White people perform ceremonies at temples; members of actual religion watch

Posted on December 22, 2012 by chrismiller

Predictably, there is an article on Stuff today about the end of the baktun. It describes all the celebrations held in spiritual places around the world, some historical armageddon fantasies, and gets quotes from “Maya experts” on how some white people are super dumb. Oh, and a single actual Maya, who apparently spent the day selling souvenirs outside the Mayan temples in Mexico.

“A few minutes before the north pole reached its position furthest from the sun on Friday, a spotlight illuminated the western flank of the Temple of the serpent god Kukulkan, a 30 metre tall pyramid at the heart of Chichen Itza.

Then a group of five English-speaking tourists dressed in white made their way across the plain, dropped their bags and faced the pyramid with their arms raised.

As the sun climbed into the sky, a man with dreadlocks played a didgeridoo at the north end of the pyramid. Nearby groups of tourists meditated on brightly coloured mats.”

The most appropriate word I can think of for this is “gross”. Why? Not just because of the standard appropriation, complete with distortion and inaccuracy (a didgeridoo?). But because I’m willing to bet most of these tourists aren’t even aware that the Mexican government banned Maya from performing rituals in their own temples to mark the beginning of the next baktun. For “health and safety” reasons. Because of the crowds. This isn’t exactly an every day ritual – a baktun lasts nearly four hundred years, so the ceremonies for a new one are kind of a big deal. But instead of performing them in the temples that their ancestors built, the Maya will be finding space wherever they can – porches, vacant lots, fields.

“Contrary to popular (mis)belief, the end of the long-count calendar is being viewed as something positive. As Mayan priest Jose Manrique Esquive recently pointed out, the current Baktun, which began around 1618, has been drenched by a continuous reign of misery that included the introduction of European disease, culture and language being erased and entire populations being extinguished.

‘This is the ending of an era for the Maya, an era which has been very intense for us, in which we have had suffering and pain,’ said Manrique Esquivel, adding ‘we are praying the wars, the conflicts, the hunger to end.’”

I guess basically what I’m saying is, things aren’t looking good for that, Manrique.

If you’re not with us

Posted on November 17, 2012 by chrismiller

Internet, I have something to confess. I hate Jews. All of them. Everywhere.* At least that’s apparently what I meant when I said that I didn’t wish to debate who was at fault in the ongoing war between Israel-Palestine because I have colleagues who worked in Gaza. (Seriously, one who just started three weeks ago used to be head of the UN’s Mine Action Team. I don’t work closely with these people, but I’m definitely aware of them and have been introduced.) That statement, which I had thought to be pretty neutral, got me labeled an anti-Semite, which is frankly a little bit ludicrous. See, where I come from, you can disapprove of a government’s actions without hating the entire population of the country. Ironically if this were not true I would never have been on pleasant terms with this person anyway, because I really disapprove of a lot of the actions of the US government.

And yeah, I do disapprove of what Israel is doing, especially when I look at things like this:

or the demographics of Gaza showing that half the population is under 18 and three quarters are under 25 and thus couldn’t have been responsible for voting in Hamas in 2006. Or when I read this Huffington Post article. Or when the IDF taunts Gazans over Twitter, telling them to flee despite knowing that they can’t because they’re hemmed in on all sides by a blockade of dubious legality. Or when bombs hit a fire truck that’s attempting to put out a building hit by previous bombs. (And the Israelis boast about their military enough, and were confident enough in being able to hit Jabari’s car, that you can’t really say with complete certainty that that couldn’t have been deliberate.) Or when I remember older interviews with Israeli bulldozer drivers or eye-witness accounts of the death of Rachel Corrie.

