Editorial: View in the mirror not simple

Hone Harawira with his wife Hilda (left), grandchildren (from left) Kahi Harawira and Fetuao Faavae, and his mother, Titewhai Harawira. Photo / Mark Mitchell

The public reaction to Maori Party MP Hone Harawira's comment that he "wouldn't feel comfortable" if one of his seven children took up with a Pakeha was more instructive than the original comment.

The accusation of racism abounded, along with predictable pieties about how it's all about love.

Harawira acknowledged that his comments could be read as prejudiced. "But how many people don't have prejudices?" he asked.

There is more than a little merit in his argument that he had "raised a mirror to New Zealand's face."

Pakeha discussion of race relations in this country is too often predicated on the idea that we live in an equal-opportunity paradise.

But the failure to recognise that Maori might have a distinct point of view on the world is every bit as racist as any of Harawira's utterances.

His critics also betray a depressing, perhaps wilful, refusal to distinguish between race and ethnicity.

They are always quick to point out that no pure-blooded Maori exists, as if this undeniable fact rendered invalid the notion of Maori identity.

Yet they would have some difficulty convincing a Frenchman that he was not French because the DNA of his Stone Age forebears had been so diluted by migration and intermarriage.

Likewise, the savage conflicts in Rwanda or the former Yugoslavia were based in ethnic, not racial, division.

To question Harawira's comments on the grounds of his DNA is entirely to miss the point.

The fact is that many members of immigrant communities - not to mention Pakeha - would (and do) feel uncomfortable with the idea that their children might marry outside their ethnic group.

Their misgivings are bound up with complicated notions of cultural identitity and we do ourselves a disservice when we seek to simply dismiss that attitude as racist.

We will mature as a society when we not only acknowledge but celebrate difference rather than seek to erase it.

And true ease in relationships between Maori and Pakeha will come when people on each side of that divide recognise the distinctiveness of the other.