This year, among all the other drama going on in the world, there is an election. When I think about voting, I am always reminded of my old headmistress at school, Sister Pauline Engel, and something she said to me. She told me – and all the students at Carmel College – that once we were old enough to vote, that we must do so. In an earlier time, women had fought for us to have this right, and so we must exercise it. If we didn’t vote, we were disrespecting their effort and sacrifice.
But there’s another aspect to my right to vote that Sister Pauline never mentioned, and I find it a bit uncomfortable. Yes, the women fought, but they would never have been able to vote if men hadn’t granted that right. I would never have been able to vote if that right hadn’t been granted by men.
Most of the time, I think of it in a positive way – I know that the men of New Zealand recognised that women should have the right to vote decades before the men of other countries. But I can also see the unfairness in it. Why should men have had the right to decide whether or not women should vote?
These kinds of inequalities appear as a recurrent theme in human history. There have always been groups who have held a disproportionate amount of power and wealth, and these groups have, at times, chosen to extend the rights that they held to members of another group. For example, in 1780, only 3% of the population of England was entitled to vote. Over the following century, that right was extended to all men who owned a house.
The reason voting rights were extended to all house-owning Englishmen had more to do with self-preservation than fairness or equality. When the power is held by a minority, the situation can be precarious, and England’s elite were becoming uncomfortably aware of the fate of their French counterparts. A similar situation was seen in New Zealand, where in 1860 voting rights were granted to miners, who had previously been ineligible because they did not meet the property ownership requirements. There had been protests and violence on the goldfields in Australia, so allowing miners to vote in New Zealand was a direct attempt to head off a similar situation here.
But when it came to granting the vote to women, the situation was different. Women protested, but they weren’t going to overthrow the patriarchy. There was little, if any, advantage to men in granting the vote to women. Likewise, there was no advantage to the white majority when the USA granted citizenship to former slaves in 1868, or when Australia granted voting rights in federal elections to indigenous Australians in 1962. Nor was there any advangage to the heterosexual majority in extending the right to marry to same-sex couples, something New Zealand did in 2013.
While I can’t look into the minds of the politicians who granted these rights, it seems likely that they made their decisions based on a combination of their own personal opinions and the majority view of their constituents. Simply put, those who held the power granted rights to those who did not because they believed it to be the proper thing to do.
These examples all illustrate that those holding power – usually the majority – have a critical role in recognising and granting rights to those who are excluded. It’s not fair, and it will never be fair, until the majority does something about it.
You may have noticed, and wondered why, I haven’t mentioned the rights of Maori in my examples above. After all, I described New Zealanders as dangerously complacent about racism, and if I focus on examples of how other countries are worse, that only reinforces our complacency. But I’ve got good reason. In New Zealand, the picture was more complicated. Maori were never explicitly denied the right to vote, and some did vote in the first election, in 1853. Most Maori were excluded from voting though, by the property qualifications (which didn’t acknowledge collective ownership of lands) and simply because Maori participation was discouraged.
The situation I’ve described is a fairly clear-cut example of systemic racism. The system doesn’t overtly exclude certain groups, but it is set up in such a way that they are excluded nonetheless. It’s tricky, because ensuring that excluded groups are represented requires a bit more work than simply passing a law that applies to everyone, regardless of ethnic origin, skin colour or gender.
New Zealand began addressing this issue in the 1860s, with the creation of four Maori seats. The Maori seats ensured a Maori voice in parliament, whereas simply giving Maori the right to vote would not have, because by that time they comprised only about 20% of New Zealand’s population. On the other hand, there were a total of 76 parliamentary seats, so Maori were significantly under-represented in proportion to their percentage of the population. The system was still squarely stacked in favour of the Pakeha majority.
The situation is, of course, quite different today, for a number of reasons. For a start, the number of Maori seats is now set by the number who choose to be on the Maori electoral roll, rather than an arbitrary number. We also have a different parliamentary system, with party lists. Parties have used these lists to include not only Maori, but other minority ethnic groups. As a result, New Zealand has a much more diverse parliament and, in fact, in 2014 the proportion of Maori MPs exceeded the proportion in the general population.
And yet, we are far from being able to say our system is fair, or that it gives everyone an equal opportunity.
Yes, our political parties now select a diverse range of candidates. Yes, this has resulted in a much more diverse parliament. But, ultimately, the minority groups still depend on the majority to ensure that they are represented. It’s simply a matter of numbers.
Political representation is just one area of New Zealand society where the decisions of Pakeha are critical to the wellbeing of Maori and other groups of the population who are in a minority. For example, New Zealand’s judiciary is overwhelmingly Pakeha. In March 2019, 11% of District Court judges were Maori, and just 2% Pasifika, well below their proportions in the general population of New Zealand, which are around 17% and 8% respectively. There have been moves to improve Maori representation but, ultimately, decisions on the appointment of judges are still made through a system dominated by Pakeha.