This also doesn’t mean I think Palestine is 100% blameless though. Wars always involve blame on both sides, somehow. When you boil it down to the original dispute, over land, both sides have valid arguments on their side. But now, right now, in the modern day, I can’t blame Gaza for firing rockets at Israel. It turns out that people aren’t perfect saints. If you treat them badly enough, for long enough, an awful lot of them will fight back. And to me, looking purely at the military capabilities of each country, the idea that the Palestinians aren’t fighting out of desperation seems about as ludicrous as the idea that I hate Jews.

* If the rest of the post doesn’t make it obvious, I don’t hate Jews.

Open Letter to Su’a William Sio

Posted on October 28, 2012 by chrismiller

Dear Mr Sio,

You don’t know me and I’m not a constituent of yours, so I guess you’d be within rights to simply dismiss anything I have to say as irrelevant. Maybe it is, I don’t know.

I’m not going to castigate you for attending an anti-gay rally, or demand your opinion on the homophobic, mis-spelled signs some people were holding, or question what you thought was positive about the part of the rally that didn’t involve them at all. I’m curious about something else.

You’re Pasifika, as are many of the people you represent; quite a few more of them are Māori. Together these two groups represent a variety of cultures with a long, rich history. Most of that history has been pretty inclusive when it comes to LGBT folk, whether fa’afafine, takatāpui or something else.

Until white colonisation.

Colonisation brought Christianity, which was introduced to the people of the Pacific Islands and Aotearoa often by force. Many scholars regard the Treaty of Waitangi as promising to respect freedom of religion, however missionaries pushed their beliefs onto tangata whenua regardless, and the passage of two generations saw the white now-majority of New Zealand passing the Suppression of Tohunga Act that finally outlawed traditional Māori religion. The Pacific peoples cannot have been treated any better. Fast forward to 2006, a hundred years after the Suppression of Tohunga Act, and over three quarters of Pacific Islanders identified themselves as Christian (largely Catholic, followed by Presbytarians and then Methodists) in the census, far more than the average for the population as a whole – the second largest “religious” group was those with no religion at 13%.

I know you’re one of those three quarters of Pacific Islander Christians. I assume you know your history. I just want to know, does it bother you? How do you feel about the colonisation process? Do you think your ancestors were wrong to accept gender variant and same sex attracted people for so very long? Do you think they went to hell for it?

I don’t mean to denigrate your religion, but I admit it’s hard to understand this. Christianity is very new to Pacific Island culture; it was brought to the area by white men who treated Pasifika badly and whose practices led to widespread poverty, crime, child abuse, and loss of mana. Now you are using that Christianity to discriminate against a group of people who had always been accepted by Pacific Islanders before. How do you justify that? How can you possibly be sure that that’s right? How do you explain your actions to those who are both LGBT and Pasifika?

I would just really like to know. I hope you can tell me.

Peace,

Chris

Stop it stop it stop it

Posted on August 25, 2012 by chrismiller

I always find it funny how men call women emotional, but they flip the fuck out the second the rules they set for women’s lives inconvenience them. Like, don’t walk alone late at night, don’t get too drunk in public, don’t go home with strange men who say they want to watch a move at their place – but if a woman says no, I won’t have that drink you want to buy me, no, I won’t go home with you to watch a move at ten o’clock at night when I’d have no way of getting home and I’m not willing to walk, suddenly it’s “ARE YOU SAYING I’M SOME KIND OF RAPIST HOW DARE YOU CALLING SOMEONE A RAPIST IS AS BAD AS RAPING SOMEONE AND I WOULDN’T WANT TO FUCK YOU ANYWAY BECAUSE YOU’RE UGLY AND PROBABLY A LESBIAN.” I’m pretty sure all the women I know know exactly what I’m talking about.

Then there’s this. Did you know that a woman adhering to the cultural values originally placed on women by men is just like not allowing black people to sit at the front of the bus or drink from whites only water fountains?

