Dawn Picken: Flexing the muscles of fairness

Donald Trump symbolically linked arms with wanna-be Nazis, claiming "blame on both sides". Photo/AP

It's another car conversation. One of many that pop up on the way to school, training, or other places I chauffeur my kids and their mates.

My daughter, Miss 13, and I, are discussing a child whose behaviour has landed him in trouble at school, the mall and just about every other place he's been. Miss 13's friend asks, "Is he Maori?"

My heart sinks. The friend who asked that question is Pakeha. She's parroting what she's learned during a dozen years on earth: brown people cause trouble.

It's a notion so common, to think or say otherwise (in many circles) means you're swimming, like a salmon, upstream. "No," I reply. "He has blond hair and blue eyes." Imagine - white people behaving badly.

Mischief and Mayhem don't care how much or how little pigment nestles within our skin.

As parents, we monitor and steer conversations within homes (and vehicles).

We do this overtly, preaching "treat others as you'd want them to treat you," and subtly, attaching race and religion labels to people whose actions we question or despise: "The Maori woman was smoking;" or "The Chinese guy was swerving all over the road..."

I'm quick to tell my children everyone deserves an opportunity to present himself or herself as an individual, not as representative of a particular ethnic group, religion, or nation.

"Who cares about the smoker's race? How do you know the guy who looks Asian wasn't born here?"

I'm not so great at confronting my peers.

Just last week, a friend recounted a story about travelling for work, saying he was grateful to leave a country full of Muslims.

Because we know how awful they are.

Every last one of them.

Did I inject my snark or mention every religion breeds fanatics, whether it's Christians who believe in polygamy, run over pedestrians or kill homosexuals in Jesus' name, or Muslims who believe in polygamy, run over pedestrians or kill homosexuals in Allah's name?

God bless the agnostics. Or burn them at the stake. Or trash them online. Everyone's got issues.

Including me.

Inside my head simmers a cauldron of prejudices and assumptions born of upbringing, media consumption and stories from friends and acquaintances around the world.

I'll spend a lifetime straining that primordial soup, separating fact from fiction from fear from my last click bait snack.

It's hard work to skip shortcuts and allow people to show you who they really are.

Social scientists say we're wired for tribalism. In a book called The Hidden Brain, about how our unconscious minds influence actions, author Shankar Vedantam details studies showing black children tend to have positive associations with white faces rather than black faces.

He writes, "Bias among toddlers is not triggered by a steady diet of hostile messages, or indoctrination by bigoted parents and teachers. It reflects instead that we really have two systems of learning within our heads, that these two systems develop more or less independently, and that we pay almost no attention to one of them."

It may help explain the question: "Is he Maori?"

I read and watched accounts of thuggery in Charlottesville, Virginia last month that ended in the death of a protester police say was run over by a white supremacist.

I was horrified people in my native USA could be so barbaric, though not surprised; I was ashamed US President Donald Trump symbolically linked arms with wanna-be Nazis, claiming "blame on both sides" (though also not surprised).

Trump was saying, once more - white men are superior to everyone else and if things get violent - oh, well.

A friend who's an Anglican (Episcopal in the US) priest in Portland preached a sermon about Charlottesville, saying he felt conflicted as an "absurdly privileged white guy," to speak about the issue.

I empathise as an absurdly privileged white woman living in the Bay of Plenty.

My children will never be stopped for driving while black or suspected of shoplifting because of their skin colour.

They will likely be hired for jobs by people much like them - educated, white, middle-class.

We can reinforce stereotypes - an inheritance in many ways broken and wrong - for ourselves, our children and our communities - or we can lead by example, untangling our own unconscious biases, refusing to define people by immutable characteristics.

I admit I don't speak up as often as I should. But isn't it our duty to critique tradition and culture to create something better?

I hope flexing muscles of fairness and tolerance around children will help me quash complacency, fear of rejection and lassitude around adults.

Even if no one else notices these miniscule acts of conviction, I will. Maybe my kids will, too.

Dawn Picken also writes for the Bay of Plenty Times Weekend and tutors at Toi Ohomai. She is a former TV journalist and marketing director who lives in Papamoa with her husband, two school-aged children and a dog named Ally.