DESCRIBED AS MĀORI

If you’ve been in this country long enough you know that when a media item contains the words described as Māori, then it’s not going to be a good news story.  

Admittedly the phrase described as European / Pākehā doesn’t presage a good news story either, but neither is it seen nor heard anywhere near as often as its Māori counterpart. 

To illustrate, if you enter described as Māori in the New Zealand Herald’s online search engine there are eight bad news stories this year alone; three of which are reported on twice with sensational headlines like Armed men in home invasion hammer attack, House stormed in bid to find man on run and Brazen scammer offered victims non-existent job.

Conversely, so far this year there has only been one item about a person  described as European under the non-threatening headline Online casanova sought by police, and there have been no stories about people described as Pākehā since 2011. 

One look at me and my siblings confirms that descriptions of our gender, height, age, colour of eyes, skin and hair, and our outstanding features might help you find us.  But described as Māori?  What does that look like? and why is it even relevant to anyone but a racist?

In a 2012 study, The Pacific Media Centre identified a number of media patterns that contribute to racist views of Māori.  The first and most powerful is that in which Pākeha, although rarely named as a group, are routinely constructed as natural and normal, while Māori are largely invisible except when measured against that norm.

This pattern produces stories and comments that reinforce Pākehā culture as the natural, normal foundation of the New Zealand nation.  Even when an inspirational story involves Māori, this pattern invariably sees them credited as New Zealanders or Kiwis while any Māori connection is portrayed as a deficit they have, or are still trying to, overcome.  

Ultimately, this pattern has produced stories and comments that normalize the ongoing theft of land and resources from Māori as a natural process.    

For recent examples of this, read Chris Finlayson’s Waitangi Day article, Treaty settlements working for the betterment of us, and the online responses to Matt McCarten’s opinion piece last month, Iwi leaders risk losing touch. 

It’s highly probable that this pattern has contributed significantly to the list of derogatory terms in Google’s predictive search function which says Kiwis are dumb, racist, stupid and rude.  

There was an even worse and longer list for the inquiry Māori are until last Saturday when Google disabled the function and removed the racist insults.  If only changing the underlying and causative attitudes were as easy.

And that is the real challenge to media producers and audiences in this country – if you don’t want to reap the whirlwind of race hatred, then either uniformly report bad news stories to also identify those described as European / Pākehā, or find ways to tell and read such stories without the irrelevant, racist identifier, described as Māori.