COMMENT
In recent times the term "white supremacy" has taken on new meaning in New Zealand. The white supremacist may now be someone hiding behind a computer screen drowning in fallacious ideology and flawed arguments. He's the disaffected, delusional loser. He's the outlier, the unusual. He's not, for example, Captain Cook. White supremacy isn't, for example, colonisation.
Until very recently, the term "white supremacy" wasn't uttered in polite company in New Zealand. The term has been injected into our national vernacular, and we're not quite sure what to do with it. We might be forced to contemplate what colonisation – the annexation of nations inhabited by indigenous (and usually black or brown) people – could possibly be other than a manifestation of white supremacy. Whether the creation of empires for resources, extra land for overflowing populations, power, control of shipping routes and the export of foreign religions and ideologies might have something to do with the idea that one culture and race is somehow supreme over others. Whether the needs of some cultures and peoples are less important. Whether the rights of some cultures and peoples are less inalienable.
We might have to wonder whether the Tauranga City Council's recent decision to revoke its gift of ancestrally significant (and unfairly taken) pā land back to local iwi might have something to do with a system that has consistently afforded power to one group of people over others. And whether it is defensible in 2019 to decide not to right a wrong nearly 200 years old. In 1830, the use of the land in question by the missionaries was granted by local Māori on the proviso that the land would not be sold to raise money – an agreement circumvented when the missionaries gifted it to the Crown, who on-sold it, after which part of the land parcel was purchased by the archdeacon (fancy that!), whose descendants set up a trust that is also angling to receive the gifted land. Complicated, isn't it? It almost makes you wonder whether amongst all that gifting and selling there was something else going on…