Sunday 24 March 2019

The challenge of weeding out racism

Our Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern wore hijab to speak to grieving Muslims

Like many New Zealanders, I was inspired by our Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s declaration in the wake of the terror in Christchurch that “This is not us.” I took it as a signal of our intentions for the immediate future. From now on, from this day forward, this is not us. From now on we are vigilant for the early warning signs of white supremacist violence. From this day forward we reject every expression of racism and hatred and stop it in its tracks. To this promise we pledge ourselves. So say we all.

Taken as a statement of New Zealand’s past and present – the comfortable bubble we were all living in up until that Friday – I’m afraid it was inaccurate, as many other New Zealanders have sad cause to know intimately. We are a nation where cries of “Go home!” follow brown-skinned people down the street. We are a nation that elects anti-Muslim racists to Parliament and appoints their party leader to the second-highest position in the land. We are a nation whose primary political divide in our most recent election was between those who were racist against Māori and Pacific Islanders and those who were racist against Asians.

I happen to have the tremendous good fortune of being a white man; the only racism I’ve had come my way was a couple of the half-dozen occasions when I’ve been mistaken for Jewish. And yet even from this position of privilege I’ve seen plenty of racism directed at others. How much more visible must it be to those on the pointy end?

(Content note: If racism in New Zealand is the last thing you need to be reminded of just now, I’d advise not reading any further.)

There was the guy in the supermarket who yelled “Come on, [racial epithet]!” when a South Asian worker, busy arranging trolleys, briefly got in his way. There was the guy who expressed regret, in tones of deep distaste, at how his country was being “taken over” by “persons of a yellow persuasion”. There was the guy on the bus who hypothesized that the East Asian owners of the internet café next to the bus stop had taken down the bus timetables to fool potential customers into parking there. There was the guy who, having come off his bike to avoid a car rounding the corner, shouted not “Watch where you’re going!” nor “I’ve got a right to use the road too!” but “Bloody Asians!”

I’ve heard people yell at the television “You’re not Māori!” when a commentator claimed otherwise who didn’t look Māori enough for their judgement. I lived through the time when Ardern’s party (before she entered Parliament) blocked Māori customary property claims to the foreshore and seabed while allowing commercial ones, and sold this policy to the nation as “the Māoris want to stop you going to the beach” (to complete the irony, the Māori claimants more often wanted to ensure public access to beaches). I heard people then joke, since by then our laws had abandoned the racist blood quantum criterion for telling who counts as Māori, that maybe they would still be able to go to the beach if they “feel Māori”. It wasn’t that long ago. New Zealand is still pretty much the same people now as it was then.

Once, conversing about my job with a social work lecturer after class, I happened to mention that in my dentistry classes there was a high proportion of Asian students. Insofar as I had a point it was to puzzle over why so few Pākehā students were going into dentistry (the paucity of Māori and Pacific Islanders in the health professions is, alas, less mysterious). But the lecturer – whose inclusive attitudes I had until that point admired – took me to be saying something quite different. “Yeah,” he said, “they shouldn’t let them in to take those places off our people, should they?”

I could go on for much longer if I cared to, and I haven’t even started on the online racism yet – the infamous comments sections on Stuff, the rants that come up on political Facebook groups. Despite the narrative that we on the Left comfort ourselves with, it’s not all coming from the Right. Jacinda Ardern is Prime Minister because Winston Peters lent Labour and the Greens the support of his New Zealand First party to form a coalition government; his votes came from a contingent of people, thousands strong on Facebook, whose chief quarrel with Ardern’s National Party predecessor was that he was too soft on immigration, and whose chief quarrel with immigration was that it brought too many Asians into the country. There are many, many New Zealanders to whom it is an article of faith that our present housing shortages and rising inequality are because of Asians taking all the houses and jobs. I know this because of the hours of my life I’ve wasted arguing with them.

