Other White Background

 

On the phone, I had to register for my home Covid test, and clarify my ethnicity. Pakeha is not on any drop down menu here. My old flatmate, a Croatian migrant to NZ used to laugh at the misnomer that "NZ European" is. (NZ Spanish? NZ Balkan? NZ French??). So I am apparently, "White, other background" Which sounds like paint. 

Off-white, potentially. 

A blank wall.

By co-incidence, in my pacing of the backyard, I got listening back to back podcasts that addressed exactly this.

"One of the privileges of being white is: a) not having to think about it. So when people say ‘well, because, you know, I don't know what you mean, I never thought about being white’. Yeah actually, I understand that ‘cause that's one of the gifts of being white."

-Prof Antony Reddy (Author of "Is God Colourblind?")

So definitely not a blank wall.

He goes on - 

"But then secondly - and I think this is the more constructive and progressive element of it - is: in what way then can you use that to be an advocate for other people? So what I'm not asking people to do is apologise for being white. I'm not asking people to apologise for being white. And I'm not even saying that there's something that in and of itself is problematic about being... about people who self-identify, or are part of a particular construction of being white. What I'm saying is: if that then imbues you with certain advantages, then how do you become an advocate? What sometimes - I think in more recent terms - people talk about [is] being ‘white allies’. I don’t particularly like the term ally- I think I prefer advocate. So [in] what ways then do you become someone who has the ability to acknowledge the advantages that comes and then you then become a supporter of other people?"

My sister sent me some info from our family tree - I now live near(ish) to where my ancestors migrated from in the UK in the 1850s and I'm keen to see and learn more round here to help imagine what it was like for them. A cursory read of her notes though shows a man who learned Maori when he arrived in Taranaki in NZ - and was evacuated in the land wars out of Taranaki to Marlborough. He and his wife and family, like so many pioneers, were intrepid, but vulnerable. Who helped them back then, and why?

In the second, shorter podcast, Glenn Colquhoun describes a year that he spent on a marae, where he was given the gift of being able to see himself from the outside - 

"Pakeha is a Māori word for someone of European ancestry (in the simplest of terms). And I guess... in New Zealand after six generations of, you know, my family being in New Zealand, I don't- the only other way of referring to myself is as a European. And I don't feel European, I feel Polynesian - white Polynesian - and I don't have another name for myself that seems to fit as well."

So, what best describes my white background is this: that somewhere along the line, polynesian people looked after my ancestors and they survived. And they gave my anscestors, and me, gifts and taonga that formed us even when we didn't treasure them. I am very grateful for, and want to learn more about all of that.

The podcasts:

The Corrymeela podcast https://www.publictheologyireland.com/podcast/9jr00wthjcsl5ilusgfgsiibqmmcfu

Poetry postcards podcast - the New Zealand episode.  https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p02r5750