“our Polynesian ancestors could not have crossed the largest expanse of open water

on the planet without developing a deep knowledge of astronomy, astrology, science,

maths and engineering.

They called it Mātauranga, an indigenous view of the world that includes all of those

subjects we have lumped under the acronym Stem (Science, technology, engineering

and maths) in our schools.

But we need to be telling these stories in our schools to inspire our young people that

this thing we call Stem is in their DNA.”

It is unclear whether Sir Ian meant this literally as a genetic predisposition towards science, metaphorically as a cultural predisposition, or something else entirely, but suggesting that science “is in the DNA” of Māori is problematic for several reasons.

First, complex skills such as ocean navigation were not something that all Māori inherently possessed, but rather skills that were practised and taught by specialists. People skilled in traditional methods of oceanic navigation today such as Jack Thatcher must be fairly bemused at the idea that Māori are born with skills that it took them decades to master, and that they take such care and effort to pass on to others.

Second, why is it necessary that in order to participate in science, students must believe it’s “in their DNA”? Doesn’t this view encourage Māori kids to believe that they’ll succeed in science because they’re Māori, rather than through their own efforts to learn and master it? Conversely, does Sir Ian think that there are races for whom science isn’t in their DNA? Does that mean that some races are inherently better at science than others? If not, what does it mean? 

Third, if Māori students are told that they’ll succeed in science because they’re Māori, but then they don’t experience success in science, could this bring their identity as Māori into question because they’re not succeeding in something that they’re apparently supposed to be good at? In situations where children do not experience success in something they think they’re expected to, they tend to blame themselves. The ‘science is in our DNA’ narrative, then, may well harm motivation and self-efficacy,  which can in turn affect educational outcomes, and lead to further disengagement. Thus, while Sir Ian’s intentions were well meaning, the weight of expectation may have unintended negative consequences.

Fourth, there are some interesting corollaries to Sir Ian’s view. If Māori are genetically predisposed to science because some of their ancestors developed ocean navigation and fortifications, does that mean that they’re not predisposed to skills in which their ancestors did not engage traditionally, such as literacy? In other words, should Māori not be expected to be good at literacy because their ancestors didn’t have a history of it? Such a view is clearly complete nonsense (Māori had very high literacy rates by mid-nineteenth century), but it’s consistent with what Sir Ian is saying here.

Science as a field of discovery is fundamentally accessible to all humans, if they have the interest and aptitude and are prepared to accept its basic principles. This is the message we should be conveying to our young people. All peoples adapted to their environment by developing the technology needed to survive, whether they lived in the Kalahari Desert, the Arctic, the Amazonian rainforest or on islands in the Pacific. We all use technology each day, but few of us understand the science behind how it works. We need to know that technology works, but not necessarily how or why it works. Artisans have been making wine and cheese for thousands of years without understanding the microbiological and biochemical processes involved, only that they reliably happened. Science is about explaining natural phenomena such as these. If indigenous technological solutions are seen as science then science just becomes what people collectively learned to do to survive in their particular environments. In this sense, equating oceanic navigation with science misrepresents modern international science, which is based on a set of universal principles, practices and norms, and especially the notion that all empirical claims must be provisional and open to test. Sir Ian seems to understand the last of these, but if so, why don’t we teach the best available solutions to problems, whether they are traditional or not?

It’s hard to see Sir Ian’s reference to DNA as anything other than a form of no doubt inadvertent racism. This view is consistent with the ideology of identitarianism, where the best way to characterise someone is based on their identity group, not their individual character, abilities and attributes. In his book “Woke racism”, the African-American linguist John McWhorter refers to this viewpoint as neo-racism.

To be fair to Sir Ian, he is putting his money where his mouth is in education by materially supporting Māori students to participate in science. It’s all very well saying that Māori kids engage with his material, but is there any evidence that they come away with a better understanding of STEM than when taught without emphasising race? We agree with teaching an understanding of mātauranga Māori in our schools, but teaching it as science, and especially suggesting that some races are somehow better at science than others, is problematic. The one thing we can all agree on and work toward is that Māori children should have the same opportunity to engage with and excel in science as anyone else.

The post A racial predisposition towards science? appeared first on Open Inquiry.