Winston Peters is not a xenophobe; he’s a cynic who knows xenophobia will always get him re-elected (which is telling in itself). As long as he talks a tough line on Asian immigrants during election season, always skating just shy of being incontestably racist, he doesn’t have to actually do anything about immigration policy once in office, and indeed he never has. But only one strategy has ever shut him up, and both Labour Prime Ministers he has partnered with have now deployed it: make him Foreign Minister.

Ardern also made Peters Deputy Prime Minister, and you can see him in the background of many of the photos of her visiting the mosques last weekend. He’s been remarkably quiet, listening to his boss flatly contradicting the keystone of his campaign platform and getting international acclaim for it. His anti-Asian rhetoric has in the past included the obligatory fearmongering about Islam. It would take more powers than are in heaven and earth to make Peters publicly apologize for anything, but I hope he is using this time to do some deep critical self-reflection.

Speaking of which – I’m relieved to say that I have to go back to my childhood to remember myself saying anything that was overtly racist (as opposed to thoughtlessly racist, for which I make no such claim). There were the playground rhymes with the N-word, and the ones mocking East Asian people. There were the jokes mimicking East and South Asian patterns of speaking English. There was a kid I was close to at age twelve because we were both outcasts, who thought New Zealand should be for white English-speaking people and Māori should be grateful that Captain Cook brought motorbikes here in 1769, or something; I was impressionable enough to think, briefly, that he had a point. By sheer good luck I happened to read a newspaper article around that time quoting, or more likely misquoting, a Māori person as opining that Pākehā ought to assimilate to Māoritanga or leave the country, and I had enough nascent rationality in my tender brain to realize that this was the only logically consistent way to apply nationalist sentiments to New Zealand.

If you’ve been developing the impression that I’m about to tell you each of these little acts of racism is just as bad as the terror that shook our nation a week ago, I hope the fact that I just indicted myself is enough to convince you otherwise. Ardern is right: the terrorist chose New Zealand not because his acts would go unnoticed here but because they would be especially terrifying bursting into our peace. But before he committed those acts he had to hide among us and build up his cache of weapons. To hide, he must have been blending in with the crowd somehow. And this guy was not some kind of genius master of disguise. His prejudice against Muslims, his suspicion of immigrants, his contempt for people of colour, didn’t ping anybody’s radar because they weren’t all that unusual coming from a white man in New Zealand.

I have nothing but praise for the police officers who arrested the terrorist on that terrible Friday and stopped the killings. I do have to wonder, though, why our intelligence services hadn’t previously noticed what an awfully large amount of guns he was purchasing. It’s not like New Zealand doesn’t have government agencies to interfere with people’s business. Six or seven years ago the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) got caught illegally spying on New Zealand citizens. Another five or six years before that, the police arrested a number of Māori activists and environmentalists in what became known as the Urewera Terror Raids. Before that again, the Security Intelligence Service (SIS) imprisoned a Muslim refugee for about a year on suspicions of terrorism, later shown to be baseless. Yet all indications are that neither the GCSB nor the police nor the SIS were keeping any tabs on white supremacists. Not worth their while, apparently.

I’m a white man, as I’ve already mentioned, and there is a well-known psychological phenomenon where people genuinely don’t notice things that are not in their interests to notice – after all, the brain doing the noticing is the same brain calculating the interests. I’m autistic, what’s more, which makes me less skilled than many at picking up social and political subtext. What I’m saying is that if I can see for myself that New Zealand has a racism problem that we need to do better on, anyone else is without excuse.

Yes, I’m afraid I do have a specific “anyone else” in mind. That person is well-known New Zealand Left columnist Chris Trotter, blogger of Bowalley Road. His responses to the shootings on that blog have, I’m sorry to say, severely diminished my respect for him as a political commentator. The first one begins with the terrorist’s name, in bold and capital letters, which is why I’m not linking to it. It goes on to describe him as a “lone wolf”, a phrase which Trotter must have known would be a red rag to a bull; to diagnose him with a mental illness, explicitly declining to provide evidence by calling it “axiomatic”; and to conclude that “we must not for one moment entertain the notion that there was something we could have done” to stop him. Which, by the way, means also not entertaining the notion that we can do anything to prevent the next one. Cheers.

