Wāhine, White Women, and Waitangi

Yesterday, like most Waitangi Days, I reflected a lot about the incredible women who have led our Tiriti justice movement over the years. I thought about the history of the movement, and pondered on the future. I spent time with my daughters, and thought about whom I want them to look up to, and who I needed to protect them from, and where I needed to focus my energy, in order to leave them a better world. I do have a Waitangi Wāhine hero, and I’m going to get to her in a moment, but we need to go on another journey first.

Curiously, I noted, many others took the opportunity to acknowledge Waitangi Day by celebrating the Prime Minister – I mean, sure, there’s lots that can be said when it’s in comparison to her forebears, but that’s probably the least appropriate day to carry that exercise out (and even less so when you appropriate Māori vernacular to do that… seriously, #ChurArdern really ain’t it, folks). Still, even all of that is vastly preferable to the tone-deaf annual drone of colonielle feminists and their monocultural stale takes on women’s speaking rights on the marae. When we cannot even click to the fact that we have no entitlement to a particular debate, we are very, very far from addressing colonial entitlement to power, or land, or water.

Waitangi is an opportunity for us to talk about challenging Treaty issues, so let’s talk colonielle oppression.

By colonielle I mean colonizer women who benefit from and exploit colonial patriarchy. They have an arsenal of tools at their manicured fingertips, including deadly tears, the camouflage of gender rights, deployment of their colonial male protectors and the manipulation of media.

Over the past week we have seen it demonstrated, as women of colour were gleefully thrown, yet again, under the bus by a white female journalist for her own ends:

MIQ has played a crucial role is keeping us alive and relatively safe from Covid, but it has also generated its own injustice, particularly for NZ citizens returning home and has, itself, become heavily politicised. So naturally, the Anti-Labourites and Anti-Ardern crowd came out strong, upholding Bellis as the white Mother Mary spurned from safe lodging. Blissfully ignorant or uncaring to the fact that she had employed time honored colonielle tactics of exploiting misogynist patriarchal power and stealing/appropriating from women of colour for her own benefit, the New Zealand commentary managed the trick of impassioned laziness, as they failed to look beyond their own cultural and political context of MIQ and PM Ardern.

And even as Afghani women such as Muzhgan Samarqandi pointed out that she is doing more harm than good, had been actively silencing their pleas, and as other eloquent writers such as Rafia Zakaria pointed out that she is employing privilege and exploiting misogyny (seriously, read those links they are very, very good)… the chorus of Bellis supporters, part political opportunist, part colonielle faux feminist, chimed together that there is NO racism at play here.

If your priority is on ‘white woman privilege’ and not the objective reality that all pregnant kiwi women face such a barrier to being able to give birth in their home, just block me

— H.Johnson (@Hjjohnsonn) February 2, 2022

Hey @kirsty_johnston if you were looking for a useful topic for your feminism podcast might I suggest “why did “progressive” feminists heap vast quantities of misogynist garbage on @CharlotteBellis instead of supporting her?” It would be a real eye opener https://t.co/tiSWq363JM

— mangereleviathan (@mangereman) January 31, 2022

Now, we need to appreciate the NZ context here. White women racism is its own genre, with its own characteristics and features (including white women feminists exploiting colonial systems that oppress non-white women, and society that protects that behaviour, and using feminism to cloak racism). Elizabeth Woolstonecraft, considered a founder of the British suffrage movement, used slavery as a metaphor to discuss the treatment of privileged white women in the UK.

How white feminists and elites appropriated slavery, and still do

It’s a chilling reminder, in this age of faux-oppression, that white supremacists co-opting victimhood is not new, and in fact has its own historical narrative.

In the USA, white women suffragettes sided with racist white female slaveowners because getting women the vote was more important than halting lynchings.

The Suffragettes Were Not Allies to Black Women, They Were Racist

This genre of racism also sits at the heart of the NZ feminist movement, with Kate Sheppard being centered as the iconic leader of NZ and the world’s feminist movement, all the while erasing that wāhine Māori held political power long before this, or that Kate Sheppard’s Christian Temperance Union applied horribly racist policy against the sacred practice of moko kauwae for Wāhine Māori, a powerful cultural attack upon the sacredness of wāhine. Even in the recent 125yr anniversary celebrations, New Zealand largely failed to grasp the opportunity to expose, and dismantle, the legacy of colonielle racism in Aotearoa, and failed to explore the colonial and Indigenous context within which the NZ suffrage movement played out (for a wonderfully articulate exploration of this truth, read this piece by Leonie Pihama or click on the poem below by the incomparable Dr Karlo Mila).

NZ is steadfastly committed to drinking its own Kool-aid when it comes to race relations. We have stitched-in blinders when it comes to convincing everyone that we are kind, and just and equitable. We are the archetypal pearl clutching, apron wringing Stepford wife of a nation, refusing to face our darkest truths and insisting, through gritted teeth, that everyone just enjoy the damn trifle. Even when we have moments of apparent insight (like the Dawn Raids apology), they are portrayed as the errors of previous era, historical transgressions that this new, shiny government can heroically make up for (even utilising the metaphor of breaking shackles), and unsurprisingly, when just weeks later that history repeats itself, it is treated as an aberration of the colonial system, not a feature.

Between New Zealands compulsive delusions about its own innocence, and the additional racist layering of white feminism, New Zealand society is ripe ground for colonielle racism, and all the while it will occur against a backdrop of “no racism to see here”.

So let’s just get clear about something:

THE MOMENT someone says a situation is “not racist” that is, in itself, a red-flag. 

Racism exists in acts, deeds, words, thoughts and policy which uphold a system of racial injustice. 