The push to decolonise casts science as Western, and racist, and therefore antagonistic to Māori. Dubbing science as Western insults the many non-Westerners who contribute to science, and denies the role Middle Eastern, Chinese, Indian, and Arabic civilizations played in early science. Racism was indeed widespread in Europe in the colonial era, and science sometimes reflected that, but science depends on continual self-challenge and self-correction. Science itself has made the strongest case against the very idea of distinct “races” of humans, showing that we all recently evolved in Africa and that diversity is greater within than between populations. 

Some decolonisers claim, against the historical evidence, that reading, mathematics, and accuracy are “not a Māori thing” (for a critique, see here). The demonization of science and the deprecation of learning as Western and alien reduce the chances of young Māori students. The distinguished African-American linguist John McWhorter has recently argued that casting precision and learning as uncool or “white” has similarly limited the achievement of generations of Black students.

Ideas of decolonisation spread in New Zealand late in the twentieth century. In the twenty-first century, leading thinkers of colour are questioning that goal. The Nigerian scholar Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò, Professor of African Political Thought and Chair of the Africana Studies and Research Center at Cornell University, has presented in his Africa Must Be Modern: A Manifesto (2014) what he calls “a no-holds-barred, full-throated defence of ‘modernity’ and why it offers Africa the most promising path for getting out of the ‘misery corner’ of the globe.” In 2021 his Against Decolonisation: Taking African Agency Seriously earned praise from many leading scholars and champions of African and Asian advancement. The Ghanaian Ato Sekyi-Otu comments that “Táíwò shows that ‘decolonisation’ has become an idea promoting indiscriminate hostility to forms of thought and practice wrongly tarred with malign colonial auspices. The ironic result is a rhetoric that gives short shrift to African agency. It’s time to drop the erroneous conflations and recognise our right to inventive appropriation of the human commons.” The distinguished Indian scholar Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak writes about Táíwò’s book that: “To sloganise for cultural and ideological decolonisation is to deny history and agency to Africa.”

This resembles the points made by scholars of Māori descent when they stress Māori eagerness to read and write in the nineteenth century, or Māori incorporation of European knowledge into mātauranga Māori, or Māori leadership in the Suppression of Tohunga Act of 1909, or the crucial role of high Māori educational achievement in the present  (see the work of Melissa Derby (Ngāti Ranginui), Charles Royal (Ngāti Whanaunga, Ngāti Raukawa, Ngāti Tamaterā and Ngā Puhi), Mere Roberts (Ngati Apakura, Ngati Hikairo), Michael Stevens, Atholl Anderson, and Te Maire Tau (all Ngāi Tahu)).

            If New Zealand students and New Zealand scientists are made to pledge allegiance to the contradictory falsehoods that mātauranga Māori is equivalent to science, on the one hand, but that science is Western and racist, on the other hand, and if bullies continue to secure disproportionate research funding for ideologues who make these claims, our students and scientists, including Māori, will suffer. Our science and education will become a laughingstock, and less able to attract the international cooperation and funding and the international student participation that offer the nation its best hopes of a future enriched by research and innovation. Parents who can afford private schooling or housing in zones where schools choose other qualifications than NCEA will opt out of mainstream schooling and widen the divide between Māori and non- Māori achievement.

            Mātauranga Māori reflects the skills of observation and experiment and the creative imagination of explanatory storytelling found in any traditional knowledge. It deserves to be preserved and researched and to be drawn on where local ecological knowledge can enrich science. But teaching it as science will harm science and both Māori and non-Māori students and divert from the real problems of educational underachievement pervasive in New Zealand.

The post Against decolonisation: Slagging science will not produce more Māori scientists appeared first on Open Inquiry.

The case for unconscious bias is based largely on the implicit association test (IAT). The test works like this: people are shown combined pictures and words, and asked to respond quickly whether the word is “good” (such as happy) or “bad” (such as murder), and then asked to respond “white” or “black” depending on whether they see a white or a black face.  If they respond more quickly to “good/white” and “bad/black” combinations than to “good/black” and “bad/white” they are deemed to be biased against black people. Responses are entered quickly on a keyboard, so that the responder doesn’t have time to think, implying that the bias is unconscious.

The test was devised 20 years ago by researchers at Harvard and the University of Washington, and was at first widely admired and adapted to different settings. But serious doubt has crept in. Even its inventors are have had second thoughts, and in 2005 effectively conceded to the widespread criticism the IAT attracted.

