Hey white people, look around

Thursday, 15 October 2020

OPINION: Every now and then, people have said to me, “Ho ho, Wellington is such a white city.” It’s a weird statement, as if they were expecting me to agree with them. It’s also a comment that’s depressingly common on the internet, where a bunch of ostensibly liberal people try to show off how open-minded they are.

I have no idea how to respond to someone wanting to be patted on the back for commenting on the whiteness of Wellington. I’ve lived here for over 30 years, and three generations of my family are here. There is a proud Tamil community in the city. Such statements are more a reflection on the person making them, who they hang out with and what they consume.

It’s hard to figure out the end game. As far as I can tell, people who make those comments aren’t also advocating decolonisation, or untrammelled immigration, or quintupling the refugee quota. They’re simply making a bland superficial observation based on appearances, kinda like a company proudly pushing forward its one visually different employee as a symbol of its commitment to diversity.

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The most common argument to rag on Wellington is that Auckland is a very diverse city. Somehow, because Auckland is diverse, Wellington is white. You can boringly share statistics, showing Wellington had a higher proportion of “Europeans” than the New Zealand average (ignoring the fact many people identify as multiple ethnicities). Whichever way you deal with statistics though, there’s an inconvenient fact that over 100,000 people who live in the wider Wellington region somehow aren’t meant to count.

Of course, Auckland is more diverse than Wellington. I love that about Auckland. It’s also very segregated (as the very good book Island Time by historian Damon Salesa explores). There is also an annoying smugness from a certain brand of Aucklander whose sole engagement with diversity is to show off about going to a Chinese restaurant with their white friends and loudly proclaim that the majority of the clientele is Chinese.

The obvious thing is that there is a difference between the power structures of a place and the actual demographics of a place. New Zealand’s power structures are overwhelmingly white – that’s irrespective of where you happen to live. New Zealand’s power structures do not adequately engage with the Treaty of Waitangi, nor do they reflect the makeup of New Zealand’s demographics. But that monoculturalism is also the case in some of the most diverse cities in the world, like Sydney, New York, London, or Paris. That doesn’t mean the people aren’t there.

When I lived in Paris, I was interested in the way certain myths about a city efface history. Paris is an extremely diverse city, yet the myths that get sold present it as some sort of Woody Allen 1920s fantasy. The actual diversity that’s in your face there reflects a colonial past and a pan-European identity – presenting Paris as white ignores France’s past and helps nativists like Le Front National present some sort of idealised France that doesn’t actually exist. The myths also help shield Paris’ issues with segregation and class – and racism.

The same thing happens here, and the myths help hide certain inconvenient histories. Cities are literally constructed through those histories. New Zealand obviously is a colonised country, in which the Crown stole Māori land. People make jokes about the whiteness of Tauranga or Christchurch, but ignore the fact there’s a brutal history in which iwi were forcibly removed from the land on which these cities grew. That’s also not to mention what happened elsewhere in the country, and the continuing ripples from colonisation. Second, New Zealand is a diverse country, and is increasingly so. The average statistics don’t actually mean anything – it only does if your idea of the “median” means white. It’s not my idea of the median.

There’s also something much darker about the “lol, Wellington is white” crowd. If you say that we don’t exist for the purpose of a cheap joke about a city, you’re saying we don’t actually belong in your definition of our city. From there, it doesn’t actually require much of a mental leap to the logic of white supremacists, who get to say, “go home” to people they deem don’t belong in their definition of a city.

The thing is, I don’t care about the numbers or the diversity statistics. I simply want to go about my day, being myself, without being erased or threatened. But there is something irritating about having to constantly remind people that we exist. It’s not our fault that they’re the ones walking around with their eyes on the ground, rather than in front of them.

Brannavan Gnanalingam is a Wellington lawyer and novelist.