astonishing to me that any white person would ever dare to reject the experience of a minority. It probably shouldn’t be surprising that this is exactly what broadcasters Duncan Garner and Mark Richardson did. In doing so they displayed a level of ignorance not suitable for public broadcasting. When they reject, outright, the opinions of Taika, they’re doing so from a place of presumed and misplaced superiority. They’re giving greater weight to their own experience of the world than to Taika’s and they do this with no recognition that their experience of New Zealand would be entirely coloured by their privilege of existing in it as white men. Their response was no doubt defensive and reactionary. They were arguing their case by positioning themselves as not as bad as those who have lived before them. But by being defensive and rejecting the validity of Māori and their experience, they end up repeating the actions of Pākehā in the past. There’s a great irony at play: we like to think we’re different from our ancestors, who we acknowledge were racist, but by our refusal to look in the mirror at ourselves, we mirror that racist past and reflect it into today.
Tui Motu Magazine. Issue 226, May 2018: 27.