Tapu Misa: What's in a name? Just ask some 'gross browns'

Yes, I know, there are more important things in the world to get het up about - not the least this ill-judged war that's already destroying the lives of so many. You'd think this greater human suffering would put things in perspective, diminish our petty concerns and everyday obsessions. But, of course, it never does.

Next to an email from an American friend - who writes that the media at home are doing their best to disguise the fact that most of the world is totally opposed to this "stupid, dreadful" war by referring to "coalition" forces, as if there were a large group of nations behind them - comes a missive from a disgruntled reader who is deeply offended by my use of the words "Pakeha" and "Palagi".

Of course, it is her right to be deeply offended, although I would have had a little more sympathy for her if she'd been just a little more respectful. But I concede that this would have been well nigh impossible for someone who could so blithely write that she "frankly [had] no respect for browns [Polynesians]" and that we were "gross".

Which made me laugh - and had me reflecting again on why there's such antipathy among some to being called Pakeha.

Notwithstanding whatever objectionable meaning it once had - and there's some difference of opinion on that one - it seems to have grown into a perfectly good word to describe a particular group of New Zealanders. Just like "Palagi", which is derived from the quite reverential "papalangi".

I'm with the Human Rights Commission when it declares that "for people several generations removed from their European or British origins, describing themselves, or being described, as Pakeha can mean that they identify as part of a culture unique to this country".

My angry correspondent, though, prefers to be called European.

She's also decidedly unhappy about my being able to refer to her in un-English words. Which leads me to conclude that her dislike stems less from any perceived negative meanings than from a deep-seated contempt for things Polynesian - and a resistance to acknowledging our geographical place in the world.

Still, 'tis a vexed question this whole name-calling game - and, I admit, one in which the rules are constantly shifting. It was only last year that a Herald headline with the word "Islander" could have me cringing with annoyance.

My sensibilities had been scarred, you see, by the dawn raids, by being labelled an "overstayer", by formative years spent reading unrelentingly negative newspaper headlines, by a time when "Islander" was synonymous with a raft of undesirable social pathologies.

My, how times have changed. When the documentary Chinks, Coconuts and Curry-munchers screened on TV3 last year, my children couldn't understand why I'd once considered "coconuts" derogatory.

Fast-track to the Pasifika festival last month and there's my sister happily buying up a supply of T-shirts bearing the legends "Fat islanders", "Freshie" - for fresh off the boat - "Overstayer", and "CIA - Coconut in Action".

There, too, is Oscar Kightley, sometime TV star and the breakfast host on the PI radio station, Niu FM, talking about "Islanders" in a way that I'll never be able to manage.

Clearly, something had been happening. In the years since I'd stubbornly insisted on using the term "Pacific Islanders" in an educational magazine I was editing - even though the publishers wanted to expunge "Islanders" for the more politically correct "Pacific people" - a new and more confident generation had started appropriating some of those once derogatory terms. We had become brown.

In an article in The Australian last year, entitled "Brown is the new Black in NZ", the paper's New Zealand correspondent, Claire Harvey, wrote about her surprise at finding how comfortable Maori and PIs were with being called "brown".

Paul Spoonley, a sociology professor of Massey University at Albany, was quoted as saying that it was part of a linguistic shift, a Kiwi-isation of the language. "For the first time in New Zealand's history, we are describing ourselves with words that have not been handed down from our 19th-century colonisers."

You could say that our search for the perfect handle mirrors our search for identity in this country. We're developing a style of music, fashion and art that is not only distinctly Pacific but distinctly New Zealand.

Twenty or so years ago, most of us were still referring to ourselves as "blacks". Being invisible in the mainstream media except when it came to bad news, we identified and engaged more strongly with black Americans and their causes than with our own. It was more hip to be black, to affect an American accent, to see black culture as our own.

The only positive brown models around were All Black Bryan Williams, the Yandall Sisters and Albert Wendt.

The search for identity - and a name that adequately reflects that - is one that has preoccupied African Americans, too. They've gone from Negro to coloured to black and, finally, to African-American.

The comedian Richard Pryor used to joke that if you called another black American an "African", fights would break out. At different times, the terms Negro, coloured and black had the same effect.

As talkback radio host Joe Madison told DiversityInc magazine: "For three-quarters of our existence as black people in this country we were defined by others. We then developed a sense of consciousness and self-worth ... that allowed us to define ourselves."

We Pacific Islanders are still at the business of defining ourselves. Latest options include "Pasifikans" (a tad voguish), and "Pasifika", which I'm still not sure about. In the meantime, we're stuck with the clunky "Pacific people" and "Pacific Islander", and the pithier but less meaningful "PI".

Of course, I realise we don't have exclusive rights to those terms. Strictly speaking, we're all Pacific Islanders now.

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