Tapu Misa: Failing brown boys in need of the right role models

In my daughter's class photo from her first year at high school there is just one brown boy. He stands out, not just for his looks but because his head and shoulders are bent, in the pose of someone who clearly feels out of place in his surroundings.

He is missing from this year's class photo, having literally taken himself out of the picture. Being the only Pacific Island boy in the extension class was not, as you'd expect, a source of pride. Among his mates, he might as well be a leper as brainy.

I met another boy just like him last week, and found myself launching into what I knew was a futile lecture. I'm sure he thought I was an old nag but I couldn't help myself. He reminded me of my own boys, and it seemed criminal that a kid with so much potential should have so little idea of it.

He too had started out in the extension class; he was bright, artistic, and gifted enough to make a future sports champion, yet he was in trouble.

At 16, his friends matter more to him than a future he seems to have limited in his own mind. Given his talents, his sights are set pathetically low.

I mention this because at this school, as with most in the country, it is the brown boys - Maori and Pacific Island, not Asian - who are the least likely to succeed. They top the suspensions and exclusions list and come bottom of the achievement tables. Statistical and anecdotal evidence suggests they are in trouble, and not just at school. In South Auckland, our boys fill the courts.

I refuse to believe it's a lack of ability or desire that limits their futures. The 16-year-old I talked to last week said he was just lazy. I think it had more to do with a lack of confidence and self-belief. And I'm not sure where that starts.

In my family there was always a healthy respect for educational achievement. I believed I could achieve because my parents told me I could, and somehow their belief was enough to get me past a stage in high school when I cared more about being cool than pleasing my parents. It was uncool to try too hard, and who wanted to be smart if it meant being isolated and lonely?

Of course, there were other barriers - a lack of money and resources being one of them - but we'd been taught at home to dream big, and that seemed to help. We've gone out of our way to teach our kids not to allow themselves to be limited by the perceptions of others.

But images of failing and misbehaving brown kids are pervasive. My daughter says the kids in her Maori language class have nicknamed her marshmallow. It amuses her that they thought she must be part-Pakeha because she speaks too well to be just an Islander. But she's not the one I worry about.

As with black communities in Britain and the US, it's the boys who most need help.

At primary school, my eldest boy wondered aloud how surprised examiners would be to find that he was a Pacific Islander, after aceing a national science exam. Why? Because Pacific Islanders don't do well at school, he said.

Despite everything we'd taught him, he had come to see failure as a norm for Pacific kids.

If most of the other brown kids weren't doing so well, it had to mean that they didn't have the ability. How hard must it be to maintain a sense of pride and self-belief when the evidence seems to go overwhelmingly against it?

I suggested to him that there might be other factors, like the fact that we can afford books and computers and have read to him since he was a baby.

But at 11, despite an above-average vocabulary, he affected a South Auckland gangsta slang. It was his way of showing solidarity with his PI friends, most of whom look to American blacks for their role models. More glamorous by far, and until bro'Town and Idol came along, far more visible.

I can understand the appeal, even to my son, who has no shortage of successful male role models closer to home. But it bothers me that our kids' horizons seem limited either to gangsta rappers or football players.

This is not to say that rugby and league don't give our boys good role models. Michael Jones, as I keep reminding my son, managed to get a double degree, be the world's best rugby flanker and still be a thoroughly decent human being.

But nurturing a vision of our boys as the next All Black star is nowhere near enough. Not everyone can become Tana Umaga and it doesn't get us far enough away from the image of the staunch, take-no-prisoners brown male.

Not to mention undisciplined and lacking in mental toughness and leadership skills, as former Kiwis captain Hugh McGahan would have it.

McGahan's outburst on Radio Sport last week doesn't deserve serious consideration, but giving our boys new role models does.

The problem is not, as some male advocates suggest, that boys aren't allowed to give in to their natural aggression. The problem for Maori and Pacific Island boys is that they're not encouraged to define themselves in any other way.

In a recent 60 Minutes item on TV3, the theologian Dr Jenny Te Paa was critical of the way male aggression had come to be celebrated as a central icon of Maori culture. There was insufficient attention being paid, she said, to the production of sensitive, intelligent, articulate Maori males.

But it's not that such males aren't out there, it's that our boys don't seem to know they're there. And neither, it would seem, does the rest of society.

There's not much Maori and Pacific Island parents can do about the perceptions of others, but there is much they can do to foster their boys' self-belief. They can ease up on the humility and teach them that strength means more than physical aggression. Tell them they'll go far with hard work and discipline and they just might.

Incidentally, my son, who's 12 now, is over his gangsta phase. He plays club hockey for a mixed-sex team, and I'm pleased to report that his biggest fault is that he's not aggressive enough.