Anne Tolley: an agent of colourblind racism?

Green co-leader Metiria Turei: stereotyped and slandered.

From Stuff.co.nz:

Tolley said she was insulted by Green Party claims that she was out of touch. 

"I'm actually insulted to be lectured about how out of touch I am with average New Zealand by a list MP who has no constituents, lives in a castle and comes to the House in $2000 designer jackets and tells me I'm out of touch," Tolley said. 

It is not the first time National MPs have attacked Turei's choice of clothing. Justice Minister Judith Collins said last year on Twitter that a speech by Turei was "vile, wrong and ugly, just like her jacket today".

It’s easy to think that racism is an act that belonged to other people, in another time, in another place. Except it isn’t. And it never was.

Some New Zealanders are aware of the realities of the racial hierarchy: the wealth gap; the employment gap; the apprehension, prosecution and conviction gap. But less New Zealanders appreciate the language of racism. Not the language of niggers, kikes and kaffirs. But of "semantic moves" - of coded insults and racist premises.

We live in the age of racism without racists. Racism comes with its own stigma. People want to avoid that. But rather than change their behaviour, society has invented rhetorical parachutes. Suddenly racism can’t exist without racial words. Racism becomes the use of "Wogistan", but not the history and ideas that sustain it.

Tolley didn’t need to mention race. Her attack is loaded with social, political and racial assumptions. The unspoken context is that Metiria, a Maori woman who lives well and dresses better, is acting out of turn and out of step with her community. How can she be in touch with her community when she isn’t living like them? The premise is that a Maori woman cannot dress well and claim to represent her people. Because Maori live exclusively in poverty, amirite.

But Tolley can. She dresses like her community, lives with them and – it seems – perpetuates their prejudices. The premise is that her community is well off and that gives her the right to live well, dress well and hold power. Tolley is constructing a self-serving stereotype. A world of (literally) black and white where binary assumptions can be made about how racial communities live.

Metiria explains further:

"I think they seem to think it is all right for them to wear perfectly good suits for their professional job but that a Maori woman from a working-class background is not entitled to do the same. I think it is pure racism." 

Ask how the attack was racist, Turei said she shopped at the same place some of her opponents did. 

"They do not think that a professional Maori woman from a working-class background should be able to wear good suits to work," she said. 

"I buy my clothes from some of the same shops they do. I think they find that they can't cope with that and I think it's because I'm a Maori woman from a working-class background."

The common refrain is Tolley didn't invoke racial terms, ipso facto, she isn't racist. But it takes a determined effort in self-deception to strip Tolley’s remarks of their racial context. Metiria doesn't conform to Tolley's idea of what and who Maori should be, therefore Metiria is out of touch with her community. That's racial stereptyping. That's colourblind racism.

A hijacked version of colourblindness has become the dominant racial ideology in New Zealand (and across the west). Because of that most New Zealanders are hyper-attuned to racialism. But what they refuse to acknowledge is when racial stereotypes – stripped of their overtly racial words – are projected onto individuals, situations and communities. Like, say, when the assumption of Maori poverty is projected onto a Maori politician.

There are several comparisons: when people discuss the warrior gene it can be framed as “science” and not a narrative used to explain inherent Maori criminality and violence. Welfarism can be used as morse code - a way to talk about Maori dependency without explicitly racialising the prejudice. Positive discrimination can be used to attack the growth of the Maori worldview in universities. The subtext is clear. It's colourblind racism.

If there's no such thing as race - "I don't see in colour" - there can be no such thing as racial disadvantage. We're all a lump of humanity that cannot be distinguished. But this sort of colourblind racism is self-serving. It preserves the status quo and ignores why some people are better off than others. Where the colourblind ideologies of liberalism aimed to control for prejudice in society, the colourblind ideologies dominant today work to validate prejudice.

Master Republican strategist Lee Atwater (father of the Southern Strategy) explains how racial discourse had to change (and did):

“You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”

Racial ideologies are highly contested. Rejecting colourblind racism is a political struggle. Colourblind racism seeks to silence multicultural pluralism and, instead, celebrate a kind of monocultural nationalism that can't include non-conformists. That serves the status quo. Racial progress is stalled. We can't allow the racists to create their imaginary future. And calling Tolley on her (conscious or unconscious) racism is part of that.