For a start, it does not meet the usual criteria for psychometric testing—or even come close. It has low reliability, meaning that if the same individual is tested more than once, the score is likely to be different, possibly even reversed. More importantly, it has low to zero validity, which means that it does not correlate with actual behaviour in social contexts. A person may be deemed to be biased according to the IAT, but show no sign of it in everyday commerce.

Delving into the unconscious can be perilous. A test as erratic as the IAT can lead to accusations of racism or sexism in people whose actual behaviour is exemplary. This in turn can create harmful self-recrimination and unwarranted feelings of guilt. It can be used to political advantage, stirring up mass movements or even hysteria that is otherwise undocumented. Some results suggested that up to 95 percent of Americans scored positively for racial bias, but this is at best implausible as a measure of how society actual works. To be sure, there are biases, but they’re surely not that extreme.

The unconscious also featured not so long ago in the neo-Freudian argument that various forms of psychological maladjustment were attributed to early childhood abuse. Memory of this abuse was supposedly repressed, buried in the unconscious. The trick was to help the afflicted individual to recover those memories, and find a healthy resolution. This too raised serious problems.

First, such memories can be false, and easily implanted through aggressive therapy. This means that people are sometimes falsely accused of abuse, and in some cases incarcerated. Punishing the innocent can be as damaging as failing to punish the guilty. The presumption of innocence until proven guilty is a feature of most legal jurisdictions, and a human right under the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Evidence based on the supposed unconscious may never provide adequate proof of anything in terms of everyday conduct. And it’s not just the accused who suffer. People led to believe they were abused when they were not carry a false image of themselves and their pasts, as well as a false sense of injustice.

It is of course appropriate to rid society of destructive elements, such as child abuse and racial or gender bias and, but this should be based on accurate evidence. It’s healthier, though, to avoid the murk of the unconscious and focus on what people actually do. Appealing to the unconscious is a bit like reading tea leaves or the formation of clouds: more likely to stir prejudices than reveal truth.

The post Messing with the Unconscious appeared first on Open Inquiry.

Another Characteristic Media Piece

Recently I was motivated to write a piece on the media and co-governance (Lillis, 2022). I expressed the opinion that New Zealand is on a dangerous path that advantages a small minority on the basis of genetics or self-reported ethnicity. I expressed the view that our media presents co-governance almost exclusively as the desirable pathway to our future, and seldom publishes alternative opinions.

I discussed an article from a former mayor of Kapiti Coast (Gurunathan, 2022a) and stated my perspective that it was well-meaning and positive in intent. I did note that he appeared to cast disagreement with co-governance as bias, or even racism, and to discount the possibility that dissenters articulate genuinely-held views, also advanced with positive intent.

Since then, the same author has published another piece in Stuff (Gurunathan, 2022b). I believe that this piece is well-intended, as was his previous, and we can understand his position. Nevertheless, it is notable that he presents a particular line that seems to cast any individual or body standing up to a minority as committing wrong and possibly engaging in racism. The title is already provocative: Councils should think twice before insulting their Treaty partners.

The author refers to an incident where Kaipara mayor, Craig Jepson, who had banned the reciting of karakia during council meetings, interrupted councillor, Pera Paniora, when she tried to recite a karakia at the first meeting of the new council. Apparently, Jepson had stated that councillors were there to do business and specific religions or cultures should not be included in meetings. 

But did his interruption constitute an insult or an act born of racism? 

Actually, many believe, as I do, that Jepson was ill-advised to interrupt the councillor and should have foreseen the reaction that indeed ensued. It would have been polite and respectful to have allowed her to proceed with the karakia. But did his interruption constitute an insult or an act born of racism?  Surely, his statement to the effect that religions and cultures should have no place in council meetings states his position clearly. What would he be expected to do if other councillors from half-a-dozen other cultures and religions stood up to sing and speak too? Surely, Councillor Jepson’s primary role was to convene a meeting rather than to conduct a concert.

Gurunathan says:

“These First Nation people underwent a colonial occupation that has witnessed the confiscation of their land, undermining their economic independence and sustainable relationship to their environment.

They were forced through a systemic assimilation policy that alienated them from their language and culture.”