Which pales in comparison to the second Bowalley Road piece on the topic, in which Trotter advances a conspiracy theory. I was going to call it a “bizarre” conspiracy theory, but actually it’s a pretty run-of-the-mill one among political pundits these days. The idea is that the terrorist’s super secret plan is to scare the public and/or the government into doing whatever the pundit politically opposes, so if they do that then the terrorist is winning, so obviously the solution is for the public and the government to align with the pundit’s political preferences instead.

I mean, OK, Trotter is a pundit, so this is nothing too shocking so far. Where it gets weird is exactly what political opinion the terrorism was, apparently, stealthily designed to promote: social justice progressivism. You see, if we’re not careful, the Cultural Left will start holding racist conservatism responsible for the shootings. And then “those even further to the left” will – horrors! – start spreading the idea of “White Privilege” (scare-quotes and scare-capitals both Trotter’s), which apparently now means not that there are many problems which affect people of colour more than white people and none really vice versa, but rather that the murders are the fault of every New Zealander for living in a colonial nation. Phase III is of course the collapse of democracy, dogs and cats living together and chaos in the streets.

Honestly, I wondered for a moment there whether Trotter’s computer had been hacked and someone else was writing his blog, because he notes that “those even further to the left” include quite a few members of the Green Party – when up until now, Trotter’s has been one of the more prominent voices pushing the narrative that the Greens aren’t really Left at all and any day now, wait for it, any day now, they’re going to sell out Labour and form a coalition with the National Party instead, no seriously, just wait, any day now... I also can’t help noting the irony of a free speech campaigner arguing that there are some political opinions too dangerous to talk about.

On the question of responsibility, there’s a distinction to be made. If someone breaks into a building at night and steals stuff, obviously that person, and no-one else, is to blame for committing the burglary. Their guilt is not in the least mitigated if it turns out there was a security guard on duty who wasn’t paying attention. But the burglar’s unmitigated guilt doesn’t let the security guard off the hook. I would think said security guard’s employers would be having a very serious talk with them the following morning about alternative career paths.

New Zealand’s security services and law enforcement, and yes, to some degree New Zealand society as a whole, are like that security guard. We’re not the burglar; that would be the terrorist. We’re not the burglar’s accomplices or confederates; that would be the white supremacist ideologues who enculturated him with his vile ideas. But the racism tolerated in New Zealand – the jokes, the stereotyping, the scapegoating of immigrants, the dismissal of Māori concerns, the handwaving away of bigotry as long as it comes from people who look enough like us – provided the cover under which he laid his plans and prepared his weapons. We failed in our vigilance. To that extent, it falls on us all to do better.

Trotter has followed those two posts with a third that, at least, falls within the bounds of something a sensible person apprised of the facts could reasonably say, albeit partly by contradicting the first two. He notes, for instance, that “there is within [societies like New Zealand] an irreducible quantum of malicious prejudice... there will always be some for whom the messages of love and respect are interpreted perversely as threats to themselves and their culture,” which doesn’t sit well with his earlier assertions that “New Zealanders have nothing to reproach themselves for” and “New Zealanders are good people” – unless the people he’s referring to don’t count as New Zealanders on account of their malicious prejudice (what’s called the No True Scotsman fallacy).

Trotter points out, truly enough, that it isn’t possible to cut off the flow of information between white supremacists; not without cutting off everyone’s internet and shutting down the news media, and furthermore censoring huge chunks of Western history and culture, because the Christchurch terrorist and his predecessors drew a lot of their inspiration from there. Hence the “irreducibility” of malicious racism. I don’t think we need to despair so quickly.

