Posts by Tze Ming Mok
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You are suspected of being responsible for several seizures among the more senior members of the National Radio listening audience for playing Whoop! Whoop! This is the sound of the Police! by KRS One and Into the Groovy by Ciccone Youth
Uh, dude, all those two choices show is how bloody nostalgic and old I'm getting. Hell, I was watching the 'Men in Makeup' top 10 videos on C4 last night - it was so dominated by Emo bands that when 'Personal Jesus' came on, I was overcome by melancholic nostalgia for the political cogency of Marilyn Manson...
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Grey Lynn and Freemans Bay are "dangerous man."
They don't call Freemans Bay 'The Art Ghetto' for nothing.
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I hate to bring it down to this. But if 'New Zealander' is such a universal ethnicity for people who have been born here, where are the non-white people on this thread who prefer 'New Zealander' as an ethnicity? In responses to an earlier blog on this issue, I at least had *two* people out of about 20 pro-'New Zealander' or 'Kiwi' responses who weren't just plain ol' Pakeha - they were of multiple ethnicity and basically seemed confused or defensive about their identity. Practically ready to cry about it, in fact: for them, I could cut some slack. The rest were, you know, plain ol' Pakeha. For them - well - no.
Sure, evolving creole multicultural ethnic identity is like, wow, so interesting - but I get the feeling that a lot of this identity talk claiming universally applicable 'New Zealand' ethnicity is avoiding the hard realities of why it is important or necessary to collect data on ethnicity to start with. You know - racism. You can't just wish away ethnic inequalities by refusing to officially admit to being white, in a blaze of glorious utopian nationalism - all it means is that the Census can't correlate your ethnicity with your income, education & occupation and confirm your membership of a privileged group.
Maybe we'll be able to calculate how dominated by Pakeha the 'New Zealander' category is by examining its income level.
Sure, we can contemplate whether 'Pakeha' technically means anyone who is not Maori, and therefore whether it is suitable as a descriptor of white New Zealanders with a strong sense of local identity. But - in reference to the question asked of me - no non-white, non-Maori, non-Pacific person I know *ever* calls themselves 'Pakeha'. Unless they are also part white. That would just be dumb. Pakeha means white people to us (sometimes we say 'kiwi'), and specifically 'local' white people. Local white people need a name, because they are the ones in charge. 'New Zealander' doesn't quite cut it.
And as Sonal asked, with regard to Yamis' checklist of 'New Zealand' ethnicity:
what constitutes common culture/values etc?
For Yamis:
english and a sprinking of Maori here and there, sport, beer, horse racing, fishing, summer holidays at the beach, marmite, gumboots, bush walks, hunting, flying nun bands
None of these things are the subject of a national consensus, rather than a nationalist Pakeha consensus (and are probably contested within Pakeha culture too). I hate sport. I prefer rum. I have no interest in horse racing or fishing, beaches are nice of course although I spent most of my summer holidays in Southeast Asia as a child, marmite is gross, I have no gumboots or other rural attire, I am uninterested in bush walking, a little grossed out by the idea of hunting, and much prefer KRS-One to the Clean. Hence - I am not a New Zealander by ethnicity? I guess I already knew that. What it would more strongly suggest to me is that I am not a Pakeha - even more specifically, I am not a Pakeha bloke with a tendency to idealise rural life. I'm a female Asian inner-city Aucklander. Having Pakeha blokes with tendencies to idealise rural life define our nationalist ideology of identity is probably bad enough - though god knows they've been doing it for a long time. Them trying to transform that unfairly universalised nationalist identity into a national ethnicity is just... I don't know... the next step?
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Yamis: indeed, anyone can write in 'New Zealander' (I don't believe it actually has its own 'tick box'). But as we can see from most of the comments here, the vast majority of the people who do so are Pakeha/New Zealand Europeans, and I certainly suspect, well over their population representative proportions. Which was the point of my posting that original comparative bar graph (scroll up for another look), with the very neat tetris action I mentioned.
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I can't really think of any non-white race for whom a significant percentage wish to abandon their heritage, at least not without good reason.
On this point, and Yamis' comments about 2nd generation Koreans who don't 'feel Korean' - I'd still doubt that they wouldn't put in 'Korean' on their Census forms. There are certainly plenty of diaspora Chinese in New Zealand who don't 'feel' Chinese, and who have no particular connection to China - probably as little connection as most Pakeha feel to Europe. It is in fact, directly comparable. But when asked, they'll never deny it.
One reason those people will never say they aren't Chinese, is because even their vestigial cultural practises that they place very little identity-emphasis on, and their physical appearance, are still marked as 'other'. This is something Pakeha have never had to deal with, and as meaningless these indicators of difference are for very assimilated minorities, to pretend like no-one's ever treated you differently and evilly for them would be a bit grating. This is why claiming 'New Zealand' ethnicity comes across as such a marker of white privilege.
A second reason is a linguistic ability to differentiate between Chinese as citizenship (ie of Mainland China), and Chinese as an ethnicity that goes anywhere and everywhere. In Chinese, there are different words for each. You can quite easily have no connection or interest in being zhongguoren (Chinese citizen), and, you know, hate China and try to destroy it, but always be huaren or huayi (ethnic Chinese, though not necessarily of the Han 'race', which is a whole other story).
Another reason they will not deny that they are ethnic Chinese is because they will sooo get it from their parents.
