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Today is a FREE taste of an Insight Politics article by writer John Black.
The ‘N’ Word for White New Zealanders
The language is changing.
Terms of abuse once confined to the political fringe, to ‘radicals’, are now issuing from the lips of mainstream figures: ‘Far-right’, ‘white supremacist’ and now, ‘settler’.
John Tamihere, appearing recently on Maori TV called Act ‘the white settler party’ and said, “if ‘settlers’ don’t like it here, they should buy a one-way ticket to Australia.”
Joanna Kidman, academic and now head of our laughable ‘Centre for Preventing and Countering Violent Extremism’ often uses the same term on Twitter. Journalists she disagrees with are ‘settler journalists’, scientists who do not accept her elevated view of matauranga (as being equal to science) are a dramatic, ‘SETTLERS!’
What gives this word a particular wickedness is that it is term of racial abuse.
‘Settler’ is the ‘N’ word for white New Zealanders.
For the word is not being used as an accurate descriptor of the first Europeans to arrive in this country, but to denigrate their descendants as somehow less legitimate inhabitants of these islands than the part-Maori using the term. And the people being so described are being entirely targeted based on their genetic makeup – as ‘white’.
Meng Foon or Raybon Kan will never get the insult ‘settler’ hurled at them.
If I were to use the ‘N’ word to describe a person of Maori ancestry it would be offensive, ignorant and ultimately absurd. The word has no New Zealand relevance and would mark me out as merely a dumb racist. And yet those using the word ‘settler’ to describe third or fourth-generation Pakeha have a much more malevolent purpose. They wish to delegitimise our very presence in this country. They wish to take the country back to 1840, equating us with new arrivals from foreign places. They wish us to kowtow guiltily to the authority of Maori as the indigenous people of these islands. They wish us to feel insecure, to concede that maybe we don’t really belong here, to act like barely tolerated ‘guests’ in our own home.
Could there be a nastier project?
Like most things of high stupidity, the modern use of the term originates from North American academia. Canada this time, not the US. The perversion of the word from a synonym for ‘pioneer’ to ‘white people who don’t belong here’ was carried out by ‘intellectuals’ such as Emma Battell Lowman and Adam Barker, authors of the page-turner, Settler: Identity and Colonialism in 21st Century Canada (2015). In the first chapter entitled ‘Why say settler?’ they write: “We need a name that can help us see ourselves for who we truly are.” And what are ‘we’? “An invasive people, a nation that violently displaces others for its own wants and desires, a state that breaks treaties and uses police and starvation to clear the land.” Elsewhere they claimed the term was apt for “uncomfortable realisations and…potential complicity in systems of dispossession and violence…that we inevitably live and embody. It is who we are” (my italics).
Sounds familiar.
The same language is now used in New Zealand to damn our white majority. Language that conjures up the ‘curse of Ham’ and the ‘mark of Cain’; biblical injunctions used to justify the slavery of entire races as punishment for crimes their ancestors had supposedly committed.
Do we really want the same reasoning nineteenth-century Protestant preachers in America used to excuse slavery becoming mainstream political discourse in this country?
Looks like it already has.
Quite apart from matters of ‘racial justice’ purely from a tactical point of view, the use of this language seems a bad move. Is it smart to tell the majority of your fellow citizens that they don’t really belong here? That you and the other 16% of the population who tick the ‘Maori’ box at census time are of inherently superior status? History is not overburdened with examples of minorities making claims to genetic pre-eminence and prospering. Quite the opposite in fact.
Although, as usual with such claims, there are plenty of non-Maori who make them; ‘settlers’ who delight in the masochism of highlighting the supposed unworthiness of themselves and their ancestors.
But they are a sick minority, mostly academics or media types who can afford to indulge in ‘white guilt’ from the comfort of their Ponsonby villas. For the rest of us, the idea appals.
But it should do more than that. It should anger us.
I do hope Ms Kidman monitors this site as part of her new position as extremism prevention overlord. Perhaps after reading this she will desist from using the term ‘settler’ and promoting the extreme political programme it represents. Because otherwise Ms Kidman and her fellow racial radicals may provoke something we haven’t yet seen in this country.
An eruption in our political life of ‘white’ hot rage.
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