The problem with identity politics, aside from its inherent bigotry and division, is that its practitioners lock themselves into a vicious, downward cycle. When privileges, promotions, even basic rights, hinge entirely on one’s identity, the race is inevitably on to be more identified than the next menstruating person.
Take the old Soviet Union, for example. The winning identity in the USSR was “proletarian”, so the commissars all vied to outdo themselves on their prole cred. Everyone wanted to be a peasant, even though most of them were at best solidly middle-class intellectuals.
It gets even worse when race is the identity pass-card to promotion and funding.
When Kelvin Davis used Question Time to say that I view the world through a “pakeha lens” it was nothing I haven’t heard before: “You’re a whakapapa Maori but you’re not kaupapa Maori”; “You’re a plastic Maori”; “You’re a born-again Maori”. It just comes with the territory of being a Maori woman who doesn’t always fit the left’s comfortable stereotype.
Problem is, I don’t think Kelvin is the only Labour minister who thinks what he said. The others might be smarter at hiding it, but they also worship identity politics.
Promoters of identity politics invariably stake their whole cred on being “anti-racist”. But, by making race their primary metric, they’re inescapably very racist indeed. It’s just an equal-and-opposite racism.
And it’s just as destructive — especially to the very people in whose name it claims to act.
As Act’s Children’s spokesperson and as someone who grew up in state care, I’m starting by fighting against what I view as racism within Oranga Tamariki.
We see the same racism in Australia, in child protective services. Aboriginal Australian children are sadly disproportionately likely to be subject to a child protection order. But, supposedly in the name of “anti-racism”, they are only allowed to be placed with Aboriginal carers.
As if someone’s ability to care for and nurture children is solely dependent on their skin colour.
I know a couple in Auckland who took on the huge responsibility of becoming foster parents. They took in a little girl, who for the sake of this story and to protect her identity, I will call Mary. Mary is part Maori. By the age of 7, Mary had been placed with different family members eight times, only to be removed again.
Mary’s foster parents took her in and loved and cared for her. They believed they would be providing Mary with a home for life, giving her the stability she so desperately needed.
This couple have good jobs in the public service and are well respected in the community.
After two years of caring for Mary, they were told they had to prove they had Maori heritage, or she would once again be placed back with her whanau.
That would be the whanau who abused the child in the first place.
Oranga Tamariki claimed that the most important thing for Mary was being raised in a “culturally appropriate environment”.
As I always say, when it comes to such things: flip the script. Imagine if child protective services ruled that white children must go to white families only.
I was a Maori child in state care. I could have only dreamed of a loving home like the one Mary was placed in.
What I needed was what every child needs. To be loved, cared for, clothed and fed.
I bounced between the system and family for years. I still carry the physical and mental scars from that time. It didn’t matter to me whether the adults I relied on were Pakeha, Maori, Chinese or African. I just wanted to be loved and cared for.
NZ Herald
And all the race-obsessives of identity politics want is to leverage their own, politically-correct racism for power, influence and money.
Of all political nonsenses, identity politics is surely the most vicious, illogical and destructive.