KEY POINTS:
I hate writing about race. For one thing, it brings out all the closet racists, the smug, ignorant, knuckle-dragging Neanderthals who regard themselves as the pinnacle of human development.
And for another, it disturbs the fantasy I have about the existence of racism in New Zealand. I like
to think that race has become a non-issue, and that the rednecks have been consigned to irrelevancy by the decent, enlightened majority.
In my fantasy, we've matured into a society that's stopped blaming bad behaviour on race or ethnicity. The kind of society, as Martin Luther King jnr once said, "where men will not argue that the colour of a man's skin determines the content of his character".
And here in the liberal, politically correct (read: how the world should be) circles I move in, where difference is an advantage and friendships cross all kinds of divides, I'd managed to delude myself that this is how it is, that the war had been won.
I'm not alone in this. Tongan publisher Kalafi Moala was feeling the love when he declared 2004 "the year of Pasifika in Aotearoa". Well, bro'Town was a hit and Tana Umaga had broken through the "Polynesians aren't smart enough to make All Black captain" barrier, an achievement widely hailed as proof that the once-troubled Pacific Island community "was now part of mainstream New Zealand".
But 2004 was also the year that Don Brash exposed the fragility of our race relations with his Orewa speech. And while Umaga's promotion and the browning of the All Blacks fooled many of us into believing "that racism has been dealt with, that it is consigned to the past", as academic Andrew Grainger writes, it didn't reflect the reality off the rugby field.
Social scientists may have decided that race is a social construct, but out in the real world it continues to matter.
The people who have written to me insisting that Polynesians really are bad, lazy, violent, and criminal (unlike whatever saintly group they belong to) are typical of racists everywhere; they have little insight into their racism, or the impact it has.
The idea, for example, that Asian people were being targeted by Polynesians for racial reasons, when it seemed to me more a case of criminals targeting those perceived as having money, has poisoned already-delicate relationships and so heightened fear and suspicion that a Pacific Island man who had forgotten his eftpos card at an Auckland petrol station last week had a machete pulled on him by the manager. If you believe that every Polynesian is out to get you, you might believe this to be a justified response.
The American anti-racism campaigner Tim Wise writes that some people have difficulty grasping the difference between saying that black folks have a higher official crime rate than whites, which is a fact borne out by the evidence, and saying that most blacks are criminals, a lie that casts aspersions on a racial group that can lead to their continued stereotyping.
Wise points to the irony of surveys that show most white Americans believe at least one negative, racist stereotype about blacks (that they're lazy, violent, or prefer to live on welfare), while insisting at the same time that racism, "including the kind that holds African Americans in this low regard", plays very little part in their ability to succeed - "as if people imbued with that kind of bias would be able to fairly evaluate job applicants or students who were members of the presumed defective group".
What makes racism so complex is that much of it is unseen; it is so ingrained in our structures and attitudes we hardly recognise it. I'm not against reporting ethnicity, as one man suggested, but if we're going to make an issue of race every time a crime is reported, we should do it for everyone, including those "ethnically unmarked" white "New Zealanders" who seem to think they're getting rid of racial division by conflating nationality with ethnicity, as happened in the last census.
Actually it just reinforces the idea of whiteness as the default setting. "New Zealander" as ethnicity means white, just as in the US, says Nobel-winning author Toni Morrison, "American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate."
The point is not to ignore race, but to acknowledge its complexities. Even the labels are problematic. Behind the convenient shorthand of "Asian" or "Polynesian" are disparate groups of people who don't share the same language or culture, or even have much to do with each other.
Would we put Fijian Indians under Asians or Pacific Islanders? Some are proud of their Pacific links, but others make no secret of their disdain.
And what of the hybrids? Two-thirds of Maori babies and one half of Pacific Island babies belong to multiple ethnic groups so which ethnicity should we blame for envy and lack of ambition? Is Valerie Vili a Pacific Islander because she's half Tongan, or a New Zealander because she's likely to win gold at the Olympics? And would anyone care if she hadn't fulfilled her athletic potential and become, instead, just another troubled kid from South Auckland?