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John, thank you for taking the time to think about this, however I must again point out (as I've had to do every time I've popped up on this thread) that 'Asian' is not an ethnicity, but it *is* a pan-ethnic category that I am happy for my ethnicity to be placed within by Statistics NZ. 'Asian' is a group that has relevance to specific ethnicities that StatsNZ acknowledges and counts inside of it. 'Asian' is not a tick box on the Census: 'Chinese' and 'Indian' are. And yes, New Zealand is a very nice place, and a liberal democracy, like many other parts of the world.
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National identity can become an ethnic group - at least according to my reading of the ethnicity definition used by Stats NZ (See bottom). Sure, it makes things a little confusing, but in a well designed questionaire one should be able to select multiple identities as most people do have multiple ethnic or other identities.
That is certainly a fair point. Still, despite all the definition and invention of 'New Zealand' identity and/or ethnicity going on in this thread, it does still look, walk, smell, swim and quack like good ol' postcolonial Pakeha to me.
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Mmmmm! back to the original blog which was about
the word Asians being non specific as far as race or ethnicity is concerned.I couldn't agree more, and the same applies to European.I'm afraid that is not what the original blog was about John. 'Asian' may not be specific as an ethnic group, but it is broadly *accurate* as a pan-ethnic category that ultimately relates back to ethnicity. Several comments on this thread (and numerous less coherent and/or civilised emails to myself) are functioning under the mistaken impression that I object to the use of the 'Asian' category by Statistics NZ or the media, and that therefore I'm on common ground with 'Europeans' who don't want to be classified as 'Europeans'. This is not the case - I'm pleased and proud to be counted as an 'Asian' in the Census - just constantly aware that many non-'Asians' using the term use it incorrectly and for questionable and misleading purposes. So no, if you're a Pakeha who wrote in 'New Zealander' rather than Pakeha or just ticking 'European', I'm afraid you cannot count on my words to support you.
my current Passport simply states that I am a New Zealand Citizen. ergo I am a New Zealander. Q.E.D
What a coincidence, so am I! But the Census does not ask you to fill in your citizenship in the ethnicity question. It's quite heartwarming to see all the Pakeha here on this thread describing and affirming their national identity, but national identity is not actually ethnicity, and Pakeha ethnicity is not 'New Zealand' national identity. What does the reluctance to draw this distinction say? I mean, for you liberal Pakeha Public Address types, your specifically Pakeha ethnic traits (ie inherited from Europe and modified for New Zealand, such as speaking *English* as your mother tongue, having *Christmas*, dressing your schoolgirls in *tartan*, eating with *knives and forks*, promoting Humeian *empiricism* and various forms of *positivism*) are probably far less important to your sense of personal identity than your national identity as a New Zealander (apparently based on the psychology of landscape? Okay, we'll take it for argument's sake). Fine and dandy! No-one's telling you that your ethnicity has to be more important than your national identity, and no-one's forcing you to choose one over the other simply by asking a Census question - we have plenty of other opportunities to state and affirm our national identity. So why pretend one *is* the other? That's actually rather unfair to the rest of us.
Che: Why have you said that there isn't a 'name' for nationalism and national identity, as opposed to ethnicity? I don't understand. And haven't we been through this "kiwi" thing already? When Asians say it to each other, we are generally talking about Pakeha. Until the New Zealand white folk can agree that other people should just call them Pakeha, we can't use 'kiwi' amongst our minority communities to mean 'everyone'. Or we won't have a name for Pakeha. If you see what I mean.
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"350,000 'Asians' aren't actually one ethnic group". Well, neither are "Europeans" or "white people". I don't get Mok's umbrage.
Probably because I was playing tetris Sir Mark, rather than giving or taking umbrage... plink!
I don't have any objection to the aggregation of the 'Asian' statistic in the overall Census summary - it's neither stated nor gathered as an ethnic group, and there's good data on the ethnic breakdown within the 'Asian' category which is valuable, interesting, and of course usually ignored. But StatsNZ itself does pretty well by our peeps. "Europeans" are also obviously not an actual ethnic group, and neither are "Pacific Peoples". However, people who wrote in "New Zealander" were specifically claiming "New Zealander" as their unitary ethnic group - no argument there, correct? Hence the point in this blog that the Maori demographer should be less worried about the 'overtaking' of Maori by a conglomerated population that isn't actually an ethnic group, than by a group that says that it is specifically an ethnic group, and maybe even an 'indigenous' one at that.
gets her panties into such a wad
Ew. Messr rodgerd, as a moderator on this site, could I ask you to refrain from bringing my blameless perineum into this?
Manakura: yes.
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DC's article was astonishingly retro, but should we not take heart that the response was not?
Absolutely - 'The Movement' has come a long way since 1993, and most of the media has come along for the ride. It helps that the Invaders have infiltrated the MSM with our many octopoid tentacles, and receive strategic coordinated instructions from a centralised hive mind disguised as the Yifans DDR machine.
that identity is context, is very much the way many Maori see identity, for example how we mihi (i.e. formally acknowledge our ancestry and kinship net) can change depending on what marae we are speaking on. However, the idea generally is to establish and emphasise your connection to that place, rather than your separateness.
Interesting comparison - I think that in most public informal 'identify-yourself' circumstances, whether in the ancestral country that perceives them as 'whitened' or at 'home' in the diaspora 'white' country, diaspora non-whites tend to be asked in different ways 'what kind of Other are you?' rather than 'how are you like Us?' Displacement is - well - displacing...