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OPINION: I fully understand why Jenny-May Clarkson’s voice faltered when she interviewed Carmen Parahi on Breakfast yesterday about Thingsapologize to the Maori for their legacy of racism.
I absolutely understand why Carmen Parahi, the Pou Tiaki editor who led the project, broke down in tears while discussing it.
When I woke up yesterday I grabbed my phone and saw that Things I had audited his coverage, tears came to my eyes. At the same time, my heart gave a little jump of excitement.
The tears recalled the mamae, the pain of generations of Maori dehumanized by a media that has uncritically amplified the colonial rhetoric of Pakeha domination and Maori subordination over three centuries.
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Things-co-nz
Dr. Atakohu Middleton, journalist, professor at Auckland University of Technology. He is a journalist and lecturer at the University of Auckland.
When powerful public entities continually tell you that you are worthless, you start to believe it; I have seen the damage this has done to my whakapapa.
The little jump on my chest was a true hope for a positive change in which all the media scrutinize themselves and their power to shape the way we see ourselves. Things He has faced a harsh truth: there is no such thing as journalistic objectivity.
Everything a journalist writes is filtered through a subjective lens of some kind, and that lens is heavily shaped by the values of one’s education. Add to that mainstream media socialization, if the story is not what the editor wants, it is enriched, and you can see how Maori issues can be distorted or misrepresented.
What I didn’t see in yesterday’s coverage is an explanation of how racism took hold in media coverage of indigenous peoples.
Racism, which we call kaikiri in te reo, has a whakapapa, that is, an interrelated and layered history, and underpins everything that Things apologizes. I think it’s important that we all get to know that kōrero.
Anei, here goes. The word race didn’t appear in English until the late 16th century, when it simply meant a group of related people. In the 17th century, the so-called Enlightenment, European thinkers put religion aside as a way of explaining the world around them and turned to secular logic.
Around the same time, European powers such as the English, Dutch, French, German and Spanish were invading and exploiting other countries. For his purposes, he planted and reinforced the idea that the people whose countries they had invaded were morally and mentally inferior, and he conceived of pseudoscience to “prove” that darker-skinned people were inherently less moral or intelligent than those with darker skin clear.
Here’s an example of pseudoscience in action in Aotearoa, from an 1859 book by Arthur Thomson, at the time a British Army medic here:
“It was found, by weighing the amount of millet seed skulls it contained and measuring with tapes and compasses, that the heads of New Zealanders are smaller than those of the English, so that New Zealanders are inferior to the English in mental capacity “, Thomson said.
“This comparative smallness of the brain is produced by neglecting the exercise of the higher powers of the mind, since as muscles shrink from lack of use, it is natural that generations of mental indolence shrink the brain.”
You will remember, of course, that Nazi Germany had a similar ideology not so long ago.
Thanks to the science of genetics, we now know that humans share 99.9 percent of their DNA; differences in ethnic physical characteristics, such as skin and eye color, are found in the other 0.1%. Therefore, equating ethnicity with intelligence is ideological. This is fake news.
It is a destructive social construction that was created to justify dehumanization; its tools are the attitudes and behaviors we call racism. When the British arrived in Aotearoa, they imported their racist attitudes, which were perpetuated in and through social structures such as the media, the courts, and educational policy.
I imagine Things reporters working on this project have shrugged off what they found in the archives. Some may be recalling some past stories with shame.
However, by opening up to scrutiny, Things it has put the gauntlet on other media – the manuka has been put, as we say in te reo.
So to TVNZ, Three, NZME, and other media outlets across the country: what are you going to do to make sure you are fair to your hundreds of thousands of Treaty partners?
Dr. Atakohu Middleton, Professor, Auckland University of Technology University of Auckland – Ngāti Māhanga, Pākehā