No. No, it’s not. That is bullshit and you should shut the fuck up. You are not entitled to see an intimate, private view of a woman’s life, artist or not. She is allowed to set boundaries, and the fact that they are boundaries that men insist on because it’s easier to make someone else accountable for your own bad behaviour makes it really fucking gross when men throw a hissy about her putting them up. The comparison is especially gross because whether it’s true or not, many people see Muslims as a group that is largely non-white. (Despite the fact that there are plenty of white Muslims and brown Christians.)

The really interesting thing is that setting a boundary and seeing who gets unreasonably upset about it is actually a pretty effective way of finding out who’s going to be the most dangerous to you. I would hope that most of my male friends would read that article and nod and think, “Yes, I see where she’s coming from, that’s totally understandable.” Just as they’d think, “Of course a woman I just met who’s told me she’s already had enough alcohol doesn’t want me to insist she has more and might feel unsafe coming back to my house to watch a movie alone with me late at night.” Because getting upset that a woman won’t let you get her drunk and stranded at your house? Probably a sign that you were a little too invested in forcing that scenario. And I refuse to believe that the incredibly vague hints in that Stuff article were enough to convince you that your life would be fucking over if you don’t get to see this artist’s documentary. You just want to because she dared to say no. And that’s gross.

eta: Bear in mind also that even if you’re the most amazing stand up guy in the history of everything, if she did not place restrictions like this, there are other guys who might hold it against her. “You let strange men see you in an unacceptable (to me) state of undress = you are a slut who deserves whatever she gets.”

An open letter to bloggers and journos who aren’t at all racist

Posted on June 22, 2012 by chrismiller

So you have some form of column, you say. Piles and piles of readers and your name right there in the byline like you’re famous or something and people you’ve never even heard of know who you are. Awesome, isn’t it? Except that sometimes… sometimes you get criticised. Racist, they call you. Ludicrous! You never think about race in your writing.

Hold up – just pause there, rewind a bit and play it back. You never think about race? Maybe, just maybe, that right there is your problem. You’re white in a majority white country. You don’t have to think about race. But other people do.

Assuming from your defensiveness and heated denials that you don’t want people to think you’re racist, presumably you’re open to suggestions to avoid having it happen. After all, you’re not. You and your friends know that. Hell, you may even be friends with people of other races, and you don’t see them any differently from anyone else.

Unfortunately people on the internet don’t know you’re not racist. Equally unfortunately, there are a lot of white people who are racist. If you don’t want to be mistaken for one of them – like, if you really, really don’t want to, because it’s the sort of accusation that will seriously ruin your week, because it’s utterly repugnant to you – there’s something quite simple you can do to lessen the chance.

Before you publish something, stop. Think to yourself, “My readers don’t know I’m not racist. I can’t even rely on the assumption that all of them read all my stuff; this is the internet. People follow links all the time. Can what I’ve written be misinterpreted? Does it need rewording? Is there anything that can’t be reworded? Does it really need to be there?”

That’s right. I’m asking you to think about race. This may seem counter-productive to you. After all, isn’t that the very basis of racism? Thinking about race? In an ideal world, maybe. but this world isn’t ideal. In this world race is, sadly, of inflated importance. Being visibly of a different race has a huge impact on how people are treated and experience the world. Therefore, to avoid being seen as racist, you do need to think about race. You need to recognise that the actions of racists affect you too, even if it’s narrowly limited to the possibility of people mistakenly thinking that you’re racist, too. It’s all very well to castigate minorities for making assumptions, to tell them it’s just as racist to think all white people are racist as it is to deride, insult, stereotype and oppress an ethnic minority, but this is a natural human response to being hurt. If everyone who hurts you shares a trait, you learn to be wary, whether it’s pale skin or gang colours. If you really, really want to stop other races from making that assumption, you could try calling out the other white people on their behaviour so they don’t have to be wary..

But at the very least, you could think about race.

Hey, remember polio?

