THE WHITE WORRIER

In December 2009, the New Zealand Parliament recognised the tino rangatiratanga (sovereignty) flag as the national Māori flag and announced its decision to hoist it alongside the New Zealand flag on all government buildings on Waitangi Day.

This decision, described at the time as a symbolic recognition of partnership and unity between Māori and the Crown, proved polarising.  While some saw it as a mere token gesture to Māori, others saw it as yet another step towards Māori separatism.

Sandra Koster, a Pākehā resident of the small South Island town of Timaru was amongst the latter when she ripped up a Māori flag in protest, arguing that Māori aspirations for greater self-determination posed a threat to the nation and to present and future generations of Pākehā.

Calls for separate institutions in particular led Koster to feel “really quite frightened for my grandchildren because I can see us becoming just like South Africa”. Koster stressed that her actions were not racist and were justified by her desire for “harmony” between Māori and Pākehā in order to re-make Aotearoa/New Zealand “a wonderful, beautiful country to live in”. 

In her 2011 thesis, “Being Pākehā: White Settler Narratives of Politics, Identity, and Belonging in Aotearoa/New Zealand”, Jennifer Terruhn opened with this story as an example of the growing public unease amongst some of the white settler majority of Pākehā about ‘the self-determinative politics of aboriginality’ and, more specifically, the ‘persistent presence’ of indigeneity.‘

In Aotearoa/New Zealand, that unease is reflected in phrases such as ‘Treaty fatigue’ and what conservative politician Don Brash referred to in his incendiary Nationhood speech as the “Treaty grievance industry.”

These phrases match a growing sense of resentment amongst white majorities internationally over the rights claimed by indigenous, ethnic and immigrant minorities.   As Wulf D. Hund and Alana Lentin noted in their 2014 study on international racism, “in just a few decades following the generalised, if at times begrudging, acceptance that racism is unjust, we have hit ‘racism fatigue’.”  

Here in Aotearoa/New Zealand, the critical whiteness theories and theories of settler colonialism which framed Terruhn’s study of Pākehā identities and imaginaries, indicate that the resentment of some Pākehā often aligns with attempts to “recuperate, reconstitute and restore white identities and the supremacy of whiteness in post-apartheid, post-industrial, post-imperial, post-Civil Rights societies.”

In his 2003 analysis of ‘paranoid nationalism’, Ghassan Hage coined the figure of the ‘white worrier’ to identify how white Australians, particularly males, marginalized by the inequalities of economic rationalism and globalization, had displaced their anxieties onto even weaker ‘others’ – Aboriginals and migrants, particularly refugees.

Throughout this year, I will occasionally revisit this phenomenon of the resentful ‘white worrier’; not to ridicule it (it is a genuine condition) nor to reverse it (only those with it can do anything about it), but, rather, to understand why it exists and why it cannot stop the persistence of indigeneity.

And with that thought, I wish us all a safe and serene Waitangi week 2020,