Tapu Misa: None so blind as the privileged majority

COMMENT

Some of my kin caught the wrong bus on Saturday. They were trying to get to the Pasifika festival but found themselves instead at the St Patrick's Day parade, where they were a tad conspicuous, being among the few brown faces there.

Not that they were averse to new cultural experiences, but it wasn't quite the one they'd been looking forward to.

So it was over to Western Springs, where things were swinging to a decidedly different beat, with considerably more brown faces among the 170,000-strong crowd. So many that even the Tongan contingent from Christchurch, hawking, among other things, Christchurch-grown taro leaves, were impressed.

We didn't know, they said, that there were so many Pacific Islanders in Auckland. A feeling shared, no doubt, by another first-time visitor to the festival.

Someone from the Pacific Island station Radio 531pi spotted the tall, bespectacled Palagi man who's been much in the news lately, and grabbed him for an interview.

The part-time DJ at the station had never heard of him, and ended up introducing him in his Samoan-accented English as "Ton Prash". He asked him if he was having a nice time, which apparently he was, but neglected to ask if such race-based, council-funded festivals as Pasifika would ever have been given the nod under his stewardship.

Or, for that matter, whether a station such as 531pi, which exists solely to fly the flag for Auckland's Pacific Island communities, would survive in the new colour-blind society he's promoting.

I mention the festival for the benefit of the reader who told me that she and her friends often wonder why there is not a Pakeha anything, as in Pakeha sports teams, or Pakeha festivals. The implication being that these would be considered racist, so why aren't, say, the Maori All Blacks?

I take that in the same spirit as those demanding to know why it's always Maori (and to a lesser extent Pacific) culture being rammed down our throats and never Pakeha culture. Or European culture, as some would prefer to call it.

It's a question I always find richly ironic.

What of the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra and the Royal New Zealand Ballet (to mention just two), both beneficiaries of decades of state funding? What of Television New Zealand and Radio New Zealand, both of which continue to cater largely to the majority culture?

As Auckland businessman and proud Pakeha Pat Snedden said this week, Pakeha don't recognise and celebrate their own ethnicity. To do that, you'd have to acknowledge that Pakeha is an ethnicity with its own culture, rather than the (invisible) norm.

Maybe that's why the same people who see a trend to separatism in any activity that recognises and celebrates brown ethnicity have never complained about those that celebrate Pakeha ones. Like, for example, the Rose of Tralee competition, open only to those of Irish descent; the aforementioned St Patrick's Day celebrations, or Scottish Week in Dunedin. Or the dozens of ethnically based Pakeha clubs.

In the Herald a few years back, historian Michael King wrote that he found it astonishing to have to constantly assert that "there is, indeed, such a thing as Pakeha culture" - one that shares some ingredients with its largely European cultures of origin but is distinct nonetheless because of its engagement with both the land and the tangata whenua culture.

Elements of this Pakeha culture, King wrote, included a strong relationship with the natural world intensified by living by the sea; an engagement with the history of the land "which, in my case, began with boyhood encounters with Maori"; a relationship with the literature of the country, especially with the writing of such people as Robin Hyde, Frank Sargeson and Janet Frame; and a relationship with Maori people, history and writing.

He ascribed to New Zealanders, too, attitudes, values and attributes that included a willingness to have a go at any kind of job opportunity which presented itself; an instinctive concern for the underdog; a compassion for those in need or trouble; and an unwillingness to be bullied, or to be intimidated by class or status.

I'd include also an emerging identification with things Pacific, evident in the enthusiasm with which many Pakeha embrace festivals such as Pasifika.

Still, it's a case that hasn't found much favour among those who don't see any advantages in their majority status; who seem as blind to their privilege as they are to their culture.

In his book Brown: The Last Discovery of America, American essayist Richard Rodriguez explores the idea of how being white in America has become synonymous with achieving freedom.

Rodriguez extends the point of Noel Ignatiev's How the Irish Became White (by distancing themselves from blacks) to include other European immigrants to America, and even non-Europeans such as his Mexican parents, who were described as white on their citizenship papers by an unimaginative federal agent.

"I grew up wanting to be white," he writes. "That is, to the extent of wanting to be colourless and to feel complete freedom of movement. The other night at a neighbourhood restaurant the waiter ... said about himself, 'I'm white, I'm nothing'. But that was what I wanted, you see, growing up in America - the freedom of being nothing, the confidence of it, the arrogance of it. And I achieved it."

It's become accepted wisdom now that race is a biological fiction - there being, according to the geneticists, more variation between people of the same racial group than between racial groups.

But are racial and ethnic classifications really as irrelevant now as we all say we'd like them to be? In an ideal world maybe.

But, as the American Sociological Association warned in 2002, "those who favour ignoring race as an explicit administrative matter, in the hope that it will cease to exist as a social concept, ignore the weight of a vast body of sociological research that shows that racial hierarchies are embedded in the routine practices of social groups and institutions".

The American authors of White-Washing Race: The Myth of a Colour-Blind Society argue, too, that whites have no awareness of their privileged status, built on decades of preferential treatment, even as they fight to protect their interests.

As one of its authors posited: "Most whites don't see white as a race. Like a fish in water, they don't think about whiteness because it's so beneficial to them."

Herald Feature: Sharing a Country