Fact checking David Round

The first rule of fact checking is that everything you read, hear and see is wrong. The second rule of fact checking is everything you read, hear and see is wrong. The third rule of fact checking is, well, you know what it is. In American politics fact checking is a lucrative business. FactCheck.org, PolitiFact.com and The Fact Checker at the Washington Post are built around verifying the claims and counter-claims of politicians, writers and commentators. PolitiFact uses the Truth-O-Meter while the Washington Post dishes our Pinocchios. Fact checking is less important in New Zealand politics, but the rise of Treaty obstructionists, falsifiers and denialists provide plenty of material for local fact checkers. Example: Treaty Rights a trap in constitution plan by David Round.

Round bases his piece on a tenuous premise: he assumes the Constitutional Review Panel will recommend that the Treaty and Treaty principles be incorporated into supreme law and the government will implement that recommendation. That assumption runs against political logic.* There are no ideological, pragmatic or popular imperatives that demand the government incorporate the Treaty and Treaty principles in to a new constitution. Doing so would amount to legislating against the National Party’s base. Only 57% of New Zealanders agree that the “Treaty is for all New Zealanders” and 59% agree that the Treaty is our founding document – but subtract for Maori responses and that figure is likely to fall below 50%. Those numbers do not demand movement from the government. After all, the Prime Minister is a pragmatist, not a Maori supremacist in a Merril Lynch suit.

For the sake of it, let’s assume that the Prime Minister and National aren’t pragmatists. Even then, neither conservative nor neoliberal ideology would allow a Treaty based constitution. Conservatives value custom, convention and continuity. A Treaty based constitution represents foundational change – the antonym of custom, convention and continuity. The same offence is made against Neoliberalism. Neoliberal dogma prescribes the supremacy of free markets and the individual. A Treaty based constitution transfers significant power to the collective – and a mainly proletarian collective at that – and that could impede the market. I must have a dry imagination, but I can’t see committed conservatives (like English and Burrows) and faithful neoliberals (like Key and Joyce) adopting kaupapa Maori politics.

Pragmatism and ideology aside, Round makes a number of more fundamental mistakes. He claims that the word taonga meant “physical property” in 1840 as opposed to “anything Maori might take a fancy” (sloppy dog-whistle). Well, Te Puni Kokiri holds that taonga “was a more abstract and wide ranging term than the ‘properties’ in the English text”. The article also mentions that taonga has been translated as meaning “treasures” or “all things highly prized”.** Both translations can be read in the abstract. Matthew Palmer writes that taonga “may be more than objects of tangible value”.*** Again, there is an abstract value to the word. In any case, I was taught that taonga has and always has had an abstract meaning. It isn’t confined to western notions of physical property.

Round also claims that “Parliament has been our undisputed supreme lawmaker for centuries”. Well, again, that’s wrong. The United Kingdom Parliament granted self-government to New Zealand in 1852 and created the “General Assembly of New Zealand”. However, the UK Act establishing our General Assembly placed substantive restrictions on that body’s law making power. Academic Bruce Harris wrote that the Act “ensured that the local legislature would remain subservient to that at Westminster”.**** Our Parliament didn’t acquire full law-making power until 1947 with the passage of the Statute of Westminster Adoption Act 1947.***** So, actually, our Parliament has only “been our undisputed supreme law maker” for going on 66 years. Well less than the “centuries” that Round seems to think. No law lecturer should make such a rudimentary mistake.

Round also says that:

The Treaty's words are now twisted to mean their exact opposite. The Treaty said Maori and settler were to be equals under the Queen's government. In Captain Hobson's words, "Now we are one people". But by the modern "principles", "Maori" are not the Queen's subjects but her "partners" in governing New Zealand.

Round doesn’t provide any example of what words are “twisted to mean their exact opposite”. That’s because he can’t. The meaning of the Treaty is well established. Round also misrepresents what is meant by partnership. The Treaty is probably best viewed as a “developing social contract” rather than a tight legal contract (like a commercial contract). Partnership, in the sense of a social contract, doesn’t mean Maori should or do have a 50/50 say in how New Zealand is run, rather the Crown and Maori (broadly speaking) must act reasonably and in good faith. Round is deliberately scaremongering.

