Jim Hopkins: Our people just a convenient myth

Hone Harawira in front of the Maori Party flag. Photo / John Stone

They were walking down a Wellington street towards the cafe, unseen but heard. Two men, talking loudly, as people do when they think no one's listening. One was a local, the other a Pom although it was hard to tell whether his accent was Brummie or Cockney or an amalgam of both. Imagine an Eastenders/Coro Street hybrid and you're probably close enough.

Anyway, this Pommie geezer was bleedin' determined 2011 would be a better year than 2010. There'd been too much personal crap in his life, 'e reckoned.

When they reached the cafe and it was possible to see who was talking, something unexpected became instantly obvious. The Kiwi looked like he'd spent his whole life in an office, safe from the tanning sun. The Pom, who wore running shoes, was, unarguably, indisputably, 110 per cent African.

That wasn't the mental picture the conversation had conjured. A pallid chap with a packet of pork scratchings, perhaps, but not a young Nelson Mandela. Yet there he was, looking nothing like he sounded and completely, candidly happy in his own skin.

It's always risky to draw big inferences from small encounters but this revived a thought sparked during the debate about Mr Harawira's pathetic attempt to get himself sacked so he can go and play with his new chums, Matt and Sue.

Some of Hone's defenders said he was just reflecting the views of "our people". And there's been similar comment this week from Ngapuhi leader, David Rankin, unhappy about the "racist and shameful" decision to slap a $1000 fee on journos keen to catch the fracas on the lower marae.

"Village idiots" was Mr Rankin's description of those imposing the compulsory koha. "These self-appointed bullies are doing great harm to our people."

There it is again - "our people" - a collective entity thinking with one mind and speaking with one voice. Yet, as the Pom on the footpath proved, we all speak with different voices. It's the life we live, not the DNA we've inherited that shapes us. Context means more than colour.

It's hard to imagine a Maori panelbeater in Invercargill, married to a Polish nurse, feeling she'd been "harmed" by the avarice evident in the north - though she might tell her kids (50 per cent Polish, 25 per cent Maori, 15 per cent Welsh and 10 per cent French) they were all "village idiots" up there.

The fact is, there's no such thing as "our people". "Our people" doesn't exist. It's a convenient myth. And a potent one as years of argy-bargy confirm. But potent things can still be bollocks - try homeopathy next time you're dying.

"Our people" is homo-opathy (as in erectus, you understand). Every one of us is a person before we're a people. If we're not, Hitler's won.

If it's acceptable to define someone as a Jew rather than a physicist, then every racial generalisation, foul or flattering, becomes legitimate.

But they're not. Race is neither the arbiter of identity nor the measure of destiny. The man on the footpath proved that when he spoke. Our personalities are as individual as our immune systems.

Many things shape us - class, community, family, location, height, weight, sex, the way we're wired, the things we watch - but this host of things influences each of us in a host of ways.

There's no collective response to the world. "Our people" don't all think alike. If you need proof, it's in Australia. Thousands of Maori have gone there to create for themselves lives more individual than collective. They don't want to be somebody else's "our people".

They want to be their people. They've gone to a place where they can be, and in 10 years time they'll sound like classic Ocker oisters.

Slapping a label like "our people" on the infinite variety of any racial group may be what we do in Outer Roa now, it may advantage the activists and help the missionary classes assuage their guilt, but it's still bogus.

The only colour that matters is the one we all share - the colour of our brains. Sorry, folks, we're all grey. The stuff on the outside is a suncoat, that's all. Different shades for different climes, nothing more, especially when "our people" and "other people" have been busily bonking and happily breeding for the best part of 200 years.

It's the thing between our ears that makes us and shapes us and bends us to its will. If it decides we should lose ourselves in an invented collective, then lost we become - and that's all. Just lost, however found we may feel.

The Maori Party's dust-up and David Rankin's row with the "self-appointed bullies" are evidence that "our people" are as distinctive, discursive, quirky, perverse and idiosyncratic as any. And it's an insult to every "people" person for anyone to suggest otherwise. Yet we've been exactly that for decades - annually, officially and interminably. The myth of "our people" has become an inviolate shibboleth, politically and socially. No one challenges it. No one queries the emperor's wardrobe.

An uneasy thought occurs. Maybe it's not the people running the lower marae or even the people running the country who're the "village idiots".

Maybe it's us.