Posted on June 19, 2012 by chrismiller

Hey, remember polio? Chances are most people reading this don’t personally, though they may know someone who had it when they were younger and still lives with the effects, or know someone who knew someone, etc. There’s really only about three countries left where polio’s a big deal, apparently: Afghanistan, Nigeria and Pakistan. However, medical workers are making progress on getting numbers down with the help of vaccination programs. It’s been working. This year so far there have been 22 new cases in Pakistan, compared with 52 in the same period last year. That’s less than half, and if numbers continue like that there’ll be well under a hundred cases this year! Hell yes, doctors! Sadly, you might have seen something in the news about how the Taliban don’t want polio vaccinations anymore though, because it’s “against Islam”. I say this because I did, though I didn’t have time to read the whole article.

Hey, remember Osama Bin Laden? How much do you know about how he was captured? I don’t know if the name Shakil Afridi means anything to you, for example. He was a doctor too. He went to Abbottabad in the first half of last year to run a vaccination campaign, oh, and also to spy on Osama. He confirmed to the US that one of Osama’s top local bodyguards was in the compound in April. On May 2, they attacked the compound. (Afridi went on to be arrested and convicted to 33 years prison for his part.)

You may see where this is going. Because now, doctors want to do another polio vaccination drive. They have enough of the stuff to vaccinate 161,000 children under the age of five. That’s fucking huge. But because last year the US used a vaccination drive as a cover for a military operation, some of the powers that be in Pakistan don’t trust foreign doctors anymore. So it’s not so much that vaccinations are against Islam, really. It’s more that they’re worried – and quite possibly rightfully so, considering ongoing drone strikes in the country – that this program will be a cover for spying as well.

So, you know, good job America. Using doctors to do your dirty work, really paying off now, huh? I mean, your wars have already killed more civilians (sorry, “potential combatants”) in the region than anything else, and now you’re getting completely preventable diseases in on the fun as well!

Summary: Medicine should never be a cover for military operations. Ever. It’s simply too fucking important.

Chinese super-bludging!

Posted on June 18, 2012 by chrismiller

Taking a break from studying Social Policy, since Winston Peters is on Native Affairs atm, to discuss this super-bludging thing. Which, predictably, I think is bullshit.

As a history lesson, the Old Age Pensions Act was introduced in 1898. It was the first direct cash benefit, and heavily restricted. To be eligible you had to have been in the country for 25 years, you had to be sober and of good moral character, you had to be 65, and it was incredibly means tested. 114 years later, you still have to be 65, it’s not means tested, and you have to have lived in New Zealand for ten years since the age of 20, at least five years of which must have been since the age of 50. There’s been quite a few changes over the years – the age of eligibility is about the only thing that hasn’t changed.

(As an aside, I don’t necessarily agree that we have some kind of superannuation crisis as regards to cost. My concerns with it are purely based on need.)

At any rate, the discussion Winston Peters started was about immigration – older people, particularly Chinese because Chinese people are scary or something, coming here and ten years later drawing superannuation.

When this does happen, I believe is due to cultural differences. Chinese families tend to have a bigger intergenerational focus than ours. It would not surprise me, then, if the bulk of older Chinese people migrating to New Zealand were doing so either in company with or to join their family. Back in early May I made a post about the cultural differences between middle-class pakeha and (often low-income) Māori and Pasifika that show up in the beneficiary-bashing slut-shaming tropes, which has some similarities. In both cases, there are inherent differences in how we view family, and because Chinese and Māori/Pasifika are both ethnic minorities they’re kind of getting thrown under the bus in the blame game.

I don’t think, honestly, that there are huge numbers of people coming here at age 55 to get access to Super. I don’t think it’s a big problem at all. If someone managed to convince me that we absolutely had to look at some problem, discounting the eligibility age, I’d be tempted to look more at means testing than eyeballing immigrants – though I suspect my means testing would be far more generous than governments tend to apply to other benefits, particularly since retirees do have high medical costs that need to be accounted for. (Full disclosure, my father’s just turned 65 and draws Super. He’s self-employed and gets a decent income, my mother also works, though I don’t know exactly how much. We’re not as well off as we were when I was young and the money definitely helps, particularly since both of them are getting older and they also subsidise the living costs for me and a couple of my siblings. So I’m fully aware that Super can be useful even for people who aren’t exactly eking out an existence.)