Round goes on and on, providing fallacious examples of how the Treaty principles will doom the country. It’s John Ansell-esque. He couldn’t resist the racist slur that “a lot of child support – must surely be a Treaty right”. He expounds on the effects of Treaty principles like he’s some sort of Oracle. It’s bat-shit crazy. I can handle strong opposition to the Treaty, but it has to be well reasoned - not half-baked Anglophilia.

Ultimately, the most worrying piece of the article isn’t anything Round wrote – it’s this:

David Round teaches law at the University of Canterbury.

Post-Script: I had a laugh where Round accuses Chief Justice Elias of treason and labels her a "usurper". He didn't provide an example of her treason, just threw down a platitude.

*For a lesson in political logic, American politics provides an instructive example. The Democratic Party enjoyed a near monopoly on the Southern States from the 1870s to the 1960s. In part due to the party’s defence of slavery, partly due to their defence of Jim Crow laws and partly due to economic policies that were perceived to favour Southern interests and industry. However, after Democratic President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act in 1964, he is supposed to have turned to his press secretary and said that the Democrats “have lost the South for a generation.” Johnson went against political logic (but not the moral imperative) and electoral realignment followed. Southern conservatives who opposed civil rights and integration fled to the Republicans Party. As a result, the Republicans implemented their “Southern strategy” and have dominated presidential politics from Nixon to Ford, Reagan, Bush and Bush II. Without such a powerful moral imperative, why would the Nats risk electoral realignment.

** See He Tirohanga o Kawa kite Tiriti o Waitangi (Wellington, 2001).

***See M S R Palmer The Treaty of Waitangi in New Zealand’s Law and Constitution (Victoria University Press, Wellington, 2008).

****Refer to B V Harris “The Law-Making Powers of the New Zealand General Assembly: Time to Think About Change” (1984) 5 Otago Law Review 565-571 (Harris is a former Dean of Law at Otago and Auckland and a Harvard graduate).

*****That same year the UK Parliament passed the New Zealand Constitution (Amendment) Act allowing our Parliament to regulate its own composition. The final step in the acquisition of full law-making powers.  

A toast to Joris De Bres

Bryce Edwards makes an interesting observation:

The Race Relations Commissioner Joris de Bres has become increasingly outspoken about politics recently - using his public office to adjudicate on highly political and partisan issues.

Regardless of the correctness or otherwise of his pronouncements, some will be uncomfortable with an office of the state being so interventionist.

First of all, I think it’s wrong to label De Bres’ public comments as interventionist. They are, after all, just public comments. If De Bres was using his powers under the Human Rights Act to force a situation on another person or organisation, then that would be interventionist. I think public comments lack the tangibility to be labelled interventionist.

Anywho, De Bres’ increasing activity is coinciding with an increasing amount of anti-Maori sentiment - read racism. As a few examples, think of Paul Holmes’ Waitangi column, the coverage and response to the Popata brothers, the senseless opposition to Ngati Whatua’s treaty settlement and Louis Crimp.

There have been regional racism incidents too. In the Taranaki internet commentators tore into local Maori for ‘daring’ to exercise their legal right to apply for customary title. In all of these situations, De Bres has largely been the only voice of opposition. Morally speaking, De Bres is obligated to oppose racism and, quite unsurprisingly, he is legally obliged to do so under s5(2)(l) of the Human Rights Act 1993:

The Commission is to “make public statements in relation to any group of persons in, or who may be coming to, New Zealand who are or may be subject to hostility, or who have been or may be brought into contempt, on the basis that that group consists of persons against whom discrimination is unlawful under this Act”

As I’ve argued, Holmes Waitangi column brought Maori into contempt, as did much of the discussion around Ngati Whatua’s treaty settlement, the Popata brother’s story and discussion and Louis Crimp’s comments. So, taking that view, De Bres is obligated to comment under the Act.

I’m bloody glad De Bres is commenting on these issues because there aren’t enough Maori with the ability, position and willingness to comment on these issues. Racism should never go unchallenged and De Bres deserves credit for acting on that principle.