The numbers of Maori and Pasifika judges appear even more disproportionate when we consider the people who end up before the courts. Maori are massively over-represented in the criminal justice system. In a report from 2009, when they made up only 13% of the population, Maori accounted for 43% of police apprehensions. Of those apprehended by police, 72% of Maori were convicted, compared to 66% for Pakeha (and 76% for Pasifika). The figures from prison are even worse – Maori make up 51% of the total prison population and 54% of those imprisoned on remand. Maori were over-represented in another group in the criminal justice system as well – victims. Close to 30% of the victims of reported crimes were Maori.
Some of this over-representation probably results from the kind of prejudice I wrote about last week, where people are racist despite their best intentions not to be. Because the vast majority of judges are Pakeha, most people who come before the courts are likely to face the unconscious “white person” bias, which favours those who are light-skinned over people with darker skin. It’s a clear example of how any prejudices held by the more powerful and numerous have a disproportionate impact.
But the problem is a lot more complex than that. A Department of Corrections report from 2007 attempted to understand the reasons for the over-representation of Maori. It found results that were both gratifying and depressing. The good news was that, while there was clear evidence for this kind of bias having an effect, it wasn’t the major cause. The depressing part is that the cause was something even more complex – the disproportionate exposure of Maori to risk factors for criminal behaviour, both in early and adult life.
Two important risk factors for criminal behaviour in adults hold a particular interest for me – the exposure of children to family instability, conflict and violence, and educational underachievement. I have seen, on a day-to-day basis, the devastating impacts that these have on children and young people, and I understand better than most how early experiences continue to affect people into their adult lives, and then go on to affect their children, and their childrens’ children. While I could quote statistics here, instead I will give my own personal experience – of the 17 children and young people who have spent time living in my home, 11 have been Maori. Only a small proportion of those have ended up with me for any length of time, but all of those who did were Maori.
There’s a vicious cycle at work here, a tangle of trauma, deprivation, mental illness, substance abuse, disengagement from education, violence, hopelessness and the abject failure of the system which is supposed to be making things better. The statistics are truly horrifying. In the USA, nearly 80% of prison inmates have spent time in foster care. A New Zealand report from 2011 stated that 60% of “clients” of the Department of Corrections (a group which presumably includes not just prisoners but also those with non-custodial sentences) had some record with Child, Youth and Family.
Today, in my experience, children don’t enter the foster care system unless there is a good reason. The trauma that resulted in them being removed from their families must play a big part in their educational underachievement and in their ending up in the courts and in prison. But there’s much more to it than that. Right now, we have a Royal Commission on the abuse of children in care, to investigate and document just how badly our system failed. I’m barely going to touch on that here but I would like to give one example, the Epuni Boys Home.
More than 100,000 children passed through Epuni, and the stories of what they endured are appalling. Some ended up there for reasons that would barely justify a glance from Oranga Tamariki today. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that racism played a part in that, given that most of the children there were Maori. It’s also hard to avoid the conclusion that places like Epuni are still affecting New Zealand today, in both our incarceration statistics and in the children who are currently coming into foster care.
When we think of racism, we may think of overt racism – insults, threats and violence – or more casual racism, the kind that makes racist jokes or says “All lives matter” when people are trying to focus attention on the hugely disproportionate numbers of black people dying at the hands of American police. We don’t tend to think of the complex and lasting effects of historical injustice – the way that racism of the past plays out today. But we need to, because it’s a serious problem.
When I say that “we” need to think more about this type of racism, I mean everyone, of course. But there is one group that needs to think a bit harder than everyone else. You know what I’m getting at by now – I mean Pakeha, or white people, or whatever you want to call us. This is not because it was white people who caused these historical injustices. I’m not expecting people who perpetrated the abuses at Epuni to read this article, for example. I’m not saying that we should feel responsible for what happened.
But we are still the majority and we still hold more power. Because we are the majority, it is harder for us to see and understand racism because of our own experiences. Conversely, because we are the majority, our prejudices have a disproportionate impact. It’s not about blame, it’s not about feeling responsible for the past and it’s not about punishing people. But it is about feeling responsible for today.
I find it particularly hard to hear about the ways that our foster care system has failed children, and especially Maori children. It’s hard to read about how the children were treated at Epuni and other homes. It’s hard to hear about the current failures, too, such as the recent situation where a baby was removed from a young Maori mother in hospital – circumstances that were clearly far from ideal. It’s hard, because I’m a part of that system, even though I’m not responsible for the actions I’ve mentioned, and I don’t feel guilty about them.
But I do feel motivated. I’m a white woman raising Maori kids, and I know that my prejudices could end up affecting them. It’s a very personal example of where prejudice could have a disproportionate impact. So, if I really care, I’ve got to do my utmost to identify, understand and overcome any racism that I have. I can afford no complacency.
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