Our entire world is built off of a system of racial injustice. The global economy was borne from, and is maintained through racial injustice. The New Zealand government, which creates the system of policies that shape our lives, is premised on racist ideals of European supremacy. Those ideals are upheld today as we see Waitangi Day after Waitangi Day pass without the government ever volunteering to address the injustice of our racist, Treaty violating constitutional framework.

Treaties are tools for equity. You cannot achieve treaty justice by applying the Treaty within an inequitable system. While racism remains at the roots of our society, it will inevitably rise to the surface in implicit and explicit ways. It will be provided for in policies, protected in institutions, and enabled in individual acts and words. Even organisations such as the Race Relations Commission and Human Rights Commission are not exempt from this fact.

#SayWhattttttttt

Former Race Relations Commissioner Dame Susan Devoy was advised to never use the word 'Racist' in her role. Dame Susan revealed what she learnt during her time in the job. This is all a part of the Te Ao with Moana Mana Wahine #WaitangiSpecial. pic.twitter.com/XyehQSDdkt

— Te Ao with MOANA (@TeAoWithMOANA) February 5, 2022

Racism that results in Indigenous women being targeted for harassment, for abuse, for assault, rape and murder does not just exist in the individual acts of their assailant. It exists in the justice system that fails to take their complaints seriously, it exists in the mono-dimensional media portrayals of us as promiscuous creatures, angry disrupters, poor mothers. An impossible dichotomy of undesirable brown troublemaker, or compliant and desirable native guide, but never quite the Madonna.

It is in its ubiquity that the power of racism rests. It is the systems that refuse to accept its presence, even in the face of it, which allow racism to not only be maintained but proliferate. It’s the society and organizations which always point to others but never themselves that fail to dismantle it, and permit its presence as the default experience for everyone who isn’t white. Which is why we say, in the critical theory of race, there is no such thing as “not racist”.

You are either actively exposing and addressing the ubiquitous system of racism as it appears in your organisation, through antiracist education and policy, or you are enabling racism to remain, which is racist.

Which brings us to the case of Aiomai Nuku-Tarawhiti who was followed through Farmers Tauriko by a staff member, and then profiled as “undesirable”, and told to leave.

@jayjay_petty

It’s sad that this is the reality for some of our young people, know you are loved despite the words that people may say ❤️

♬ State Lines – Novo Amor

Farmers have apparently held an investigation and the whanau have a meeting with them soon, to be mediated by the Human Rights Commission. In an email to the whānau, Farmers contested that the incident was not, in their opinion, racist.

So let’s have a closer look. 

One might suggest that being followed and called “undesirable” is in itself an objectively neutral experience, and without explicit racist intent, could not have caused racialised harm. 

Let’s take one factor off the table early: Intent

Racism is not experienced by intent. It is not about the person that did it, but rather where it lands, who experiences it, and the power relationships between them. This phenomena did not happen on a blank canvas. We have an older white woman, in a position of authority, following a young brown woman for no reason than how she “looked”, labeling her “undesirable”, implicitly accusing her of doing something wrong, or being somewhere wrong, (and explicitly looking/being wrong) and directing her to leave.

This occurs to Aiomai as a member of a people who have been unfairly judged, labeled, villianised, disempowered and displaced for generations. It occurs to her as the next generation of a long line of brown women who have been subjected to the colonial gaze as either “desirable” or “undesirable”, with equally disastrous consequences. 

It occurs against a history, passed down to Aiomai, where native women and children have been specifically targeted by a colonial project with the aim of leaving their people morally dejected, deflated, and easier to oppress.

To have applied such treatment in a way that ignores that reality, is, in itself, racist. It erases the harm that this experience creates WHEN COMBINED with the longstanding experience of being Māori in colonially racist NZ and being a young woman of colour in a racist world.

It expects her to receive that experience as if she were, in fact, white. 

There’s a certain dark poetry to this story of cotton farmers, sugar farmers, slavery, stolen land, settler colonial farmers, and a store called Farmers enabling racism toward a young wāhine Māori, literally displacing her because of her appearance. Just when you thought Farmers had reached peak-colonizer… this past Waitangi week, Tauranga Farmers managers gathered for the karakia that was offered to mark the opening of their new store. While it is of course the tradition of this whenua to open all new premises with karakia for the protection of staff and customers, it’s also a fact that colonial reliance upon Māori grace, while still being racist towards Māori, is another longstanding colonial tradition (along with guilt-laden aggression towards Māori).

So, after another Waitangi Day has passed, and we see our land is still not back, our rights to self determination remain denied, and the power systems that enable racist abuse of privilege remain, I celebrate and uplift Aiomai Nuku-Tarawhiti who is standing her ground, along with her whānau who stand by her side. Standing up to the system that has protected and enabled white women to exploit colonial power against brown women. Drawing on the long history of wāhine Māori who have held and protected this land from the time of Atua to this day, continuing a legacy carried by Whina, by Eva, by Naida, by Tariana. You see, it is not just trauma that travels through the generations, but also mana, strength, and forbearance. Aiomai is here because every generation before her survived everything colonizers had to throw.

Of course Aiomai upsets colonizers, she is the walking reminder of the failure of colonialism. Of course they feel threatened by Aiomai, she carries the force of righteousness, she carries the whakapapa of this land and when colonizers compare themselves to her, at a very deep level, they feel bad, and all they know to do, is try move her out of sight.

But she is not moving, she is a powerful wāhine and even as a rangatahi, is forcing racist colonial systems to confront themselves and for that, she is my Waitangi hero, and she should be yours, too.