Read an extract from The Good Settler on E-Tangata:
Richard Shaw doesn’t shy away from examining the myths that Pākehā tell themselves about life in New Zealand.
He’s about to publish his third book on the topic of how Pākehā came to occupy this land and at what cost, while reflecting on the role his own Irish ancestors played in that history.
In this essay from The Good Settler, released next week, he picks apart the concept of “race”, and considers why this invented idea just won’t go away.
It happens, very occasionally, that you live through moments of intense consciousness in which you can feel your world turning on its axis. The seconds clot and time lets you know that something is in the process of becoming — not about to change, but shifting right then and there.
The births of my daughters were like that. The death of my father. I thought my selection for the Manawatū Under 19 rugby team might be one of those moments too, but it wasn’t. Instead, at our first (and my only) game, the ground announcer asked the person who had locked their bike to the large freezer outside the main stand to please remove it immediately, and I had to scoot away from the subs bench to sort that out.
A year or so after the freezer incident, I sat in a university lecture hall as sociologist Paul Spoonley methodically pulled a word apart, patiently explaining to us that while the use of the word “race” had real consequences for people’s lives, the underlying idea — that races are palpable, material phenomena — is an invention. Races, Paul pointed out, exist in the same way that elves and pixies do: in the imagination.
When he said that, space tilted a couple of degrees, and everything looked different.
That lecture took place 40 years ago but has stuck with me. Not only because a term that I casually used was revealed as a rhetorical emperor lacking clothes, but also for the wider message, which is that certain words are not what they seem. You need to know what you’re doing with this sort, and use them carefully. Especially if you live in a country with a long history of using language to keep people in their place.
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Read the rest of the extract on E-Tangata here.
