Kia ora koutou…I was born in 1929. My first day at school a teacher said to another teacher, ‘Pretty little thing, pity she’s so dark.’
The kids weren’t any kinder. ‘Ooh, you’re father shot himself and you mother’s a hori.’ So that wiped me.
I was never marked first in anything. No matter how hard I worked I was marked second or third. I wonder about that. Unconscious bias? Not a chance. When I was in Standard Five, we had to write what the teacher called,’a funny piece’. I wrote a funny piece and he said I must have copied it.
My brother was strapped daily for not learning his spelling. He knew his spelling when he left home but was terrified of the teacher. Unconscious bias? Yeah right. As kids we didn’t know if the shit was because our father had shot himself or because Rose was Maori.
When I was around eighteen people called me Brownie. I was browner than they were, true, but it was the way they said it. An older woman said to me, ‘Don’t answer to anything except your name.’ I followed that advice. Its probably why I’m so hard line about my name.
And when I announced to the world that I was, oh dear, oh dear, a lesbian/feminist that didn’t go down well either.
Changing Maori, Pasifia, Asian names to English doesn’t just happen in classrooms – the first thing the settlers did in the 1840s was change names. The Land wars, that is wars to take land away from Maori to sell to Pakeha, were engineered. These wars were physical, bloody, and the effects were and are long long lasting. Parihaka (Thursday, November 5, 1881), two years before women were granted the vote) was about land, whatever excuses were trotted out.
The Chinese gold miners – the ‘yellow peril’, ‘Ching Chong Chinaman’, the daily treatment of them, the laws, the poll tax. Lebanese settlers, in fact anyone who looked different or spoke/speaks with an accent. The deep-seated belief that everything white (people, world view, religion) is superior to anything else. The certainty that Christianity is the ‘one true church’, the wilful refusal to see what is being done to a group of people when you call them names, in fact making a group of people different, ‘the other’.
What happened last Friday at the mosques in Christchurch is not new. Its just that some are ‘seeing’ it for the first time. Is this New Zealand? That’s what a lot of people seem to be asking.
The answer is yes it is, always has been. Its up to you whether it goes on being so. We can have vigils, we can light candles, we can make cards, we can sing songs, but until we change our attitudes and behaviour, until we exercise some control over our words, until we speak up when someone says something racist, until we change our own actions and attitudes, things will remain the same.
Like I said, I was born in 1929 and I’m going to turn ninety this year. It’s been a long time coming but some change would be good.
Renée
