This link was sent to me by a despondent (and of course anonymous) New Zealander with the comment, “This is now unstoppable in NZ.” It’s from the Times Higher Education site, and the authors are Mahdis Azarmandi and Sara Tolbert, both on the Faculty of Education of New Zealand’s University of Canterbury.
Click screenshot to read:
It’s fairly clear that by full “decolonization,” the authors propose a full disruption and subversion—yes, they use those words—of universities, with the ideal being to give the lands and waters back to the Māori people, as well as completely transforming college education into a program catering to the indigenous people. I’ll give the authors’ intentions, and then show their “praxis” for decolonization. Excerpts are indented and bolding is mine.
As non-Indigenous scholars, we can engage in anticolonial and feminist practices that subvert the settler colonial university, but we cannot promise “decolonisation”, especially in a country such as New Zealand, where the effects of colonisation are ongoing and where, in the words of Indigenous climate activist India Logan-Riley, “land back, oceans back” is yet to be realised. Unless the university is fully engaged in land back, oceans back, decolonisation will be used by the settler colonial university to justify settler occupation of stolen land, water and knowledge (see “additional links”, below).
Rather than offer how-to tips for “decolonising the university”, we suggest a few points as a call for collective action to change things that are unjust – inside and outside the university. We argue that to engage in anticolonial, feminist practice, we must address the systems that produce violence and exploitation, not just in the scholarly aspect of our work but also within our own institutional and material conditions such as housing, jobs and access to health. Some of these points are taken from our forthcoming chapter “A manifesto for transdisciplinary (transgressive) feminist praxis in the Academy”.
It’s clear from these words that the authors, who are both non-indigenous, don’t want merely a cosmetic redo of universities, which they see as not only having stolen the land and water from the indigenous people, but also “produce violence and exploitation.” They mean what they say: they want a complete rethink and redo of how the country’s universities are run and what they teach.
Unless by “violence” the authors mean “offense”, the hyperbole is strong, especially since New Zealand’s government and universities are doing everything that can to create equity for the Māori. (Indigenous people constitute 16.5% of New Zealand, just ahead of the 15.1% Asian and well behind the 70% European people.) One question underlying all this is whether the whole system has to be transformed to cater to the people who got to the islands first. But I’ll leave that aside and move on, because it’s worth seeing the reforms these two scholars suggest. There are six alterations of “praxis”:
1.) We can’t both love and change the university at the same time. We must actively engage in the disruption of oppressive, settler colonial and patriarchal practices. Learning from abolitionist struggles, we need to engage in non-reformist reform – that is, practices that improve the lives and conditions of those most marginalised (outside and inside the university) but that do not consolidate the power of the institution.
By “most marginalized,” I presume they mean the Māori people, though later they pull others into the reformist tent. Note that their purpose is not education, but social reform—outside as well as inside the university. There is not a word about what sort of education people will get, save that it’s going to be centered on indigenous “ways of knowing”:
2.) A crucial aspect of anticolonial praxis in the university is recognising and respecting Indigenous epistemologies and, where possible, engaging these as central to its curriculum while also peripheralising European and settler knowledge, which has been foundational in its formation. However, how and to what extent Indigenous knowledge should be in the university is not for non-Indigenous people to decide, but the way we act within our natural and knowledge environment must not be extractivist. We can and must resist extracting resources and knowledge from land, water and people. We need also remember that some knowledge is not ours to share; “sometimes the knowledge does not need to be moved out of the communities where it resides into the pages, websites and walls of the academic industrial complex” (Tolbert & Azarmandi, forthcoming). What anticolonial feminist praxis centres is being-in-relation (with place and people). We need to approach the incorporation of Indigenous knowledge with humility – there is a fine line between incorporation of Indigenous knowledge and cultural appropriation. What we can do is make space by disrupting disciplinary boundaries and challenging the limitations of academic disciplines that discourage collaboration and maintain competition.
Here we see that the “settler colonialists”—that is, able-bodied heterosexual males of European descent (see below)—should have no say in what passes for knowledge in the university. Indigenous knowledge must be central, and settler knowledge peripheral. In practice, this means the Māorization of the entire curriculum, including science.
