Management at an established Auckland eatery put up signage this week insisting staff only speak English. Someone in the kitchen took umbrage, screamed racism and splashed the signage on social media. This ensured a media circus about racism and Circus Circus, through no fault of its own, lived up to its name. The complainant should take a long hard look in the mirror because good communication is not racism.
For years “European” was my only option in the tick-the-box ethnicity question. These days the option “New Zealander” is slightly better, but why ask the question at all? Aren’t we all New Zealanders? Why the distinction, particularly now the question is “which ethnicity do you identify as?”
The unscientific data collection is a waste of time and money that gets considerably worse when government agencies use the data for racial discrimination. What’s wrong with allocating funding where it’s most needed, regardless of the ethnic group someone chooses to identify with?
“Speaking at a Capital and Coast District Health Board meeting today, medical officer John Tait said the Ministry of Health bands people accepted for specialist treatment in a priority ranking.
“People are given a score on their level of need and ability to benefit from treatment compared to other people.
“’We’ve moved Maori and Pacifica to the top of the band,’ he told the meeting.”
This is outrageous and highlights the utter foolishness of abandoning medical assessment on a case by case basis. Sick people more deserving of urgent medical attention will suffer longer and may die simply because Maori or Pacifica are deemed more deserving.
I am sorry to say we have become a racist country. I thank God for politicians like Judith Collins who took parliament to task this week for its part, asking the house why it matters that she is white. A newspaper reported:
“Tensions flared over race relations again today at Parliament with outspoken National MP Judith Collins saying she was ‘sick of being demonised’ for her ethnicity.
“National’s been under fire for not having any M?ori MPs in its top 12, in the new line-up revealed on Monday.
“Yesterday Collins pushed back, asking reporters if there was ‘something wrong’ with her being white.”
Given racism is enshrined in law and practice that emanated from government, why aren’t ministers addressing the huge problem now blighting all areas of life? This is a good question to put to your MP: what are they doing about reversing the toxic trend of racism?
On a lighter note, although still on the topic of ethnicity, the highly entertaining work by Geoffrey Corfield titled “A Humorous History of NZ” has been serialised on the BFD. If you haven’t read it, you really should because it is a treat. Its appeal was pre-determined when the University of Otago rejected the work saying “you display a lack of knowledge of and sensitivity for the protocols that bind us as a bicultural nation, and the story of ruthless colonisation that underpins New Zealand’s history. […] it transgresses so many aspects of Maoritanga.“
Corfield spins the story that Maori referred to immigrants as “white turnips”.
“Recent botanical detective work indicates that a rather rare kind of hybridization between some form of cabbage (18 chromosomes) and turnip (20 chromosomes) resulted in the new species, rutabaga (20 + 18 = 38 chromosomes).
No one knows when or where this occurred, but the new species was probably first found in Europe some time in the late Middle Ages. There was no record of it until 1620 when the Swiss botanist Caspar Bauhin described it.
Turnip (Brassica rapa) is of ancient culture, many distinct kinds having been known to the Romans at the beginning of the Christian Era. Some of those varieties bore Greek place names, indicating earlier culture and development by the ancient Greeks.
In the first century Pliny described long turnips, flat turnips, round turnips. He wrote of turnips under the names rapa and napus. In Middle English this latter term became nepe, naep in Anglo-Saxon. One of these words, together with turn (“made round”), became our common word “turnip.”
Perhaps Corfield chose the turnip because its ancient culture and ready ability to hybridize best describes migrants who derive from ancient cultures and hybridize very nicely.
The one sticking point to categorizing ourselves as “white turnips” these days, is the fact that we are not all white. Some of us are a lovely shade of mocha and others a luscious dark chocolate colour, with many shades in between. We are all shapes of long, flat and round.
Because, through no fault of my own, I am white (and round), I identify as a “white turnip”. This is now my go-to ethnicity. I can do nothing about the government spraying money at their favourite ethnicity, but I can do everything to confuse the desk jockey’s pigeon-holing my ethnicity.
May the racists of any colour or ethnicity be afflicted by their own pigeons roosting on their heads and pooping heavily.
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