Janet Wilson: Tackling systemic prejudice will require shrugging off our apathy

Friday, 17 March 2023

The Martin Luther King Memorial in Washington, DC. King’s family were upset by the use of his image in a newspaper advertisement advertising a campaign fronted by Julian Bathchelor against Auckland’s Hero parade in 2000.

Janet Wilson is a freelance journalist who has also worked in communications, including in the leader's office of the National Party; and is a member of the National Party. She is a regular contributor to Stuff.

OPINION: Racism’s meandering course through the warp and weft of Aotearoa’s historical fabric was given small but steering prominence with news last week that police broke up a Dargaville public meeting called to discuss co-governance.

The meeting, organised by Julian Batchelor, who heads the Stop Co-Governance group, is one of a series of town hall meetings quietly held around the country since last year.

Batchelor’s schtick is divisive to say the least; he claims co-governance is a part of a plan by radical tribal representatives, so-called ‘elite Māori’, to take over New Zealand.

He uses the term apartheid to describe policies that support Māori as Treaty partners, while also opposing the number of Māori MPs, who he says are “overrepresented” in Parliament, and railing against Te Tiriti o Waitangi. On his website he exhorts ‘average Māori’ to start researching where all the “Māori money and assets have gone”.

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'Divisive and immature conversation': National Party leader Christopher Luxon takes on co-governance in Rātana speech.

And behind his depressing bumper sticker slogans - “One person, one vote”, “One flag, all ethnicities are equal”, lies bald, emperor-has-no-clothes racism. “Stop forcing te reo”, his website bluntly asserts. “Our country is New Zealand, not Aotearoa.”

So just who is Julian Batchelor?

He’s a school teacher with a Bachelor of Theology and a masters in educational psychology. He’s been a real estate agent and his name was number 30 on the 2005 NZ First list. He is an evangelical minister who wrote a 2006 paperback called, Evangelism: Strategies from heaven in the war for souls.

He's also anti-gay. Back in 2000 he used images of Martin Luther King, Dame Whina Cooper, Mother Teresa and Mahatma Gandhi to campaign against Auckland’s Hero Parade.

National Party leader Christopher Luxon and Chris Hipkins addressed the issue of co-governance at Ratana celebrations in January 2023. Janet Wilson says political parties across the divide have “failed to show leadership” on a defining issue.

In 2020 he finally settled a five-year saga with the local council over a 3m-high retaining wall on his property at Hauai Bay, east of Russell, telling the judge that he wanted “his day in court” to fight the council’s four fines. Local reporting attests that while he had consent for the wall, Far North District Council said he’d used much more fill than the consent allowed.

The fact that Batchelor has been able to shuffle softly around the country while using his own website to criticise journalists he disagrees with is down to two issues: there is a constituency that agrees with him, aided and abetted by political parties across the divide who have failed to show leadership on such a defining issue, instead using it for their own political gain.

More importantly, at this stage of the electoral cycle, why has Batchelor’s disruptive discourse been able to gain a foothold?

Psychological research tells us that racism, rather than merely being about just the individual, is part of an institutionalised system that exists within organisations and cultures. For instance, while Māori represent 15% of the population, they make up 52% of those in prisons.

Research also reveals that behind the hatred and fear that is the bedrock of racism lie other factors that contribute to it. Factors such as categorisation, factions, segregation, hierarchy and power. That’s according to two psychologists, Steven O Roberts from Stanford University and Michael T Rizzo, a NYU postdoctoral fellow.

Their 2020 paper, published in the American Psychologist journal, found that while not inborn, humans ranked people according to categories from a young age, which gave them a shared identity, which promoted stereotypes.

Which goes some way to explaining why an Education Review Office (ERO) report published this week found that one in five children from ethnic backgrounds reported bullying in the past month.

Janet Wilson: At this stage of the electoral cycle, why has Julian Batchelor’s disruptive discourse been able to gain a foothold?

What’s more, Roberts and Rizzo found that categorisation led to factions, where one group identifies strongly with their ingroup, to the detriment of another, leading to hostility towards them.

Colluding with the process is socio-economic segregation from those racial groups, which allows a hardening of people’s beliefs, underlined by the hierarchy whose job it is to assign power, wealth, and status.

The problem with hierarchical structures is that they reinforce the power of the individual, which results in dominant groups believing they are superior to non-dominant groups.

Roberts and Rizzo found that passive racism, resulting from ignorance, apathy or denial, is the most important factor of all. When racism is systemic, all we must do to sustain it is to do nothing.

Which leads us to the somewhat paradoxical idea that you don’t need to believe you’re racist to uphold racist systems when your own “Meh” attitude allows it anyway.

Other researchers have also discovered that fewer overt suggestions of racial bias are evident today, with many suggesting that racism has gone underground, thriving within our lack of compassion.

Or is it? An intriguing postscript to the Dargaville meeting was that half of the 150 people who attended came to defend Māori, calling Batchelor’s presentation “utter, blatant racism”, forcing police to break up disagreements and ultimately the meeting.

Whatever your views of Julian Batchelor’s ideology, in the next four months he’s coming to a town near you, peddling his fear-based ideas across 37 meetings.

Time to shrug off apathy and engage.