Of course, there was colonial occupation but just how much land was confiscated? The confiscation law was aimed at Kīngitanga Māori in order to restore the rule of British law. Much land was purchased, rather than confiscated. For example, the Crown and the New Zealand Company had purchased some 99% of the South Island by 1865 (New Zealand History, 2022). Diverse sources of information are broadly in agreement that, as punishment for rebellion (e.g. the New Zealand wars of 1845 -1872), approximately 1,200,000 hectares, or 4.4 per cent, of land was confiscated, mainly in Waikato, Taranaki, Bay of Plenty, South Auckland, Hauraki, Te Urewera, Hawke’s Bay and the East Coast (Wikipedia, 2022).

Some land was given back but in any case we may agree that the confiscations were wrong. However, Peter Winsley reminds us of another precursor to confiscation, the Musket Wars, that were fought between Māori tribes from about 1807 to around 1837. These wars claimed approximately 40,000 Māori lives, compared to the deaths of less than 3,000 people from all sides in all the New Zealand Wars (Crosby, 2020; cited in Winsley, 2022).

Gurunathan refers to the undermining of Māori economic independence and sustainable relationship to their environment. He makes a valid point here, but could have conceded that Māori and other minorities have also gained greatly in economic wealth, education and improved health, and that the relationship between indigenous or traditional communities and their environment was not always sustainable. 

The author proceeds:

“ . . . why Mayor Jepson should refocus his navel-gaze on his understanding of council business is the brutal realpolitik that, if you piss off your Treaty partners by insulting their mana, legal tools are available to them to grind down council’s decision-making process and, worse, get it tangled up in court.”

Where in the Treaty of Waitangi do we read of partnership? Was anyone’s mana insulted deliberately? If an observer referred in our media to a minority person’s “navel-gaze”, what would be the reaction? And what would be the point of grinding down council’s decision-making process or getting it tangled up in court?

He continues:

“Aotearoa New Zealand is making some significant steps towards a unique hybrid democracy – a fusion of the Māori worldview and what we inherited from Britain. The journey will be challenging.”

By whose authority is this new hybrid society being forced on everyone? Why should a minority world view be imposed on a twenty-first century nation, even that of a minority which, to be fair, was present in these islands before others? Any such journey imposed through legal or other force on an unwilling population will indeed pose a great challenge if indeed many see it as socially, politically and economically retrograde and simply do not want it for this and future generations.

We live in the Here and Now

No longer do we live in Victorian times. Over the last half-century we have become a very multicultural society and the relevant population statistics were given in my last article (Lillis, 2022). Asians, Pacific people and Middle Eastern, Latin American and African people now make up approximately 40% of our total population, or more than two-and-a-half times those who self-identify as Māori (Ehinz, 2022). Every person must count as equally important as everyone else and deserves both equal social, economic and political decision-making power and equal opportunity to achieve success and lead a fulfilling life. 

Is it truly sensible, in the twenty-first century, to value traditional knowledge and resource it equally to modern science? If we have Māori providing for Māori, then shall we have the same for Pacific people and immigrants from Ethiopia and Somalia? Why should our public service become bicultural and support self-determination for one group and not others? Why should our law, policy, processes and entities support a bicultural, but not a multicultural, joint sphere of governance and management of resources, taonga (treasures) and Crown lands? Why must we have a bicultural, mātauranga-informed, but not a multiculturally-informed state service? Why should one cultural and ethnic group co-govern and/or co-design and deliver services, but not Asian people or immigrants from Iraq, Eastern Europe, Latin America or Afghanistan? 

We live in dangerous times! For example, in relation to treatments for cancer and other illnesses, some of the material currently available online is deeply worrying. For example, one three-minute video exemplifies very real risk when traditional knowledge is taken literally (ACC, 2022). Much of what is in this video we can agree with, especially in relation to addressing a patient’s needs holistically. However, the healer who features in the video tells us that:

“The Western health and healing system is awesome. It’s not better. It’s not worse than Maori healing.”

She also tells us that it is for everyone; not only for Māori. From the perspective of many readers, her concession that western medicine is no worse than Māori medicine may seem very broad-minded and convincing, just as the notion of equality of traditional knowledge with “western science” may appear to be quite progressive and respectful towards indigenous and other minorities. However, all cultures and societies have developed and used proto-scientific rules of method but putative science, which has no experimental basis, has no place in the twenty-first century.