The stand-up conversation

Posted on May 23, 2012 by chrismiller

A few people are having this conversation again and while I’m here I realised I do, actually, have something to say. This post has some links in it to what others have already posted.

Basically, it started when a couple of my Twitter friends walked out of a Raybon Kan show when he started making rape jokes. I can only wish I’d have the guts to do that honestly – knowing me I’d be too scared to draw attention to myself, second guessing myself over whether I was being “too sensitive” or over-dramatic, etc – plus I’d most likely be there with other people and I’d be similarly too nervous to suggest it to them.

Instead, I just don’t go to stand up comedy.

Ever.

I mean, this is a pretty popular genre of entertainment we’re talking about here, especially when you count the panel and quiz shows that feature comedians (I do watch QI on occasion, though the white-meat-sausage-fest is depressing as hell and I do find myself having moments of “Not Funny” still). It’s also one of the genres of live show that’s still going strong in the age of tv and movies zapped direct to your computer. And yet, I doubt I’m not the only one who has a policy of just avoiding the whole thing, just in case.

For me, it’s not just rape jokes, either. Chances are pretty high that any given comedian I know nothing else about will use those. But chances are even higher that even if they don’t, they’ll use jokes where the punchline is “and someone was gay!” or “and someone was trans!” or “and someone was mistaken for being gay or trans!” or “haha, foreigners!” On a visceral level it’s the first ones that bug me the most, of course, because I’m lucky not to be directly affected by racism, but I sure as hell don’t find it funny even if it doesn’t make me sick and angry and ashamed at the reminder that there are significant portions of society who think I’m not worthy of being considered a person.

I don’t want to pay to be made to feel like that. And there’s never any guarantee that it won’t. Even when a comedian’s been good in the past. Even when they’ve challenged the status quo on another topic. Hell, even if they’ve challenged the status quo on that subject. It still happens.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not against jokes about gay people, or trans people, or whatever. But there is simply a huge difference between a joke involving a minority, even a joke that revolves around being a minority, and a joke where just being a minority is a punchline. Apparently it’s a difference too subtle for these people to grasp, and until they can, I can’t trust them with my money.

Culture shock/eugenics

Posted on May 10, 2012 by chrismiller

Yeah, I’m still on this contraception thing. I’ve figured out how to phrase something else that was bugging me about it, helped by reading some other people’s posts, in particular one about the expectations of when one should start a family.

We all know that Māori and Pacific Islanders are disproportionately represented among the poor, right? Like, this isn’t something I need to go and find the stats for? From memory, over half the parents and carers on the DPB are brown. Because I’m not I won’t get too in depth about this – that should be for someone who grew up in that culture – but from everything I’ve learned, in Māori and Pacifika society, children are really important.

Now, National likes to talk about intergenerational reliance on benefits and getting people into work and blah blah. The thing is, when everyone around you is poor and no one in your family has ever been anything but poor, expectations are different. In my family, it was generally accepted that we’d all finish high school and go straight to university. In a poorer family, that doesn’t happen – the financial support isn’t there, the tradition isn’t there, etc. And because of racism, classism and similar societal attitudes, the kids have probably been going to school somewhere where they’re not given career counseling and uni information packets and everything like they are at better schools. It’s quite likely that school has been something you do until you’re old enough not to, and that that’s the message they’ve gotten not only from their friends, but their teachers and other school staff. (Incidentally, the Māori girl I went to the family group conference for hasn’t been at school for the last three years. She’s 15. Yeah.)

