Tapu Misa: No room for complacency when racism is assessed

There is a test you can take which measures your racial attitude at an unconscious level. It's called the Race IAT (Implicit Association Test), and, as Malcolm Gladwell writes in his best-selling book Blink, it measures "the immediate, automatic associations that tumble out before we've even had time to think". Or to kid ourselves.

A version of it is available on www.implicit.harvard.edu (see link below) and I'm recommending it to anyone who tends to start a sentence with: "I'm not racist but ... "

Gladwell says he's taken the test "on many occasions" and the results always leave him feeling "a bit creepy". Despite being half black - his mother is Jamaican - the test reveals that he has "a moderate automatic preference for whites".

He reports that of 50,000 African-Americans who had taken the test, about half have stronger associations with whites than blacks. "How could we not? We live in North America, where we are surrounded every day by cultural messages linking white with good."

My daughter, with her hyphenated New Zealand-Samoan-Tongan identity, took the test after reading Gladwell's book and was not surprised to find - considering her diverse range of friends and family - that she has no racial preferences, conscious or otherwise. Which might suggest that in Aotearoa we still have "the best race relations in the world", as a friend of mine remembers reading in a textbook at her school in Scotland 40 years ago. Or not.
In the aftermath of the Sydney riots, complete with neo-Nazis and the incitement of ranting talkback "shock jocks", there has been much talk here at pre-Christmas gatherings about how racist our own society might be and whether we're any better than our excitable neighbours.

My sister and one of our friends, a genial Pacific Islander, who encountered prejudice just about everywhere they went on a trip to Sydney, would say: "Yes, without a doubt." And I'd be inclined to agree.

But you don't have to scratch the surface too hard to find signs of the same ugly underbelly. Witness the approving "good on yer" postings on the blogosphere, and those "If Sydney can do it so can we, let's take back our land" posters which appeared in Wellington last week. But how big a racism problem we might have here depends entirely on who you ask - racism being no problem at all for those who've never experienced it.

For example, most participants in a research report published by the Asia New Zealand Foundation in July said they'd experienced some form of racism, the most common being verbal abuse and "the finger", often from teenagers or children.

As well as overt racism - having bottles or stones thrown at them, and being laughed at because of poor pronunciation - Asians reported more subtle racism, especially in employment, with employers giving jobs and promotions to Kiwis ahead of them, even if they were better workers.

But the man whose job it is to keep a watching brief on these things, Race Relations Conciliator Joris de Bres, says that despite the eight cases of race-related crimes successfully prosecuted by the police this year - the largest number in recent years - he doesn't think we're seeing a deterioration in our race relations.

"Several of them have a common origin in people associated with the tiny National Front organisation, who certainly do not represent the views of the vast majority of New Zealanders."

Or, it would seem, the views of the tiny National Front, which is keen to reject that whole fascist white supremacist tag.

When two former National Front members were convicted earlier this month of the vandalism of Muslim worship centres in Auckland, the National Front leader Sid Wilson was at pains to point out that he didn't like haters in his organisation, that he found the term "sand niggers", used by one of the offenders, offensive, and that he had in fact expelled one of the men because of his extreme views. (Ironically, the expelled man's lawyer was Samoan.)

But even if our version of the National Front seems tame compared with its more vicious overseas counterparts, we shouldn't get smug.

There's only ever been one surefire way of overcoming racist attitudes and that's to get to know each other well enough to become immune to the negative cultural messages we're bombarded with. That requires more than a little interaction.

But how we go about that is becoming more problematic. As rising house prices and other economic realities bite, and our suburbs and schools become more segregated, the opportunities for rubbing along together are becoming fewer.

At a netball game earlier this year, the Pakeha dad who was in charge of our mostly brown team was shocked at the racist attitude of some of the parents of the opposing team.

They were all white, from a decile 10 school in the eastern suburbs. Our team was mostly brown, a mixture of Pacific Island, Maori and Pakeha. It was clear that some of the parents, and their daughters, had come with an attitude. They'd decided that our girls were beneath them before they'd even clapped eyes on them.

By the end of the game they had intimidated our team's umpire, an unassertive student who had volunteered to help, told a cheering parent to shut up, and racially abused our young umpire. When challenged by our outraged Pakeha dad, one of the abusers accused him of being one of those PC bleeding heart liberals.

Which, of course, was so much worse than being a racist pig.