The problem here, of course, is that some Māori and others, presenting with cancer or other serious conditions, listening to this and other similar messaging, may opt for traditional methods. With what result? In a broader sense than health and wellbeing, what messages are we sending to our young people as they access our “new and improved” education curricula and other online material? Well-meaning traditional faith healers may guide many of their trusting devotees along a pathway to disaster, and feel-good messaging, such as in that video, is in fact highly dangerous. 

Education and Polarization

Right now our secondary education system is being revised and matauranga Māori is being woven into our national science curriculum in a way that defies logic. It will make New Zealand a laughing stock and lead to loss of confidence in our education system, both across the world and at home. No mauri, or indeed any other “life force” that features within the mythology of any cultural or ethnic group, exists within inanimate things and therefore including such a concept in any national science curriculum is extraordinarily naive, betrays wilful neglect of duty on the part of those responsible, and compromises the education of future learners. There should be no place for political or ideological doctrine within the curriculum. Only objective politics and history are permissible and then only in social studies, anthropology and history class.

We need to match the quality of our education with that of leading nations, particularly OECD nations. We must provide education that enables New Zealand students to compete in the domestic and international marketplaces and we want New Zealand secondary and tertiary qualifications to be respected internationally and to remain portable to other countries. To achieve such objectives, we can teach and value traditional knowledge but must at all costs keep it out of our science curriculum. At present our education is set to become a world-leading mediocrity and we should bear in mind that, behind the statistics, our failures will have many human faces.

How about a different set of rules? What about these, as a beginning?

1. We work together towards the good of all New Zealanders

2. We ensure that all citizens of New Zealand enjoy equal social and political rights, and address effectively any significant social and other problems, irrespective of ethnicity.

At present we see considerable social and political polarization in New Zealand and we now have duty of care to take corrective action. We remember the statement from John Stuart Mill, made in an address to the University of Saint Andrews in 1867:

Let not any one pacify his conscience by the delusion that he can do no harm if he takes no part, and forms no opinion. Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing. He is not a good man who, without a protest, allows wrong to be committed in his name, and with the means which he helps to supply, because he will not trouble himself to use his mind on the subject.

Here, we are not in open confrontation with bad men, but instead with bad ideas.

The New Zealand Media

As I said in my previous article, when people such as Gurunathan publish their views, most probably they have good intent and we should listen and learn from them. Like others, Gurunathan reminds us that prejudice is real, that minorities often experience marginalization when others do not, and that we must do our best to ensure fairness and equality of opportunity. However, our media should give alternative perspectives equal opportunity for dissemination within the public domain but today contrary views are all but banished from the public square. Finally, we can achieve good things without adversarial or vindictive behaviour. We should also remember the words of Abraham Lincoln:

Do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my friends?

We will not make the desired progress if every dissenting opinion is cast in negative light and if insults are taken where none are intended. All of us must learn to accept constructive criticism without unnecessary outrage. We must expose hate, racism, prejudice and bias wherever they appear, but invoking the straw men of racism and hate is especially unhelpful when we are genuine in wanting a better world for everyone. Equally, we will not make progress if our media presents only one acceptable political perspective and crushes everything else.

References

ACC (2022). Rongoā Māori: A traditional healing choice for all.
https://www.acc.co.nz/newsroom/stories/rongoa-maori-a-traditional-healing-choice-for-all/

Crosby, R. (2020): The Forgotten Wars. Why the musket wars matter today. Arataia Media.

Ehinz (2022). Ethnic Profile: New Zealand has a diverse ethnic mix.
https://www.ehinz.ac.nz/indicators/population-vulnerability/ethnic-profile/#:~:text=70.2%25%20European%20(3%2C297%2C860%20people),%25%20Pacific%20peoples%20(381%2C640%20people)

Gurunathan, K. (2022a). Fanning the flames of fractiousness around co-governance.
https://www.stuff.co.nz/opinion/130588562/fanning-the-flames-of-fractiousness-around-cogovernance

Gurunathan, K. (2022b). Councils should think twice before insulting their Treaty partners.
https://www.stuff.co.nz/opinion/130685248/councils-should-think-twice-before-insulting-their-treaty-partners

Lillis, D. (2022). The Media and Co-Governance.
https://breakingviewsnz.blogspot.com/search?q=lillis

New Zealand History (2022). Māori land loss, 1860-2000.
https://nzhistory.govt.nz/media/interactive/maori-land-1860-2000

Wikipedia (2022). New Zealand land confiscations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Zealand_land_confiscations

Winsley, P. (2022). Comment on Fair Chance Inquiry Interim report.
https://breakingviewsnz.blogspot.com/2022/11/peter-winsley-comment-on-fair-chance.html

The post Another Comment on the Media, Education and Co-Governance appeared first on Open Inquiry.

