Mar 16
"We may be on our way to genuine hybridity, multiplicity without (white) hegemony, and it may be where we want to get to – but we aren’t there yet, and we won’t get there until we see whiteness... put it in its place and end its rule. This is why studying whiteness matters". ~ Dyer, 1997
Representations of Māori in the media: "The processes of colonization attack us in our most sensitive areas: in the way we perceive ourselves blind to the way those perceptions have been constructed for us initially" ~ Spokane poet and scholar, Gloria Bird, 1993
It may seem a stretch linking Shelley's Frankenstein to an exploration of 'the warrior gene' 5 years on, nevertheless the links are clear and unmistakable...
Misinformation about Africa has become a growth industry in the West.
~ Ama Biney
I think I need a new category called 'pissed off' pieces. Cos every now and then I stumble across an article that makes me so mad I just want to hurl fury and insults...
Don't panic! Tame Iti isn't occupying Wall Street (unless Wall St have their sights on te Urewera for some sort of mining project, wouldn't surprise me) - there's a method to my madness...
Its a bastard when you're trying to write a post on how media re-presentations of black/brown males draw on, circulate and actually create a vital figure in the public imagination - the angry black man...
The role of philosophy is not to discover that which is hidden, but to make appear that which we do not perceive because it is so near
- Michel Foucault
Brilliant thinker that Foucault is (and I do particularly like this quote), I think the greatest appeal of these words is that they remind me of the admonishments of our kuia and kaumatua on the marae - it's not what's said you should pay attention to, its what's not said that says the most*. Ironically. Focussing on the hidden, the invisibilised, the unspoken is thus an intense preoccupation for me, and carries over into my wary perusal of the media...
An old post pulled from my facebook page, that I wrote back in February. It was a letter to the police commissioner, but really - to 'New Zealanders' in general. Tried to get it published in a number of newspapers, but sadly (if unsurprisingly) no takers. I imagine that, similar to LudditeJourno's experience recounted here, the news editors had attitudes akin to this one, from a Dominion Post Editor:
"I’m not terribly interested in the Parihaka festival – unless there is a hard news angle from it i.e. riot/police raids etc."
Replace Parihaka with Waitangi and you get the picture...
When racism is the topic at hand, in a public arena anyway, my experience is that people fall into the wallpaper. Or at least respond with a disapproving sniff and stiffened spine. It is a topic that provokes a fair amount of defensiveness and no doubt anxiety, which is a bugger given that what I really want to shift to talking about is, as bell hooks calls it, white supremacist ideology (and patriarchal, and capitalist). Far more useful, and I would say apt - but at this point perhaps a step too far...
Those of us who have been following the American elections with interest for some time now will remember the infamous Rev Jeremiah Wright who's fiery sermons (edited to cause maximum television-viewer angst of course) almost cost Obama the Democratic Party nomination and the chance to run for US president. Having carefully selected Wright's most divisive statements, the media proceeded to play them ad nauseum for weeks, particularly - and no surprise here, on Fox. Not for their rhetorical value mind...
Turangawaewae 