Our Kiwi values do not include being racist
The truth is that we all start somewhere, morally speaking, and it’s usually clinging to the side of a cliff. Our life is either an exhausting struggle upward, or an easy slide down. Whichever direction we take, at some point we realise that life’s not even a lofty mountain. It’s the side of a landfill. We can climb out, limp to the road and thumb a ride home. Or we’re eating from discarded pizza boxes tonight. My heroes don’t eat garbage.
Last week NZ First wet its beak in the nonrecyclables with its Respecting New Zealand Values Bill idea. As reported by Stuff, a remit was passed unanimously at the party’s annual conference that aimed to set legally mandated Kiwi values for migrants. The remit needs sign-off from the party’s MPS to become NZ First policy. If it ever actually got the numbers in Parliament to become law, it might, among other suggestions, create a Kiwi-values court for those who don’t comply. The court, or tribunal, or whatever it is, could kick people out of the country.
As always, NZ First is a shiny leather brogue aching for something nasty to step in.
Mind you, I don’t blame its politicians for attracting poop. It’s not their job to help the general public avoid moral capitulation. Politicians are merely receptacles. No, it was the enthusiastic response from everyday people to the remit that shook me. The barefaced animosity against nonwhite migrants prefaced by the haunting qualifier, ‘‘I’m not racist, but . . .’’.
I’m sorry, sir and madam, but you are.
Of course, many of these angry people argue that it is really they who are the victims of racism. I’m not sure this is possible. Now I know some of you will be striding to your dictionaries, flipping to the well-thumbed page with a three-sentence definition of ‘‘racist’’ and shoving it vigorously at this column. Firstly, calm down: dictionaries are there to add colour to your angry blog posts – not to actually live your life by.
Secondly, the idea that people who are already on the lower rungs could even tickle those above them with any kind of racism is absurd. The pancake might as well wrest the spatula from your hand and flick your nose. (There are plenty of similar examples of impossible reversals: pyramids balanced on their tips, rats eating cats, horses riding men, Oates and Hall. You can’t make this upside-down universe real, no matter how hard you try.)
Yet these angry people think they are losers in a battle for our Kiwi identity. It’s like the chorus to some quaint 1950s rock tune. They’ve caught the rockin’ pneumonia, boogie-woogie flu, moral rabies and the indignity syphilis.
So, what is a racist? To some people, the foreigners get it easy, with their handouts and their nasty foreign ways. What’s worse is hardcore racists have an absolute inability to cope with the truth that they might not be as decent as they think. This is a terminal failing. I mean, if you can’t conceive of yourself being wrong, doing something bad, then it’s likely you’ll always be bad and wrong.
Other times, these people present themselves as calm, rational people. The zen-into-xenophobia kind. They chip away at decency with pure argumentation and a cheeky glint in their eye. Of course the question is not whether their argument wins the debate of ideas; it’s why would they argue against decency in the first place?
They lean on stats about racial difference, blood quantum, pseudo history, the civilised superiority of the Western heritage, but the only case they build is the one for their own hysteria. I’ll admit they sometimes carry a computer-like implacability – if that computer smells like granddad, and has the playful charm of a dot matrix printer performing a lullaby. Even HAL 9000 could carry a nice tune.
Rationality. Tasked with berating the powerless, it’s a dead end. It’s like filling a room with monkeys tapping on keyboards for 100 years and hoping for a creative-writing miracle. You’re never getting a Shakespeare sonnet.
The miracle I crave is the Pa¯ keha¯ who has the courage to face up to the world as it really is. Fortunately, this is not a rare beauty, it’s an everyday event.
People don’t become racist. Most start off that way and, maybe, if lucky enough to possess some innate decency and wit and strength, throw away the blindfold. We can carry that anger and resentment and fear we’re born with, or ditch it.
Our Kiwi values allow us to function as a society – imperfectly, I’ll warrant – because every day most of us can at least reluctantly, or enthusiastically, or confusedly, put one hand ahead of the other and start climbing.