This approach is taking us in a dangerous direction. There is an urgent need to move away from the emerging culture of fear, cancellation and caricature, and towards patient and in-depth discussion and debate using reason, evidence, logic. We need to move beyond the knee-jerk social media-style outbursts and emotional tirades. But how do we remove the fear of being attacked for having differing views? Well, we need to relearn how to have challenging conversations. But first, we need to defuse the pejorative bomb. Let’s talk about how to do this.

Defusing the pejorative bomb

There are two ways to defuse this bomb. One is that a slur is reclaimed as a compliment or a badge of identity as people begin to stand up to bullying behaviour. For something as serious as racism, such an outcome would be disastrous. I fear this outcome and you should too. The other is that we choose to stop deploying the pejorative bomb. That requires us to do three things.

Step one: provide specifics

First, we need to stop claiming that racism is systemic or rampant in NZ. As a minority member of society, I can say, hand on heart, that New Zealand is not a country riddled with nasty racist people. Racism is far from absent, but it’s not rampant either. Most New Zealanders are decent people and we’re all getting better at living in a multicultural world. The vast majority of people aspire to see our country continue to improve. How does one respond to claims of structural or systemic or rampant racism when no details are given? Such sweeping generalisations don’t provide a means of finding solutions because they only serve to get peoples’ backs up, particularly if you deny those you accuse any right of reply. So, by all means, point to a specific problem and propose a solution. And be prepared to discuss both the problem and a range of solutions.

Step two: we need to understand what is and what is not racism

These days, many people seem to have a very black and white idea of what constitutes racism. But reality is never as simple as we might wish it to be. Here are a few examples that draw from my own experience.

As a student, I often heard the trope that Asians are good at passing exams because we just memorise facts—Asians cannot think for themselves. That stereotype was common in my student days—so much so that Singaporean diplomat Kishore Mahbubani provocatively titled a series of essays, ‘Can Asians Think?’ This trope has often been rolled out in discussions of high Asian scores for competitive entrance exams, in NZ and abroad. The starting point for an Asian is that we know that some hold an underlying assumption about our ability; despite good grades, we are assumed to lack other (more important) qualities. Perhaps, on the basis of race, we don’t fully deserve to be there. This is to confuse an individual with a stereotype. Each of us painted with that stereotype has to demonstrate, one person at a time, why the stereotype doesn’t hold. 

In the weird world of the 2020s this narrative has been replaced: Asians are now being recast by some as ‘white-adjacent’. This means that, because of our perceived success, we not only do not need any help, we are also now part of the power base, so discrimination against us is justified in order to ‘make room’ for those who are genuinely unprivileged.

What’s the issue with this? Well, ‘Asian’ is a very broad term – it covers enormous cultural and ethnic diversity, and in different parts of the world, the term refers to very different ethnic groups. Asians are not all alike. Some have come here as refugees from among the poorest countries in the world, with little education, and limited opportunities. Some are descendents of people who first arrived here in the 1800s. Some are comparatively recent arrivals. Some, like me, are part something else. 

Asians are aware of our many differences, and we are sometimes known to have fun with them; I was at the hospital recently and had to work hard to keep a straight face when talking to an excellent and very professional Filipino nurse. Why? Because the playful portrayal by Filipino-American comedian Jo Koy of the Filipino ambition to become a nurse popped into my head! This is surely a stereotype? Yes, it is. So isn’t it racist to laugh and share it? No, not if we take Jo Koy’s lead. By inviting us to laugh with him, he lifts up his community; we learn something and share in a love letter to a community, a humanising in-joke.