Basically, if they weren’t on the benefit, or weren’t relying on others because they didn’t qualify for the benefit despite being unemployed, they’d probably be in shitty jobs that didn’t pay much more than the benefit does anyway.

So, now, National’s saying, well hey, we’ll give you free contraception so you can wait to have kids until you’re off the benefit! And that’s all very well (except in the ways it isn’t), but when exactly is that supposed to be? What, they get a job, they’re earning a whole $50-100 more a week or whatever, then now they can have kids… but because it’s a shitty job they don’t necessarily have the benefits and job security to actually keep it when they need to start taking time off around birth or when they need to deal with sick kids. Yeah, everyone is supposed to get maternity leave and sick days, but they don’t exactly have much recourse if their bosses dick them over. So once they decide to have kids suddenly they’re that much more likely to just end up back on a benefit.

Going back to what I said about kids being important. Low income people aren’t stupid. They know their job prospects suck. They know they’re not going to university. They’re not in the position where it’s better to wait until you’re educated and established before you start a family. So for young women who’ve grown up in a culture where babies are one of the most important things you can do with your life, who know they’re not going to distinguish themselves by becoming CEOs or whatever, having a family is something they can do. And sending such an explicit message that women on benefits are not supposed to have babies is… kind of worrying, with all this context. Because social eugenics isn’t new to New Zealand – we’ve been doing it since white people got here. White families are desirable. Brown families aren’t. We’ve had several different ways of encouraging this, from tax cuts and perks that you could only get by living in a very Anglicised way, to policy that Māori only received a certain percentage of the benefits that Pākehā were entitled to, and of course the notorious land confiscations so it could be parceled up and handed out to homesteaders. Now it’s contraception targeted at a specific group of people that is disproportionately brown and who are extremely unlikely to be able to claw their way out of poverty due to National’s economic management.

Let’s face it – even if it’s not the intention, making sure no one on a benefit has babies means a lot less Māori being born suddenly. It doesn’t actually mean that the would-be parents are instead improving their lives, because under a right-wing government, there’s no where to go but down.

Stand your ground

Posted on April 24, 2012 by chrismiller

Imagine you’re with a group of friends, out in public somewhere. As you’re walking down the street to a grocery store, some people start yelling abuse at you, targeted toward whatever minority you happen to be part of (straight white cis men will just have to pretend, sorry). Wishing to stand up for yourself, for the sake of your own self-respect if nothing else, you approach and tell them that you don’t appreciate hate speech.

In response, one of them smashes a glass in your face, slicing right through your cheek. A fight breaks out as the others back up their friend and your friends back up you, and at the end of it, one of them is dead.

Now imagine that, even though it’s unclear what the murder weapon was (of two possibilities) and it’s unclear who used it, you are the only one arrested – not any of the group who were using hate speech, not the woman who seriously assaulted you. You are not given adequate medical care (initially, stitches, but you have to wait two months for a follow up, during which time your cheek swells badly, putting pressure on your eye and making it difficult to eat). You’re interrogated for hours. Under pressure and stress you confess, but later recant, saying that though you don’t know which of your friends it was, they were defending you, and you’d wanted to protect them. Nonetheless, you’re charged with two counts of second degree murder; for defending yourself (verbally) against bigotry, for whatever exactly happened after someone attacked you for daring to flaunt your existence. You remain in jail for several months, twice being placed in solitary confinement “for your own protection”, despite your wishes to remain in the general population. Meanwhile your friends are still subject to harassment and ignored by police when reporting it.

Congratulations, you are now a black transgender woman in Minneapolis. Your name is CeCe McDonald and your trial is set to begin on April 30.

CeCe is currently back in jail after an alleged parole violation – an accusation that she tampered with her electronic monitoring device for twelve hours, which may well have been a mechanical fault, and a drug test showing THC in her system. Her bail is set to $500,000, despite the fact that before this she was trusted to go to school and work (neither of which she can do while locked up).

The Little Pakeha

Category Archives: racism