First of all, the degree to which racism is still tolerated in our society offers a way to shore up some of our defences: stop tolerating it. That of course will call to mind what most people identify with social justice progressivism under the name “political correctness”, and what social justice progressives themselves refer to as “callout culture” – screaming at everyone for the tiniest infraction, making up new infractions when you can’t find one. I’m not saying this isn’t a real problem in progressive discourse, though I would point out that it’s a problem progressives are aware of and trying to solve. But it’s not what I’m talking about.

As with criminal deterrence, making the penalties surer is more effective than making them harsher. Let the jokes fall flat. Challenge statements that embody stereotypes – I don’t mean bark at people, I mean make them explain what they mean in front of everybody. If the racist remark comes from a stranger on the street, I’ve found simply staring at them can produce all sorts of frantic self-justification, which means they know they’ve violated a social norm. This is a norm we want to strengthen. Every little helps.

White supremacists have been ramping up their efforts in recent years for one very simple reason: they’re losing the war and they know it. Too slowly, but surely, racist structures are crumbling or being replaced. People of colour are moving upward in Western societies, and non-Western countries are becoming more prosperous and less dependent on Western charity. Colonial injustices are being resolved. Racists can see all this and it horrifies them. Obviously they can’t accept that it’s a natural consequence of people applying reason in the service of empathy, which is why they’re coming out with all the ludicrous nonsense about secret Jewish master-plans to replace the white race with Muslims and black people, or whatever. White supremacist ideology bears this certain mark of evil, as C. S. Lewis once said of the Nazis and the British imperialists: only by being terrible does it avoid being farcical.

What they’re drawing on, meanwhile, is centuries of racist history presented as a grand procession of great white men; a view of history due entirely to the selectiveness of our cultural education, so that in a typical world history textbook you might get a chapter on Julius Caesar, a page on Genghis Khan, and a paragraph on Qin Shi Huangdi. You can see how that might give some people the impression that only white men have ever done anything worth talking about. Closer to home, at primary school in the 1980s I learned lots about the Anzacs and the Otago gold-rush, a little bit about the Treaty of Waitangi, and nothing at all about Parihaka and the prisoners who built so much of my home-town’s landscape. This too is changing, again slowly, but in the right direction.

New Zealand is in for some painful conversations in the next while about where we went wrong and what we could have done better. This is my contribution. I think we can find hope in the fact that we’re already moving the way we need to be moving; but we need to redouble our efforts. Friday 15 March 2019 showed us all too clearly what we stand to lose if we don’t.

1 comment:

  1. Interesting piece Daniel. My only point is concerning your statement, " I do have to wonder, though, why our intelligence services hadn’t previously noticed what an awfully large amount of guns he was purchasing." The sources of I have read is that he had 5 guns (or so). To you that might seem like an awfully large amount of weaponry. However, for a good deal of gun-owning New Zealanders that would be a fairly typical number, so the white supremacist terrorist would not and apparently did not stand out from the crowd. Now if that b******** had 20 to 30 maybe ...

    For instance, at one point my Father had 4 or 5 -- and perhaps still does; my brother has 2 or 3. A keen hunter would have at least 3. One small calibre rifle 0.22" rimfire (for rabbits); One large calibre (5.56mm/7.62mm) rifle -- or perhaps one of each depending on the hunting scenario; and a shotgun for birds. And if you were both a hunter and a target shooter (the demographic often overlaps) you would add another 1-3 depending on which disciplines you shot in. I am familiar with this demographic. I grew up in it -- my father was both a hunter and a target shooter. My relationship with guns is complicated, which I won't explain here and now.

    I have never owned one although if I lived in New Zealand I probably would because I would be at least target shooting if not hunting too. But that ship has probably passed because at this point I have no time to take up target shooting and there is little easy scope (or need) to go hunting.

    So to cut a long story short, the intelligence agencies would never have found the person if they were looking and were only looking for the number of guns they had ... There would need to have been other indications and even those could of been lost in the noise of typical NZ bigotry/commentary online.

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