By contrast, to uniformly label or treat all Asians as ‘white-adjacent’ is an astonishing use of racial stereotyping. While the term originated in the US, I have heard this viewpoint from people here in NZ who specifically claim to be champions of minority groups. These individuals are frequently from the majority group, cast themselves in their role as champions of the less fortunate, and, in their self-proclaimed benevolence, have taken it upon themselves to decide who needs help, who can be ignored because they have it good enough, and who has too much privilege, all using a flimsy proxy: race.

For someone who has grown up with the, ‘Asians are good at exams but are not able to think’ trope, this strikes me as a very poorly thought out position. 

Step 3: check your privilege-checking. Can you really determine privilege by skin colour?

Let me end with a very personal example that touches on the complexities of privilege and why we can’t assume it follows race. After moving to NZ, I had a difficult time at school. In my final year of primary school, I had only one friend. He had just arrived from another school and we were thrown together by circumstance. His family were rough around the edges working class folk and, when I first met them, they were living out of a caravan. By contrast, members of both sides of my family—Japanese and British—are university educated. My friend’s family were always friendly, and made me feel welcome. There was however one thing they did which really annoyed me. They gave me a nickname based on my Japanese ancestry. I detested it because I didn’t want anyone to draw attention to my difference, but it stuck. These are the type of people one might often hear being pejoratively labelled ‘white trash’. This is accurate: they were white, my friend’s stepfather literally worked in ‘trash’, and they were from that slice of society that is short on privilege—certainly lower than my university-educated family. But they were far from being trash. My friend went on to get a university education and is successful in his chosen calling. 

This reframing of who is privileged and who is not by the New Racists is allowing privileged members of the activist class to inadvertently punch down on people who look like me but don’t have my ‘white adjacent’ status. Is an Asian refugee who fled an oppressive regime more privileged than a successful, well-educated Māori academic? I would argue that it is hard to quantify and compare privilege. Perhaps we should spend less time trying to work this out from proxies and talk to people instead.

Then there is the deliberate punching down (yes, you read that correctly) on people who in the eyes of the New Racists look white and privileged but who, like my friend and his family, are actually starting from close to the bottom and doing it tough. But they are still white, you might say, they still have privilege. Yes, they do. That ‘white’ family are the only people who get to call me by the nickname they gave me—Fuji. 

An alternative to punching up and dropping pejorative bombs

So what’s the alternative? Calm, evidence-based discussion and debate, and making an attempt to understand the reasons behind someone disagreeing with you. It helps to remember that the world is a complex place and ‘good and bad’ or ‘right and wrong’ are not always easy to establish. It also helps to be wary of overly-simplistic solutions, and to accept that sometimes we will be in disagreement on contentious matters.

Here are some personal measures I intend to take in conversations going forward; I hope you will consider doing the same.

I will tell people that it’s OK to

• Talk about race and to discuss the difficult stuff without fear of recrimination.
• Say something that you subsequently regret or realise is inappropriate.

If I don’t think something you say is appropriate

• I’ll tell you why. 
• If you apologise, I’ll accept your apology. And vice versa.

I won’t

• Shut down your right to state your opinion, even when I disagree with you.
• Get distracted by the way you deliver your message – you don’t need to sugar coat it or tread carefully.
• Presume to know what will or won’t hurt others or act to censor you on their behalf.
• Try and shut down or win an argument by calling you names.

I will

• Try to listen carefully to what you have to say, even if it is challenging for me to do so.
• Endeavour to discuss difficult topics and debate with you firmly, but fairly.
• Endeavour to sort out the content from the emotional reaction either you or I have to your delivery. I expect you to do the same.
• Tell you if I disagree with you, but I’ll use evidence to back up my position.
• Have the courage to concede when you are right. 
• Treat you as my equal. That means I will sometimes disagree with you.
• Avoid using pejorative insults or outbursts. 

As an educator I will

• Endeavour to teach others how to discuss and debate constructively.
• Not demean students by presuming I need to protect them from hurtful statements. 
• Teach students how to defend themselves calmly, and with evidence.
• Empower students to think rationally and clearly, and to debate based on evidence. 
• Teach students the value of changing one’s views in light of evidence.

As a colleague I won’t

• Act to get you removed from some position of responsibility, kicked out of your job, or bullied by others, simply because I don’t agree with you.
• Scapegoat someone so as to protect myself.
• Bow to the demands of bullies, no matter what form they take.

Photo by Romain Gal on Unsplash https://unsplash.com/photos/4G_C_qKwi6s

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