3.) We must build collaborative partnerships and alliances with other marginalised communities, acknowledging the intersections of colonialism, racism, sexism, homo-transphobia, ableism and other forms of oppression. Building genuine relationships and collaborative partnerships with Indigenous and marginalised communities is essential. If these relationships benefit scholars and the academy more than the community, chances are they are meant to further empower settler colonial regimes and not disrupt and decolonise them. Adapt feminist and collaborative writing practices; refuse symbolic service requests and instead strategise and work towards systemic change: unionise, organise for a living wage and improve institutional practices such as parental leave and access to healthcare and housing.
In the above they pull into their tent everyone considered marginalized, including the disabled, people of color, women, gay people, and trans people. It’s not just that these people deserve equal rights and equal educational opportunities—something that nobody would oppose—but that they will also participate in overthrowing and subverting the violent and exploitative universities. As for parental leave, healthcare and the like, that is the responsibility not of the universities themselves, but of the New Zealand government, which funds the universities.
4.) Anticolonial praxis requires institutional transformation at all levels. This also means securing the right to education and making sure public universities exist and are supported. In the institution, we need to critically examine and restructure policies, procedures and practices that perpetuate settler colonial regimes of power. It involves addressing systemic barriers that maintain inequality, such as access to education, hiring practices, tenure and promotion criteria, curricular decisions and funding allocations. Resist symbolic change and cultural window dressing. Name it; make it explicit.
#4 is more of the same, expressing a deep animus towards the “settler colonial regimes of power”, something they never give examples of. They also argue that “systemic barriers” (i.e., codified systems of bigotry) must be dismantled, although they give no examples of such barriers and I know of none.
5.) Anticolonial and feminist praxis requires constant self-reflection and a commitment to unlearning. It involves critically examining our own complicity within the settler colonial structures. Be mindful, however, that this reflective and personal work alone does not create change – and sometimes, as feminist scholar Sara Ahmed has illuminated, it can become another way of not doing things with words. Connect, resist and organise.
6.) Finally, we must dare to dream beyond the university. What if the university can’t be unsettled or decolonised? If we do unsettle or decolonise the institution, will it be recognisable once we are done? As la paperson (the avatar of K. Wayne Yang, an associate professor of ethnic studies at the University of California, San Diego) has written (and we cite in our forthcoming chapter), we should understand “the university as a machine that is the composite of many other [disloyal] machines” – ones that ‘break down and travel in unexpected lines of flight – flights that are at once enabled by the university yet irreverent of that mothership of a machine’. May we find each other…beyond the university, and unite in our irreverent lines of flight”.
Here the universities are seen as mere staging areas for society-wide transformation, something they implied when they said, “Building genuine relationships and collaborative partnerships with Indigenous and marginalised communities is essential. If these relationships benefit scholars and the academy more than the community, chances are they are meant to further empower settler colonial regimes and not disrupt and decolonise them.”
One gets the impression here that the writers would be happiest if all the Europeans (save the marginalized ones, like the gays or people of color, were heaved out of the country so it would revert to a system of Māori governance. Now it’s true that the Māori were historically oppressed, but were also given the rights of “colonialist” settlers as well as the right to keep all their lands and properties by the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi. This treaty, which is ambiguous and wasn’t even signed by all the indigenous leaders, is a holy document in New Zealand, interpreted by locals to mean that they get most of everything (the fearful Europeans dare not say otherwise).
When you read something like this, you wonder about not only the philosophy of Times Higher Education, which decided to print what is largely an incoherent (and incorrect) set of assertions and accusations, but you also wonder about what will happen to New Zealand. The authors, after all, are “settler-colonialists”, calling for their own decimation.
What is happening in New Zealand—with all the many official attempts to create equity only serving to provoke tirades like the one above—is the world’s most far-reaching attempt at ideological capture of an entire country by the people who consider themselves entitled to run the whole country: the descendants of the original Polynesian settlers. But the world has moved on, and who can deny that “settler colonialists”, by bringing with them their knowledge, medicines, free national healthcare, and inventions, have improved the lives of most people in New Zealand? It is not as if the arrival of people from elsewhere has been an unmitigated evil.
I think the person who sent me this screed is right: this movement is unstoppable, and it’s going to ruin New Zealand. Apparently the Luxon government is either ignoring this stuff or doesn’t care to stop it. Soon it will be too late, if it isn’t already.
I pity New Zealanders who want to get a good college education in the face of people like Drs. Azarmandi and Tolbert, whose program will sink New Zealand to the bottom of the academic ranking of comparable countries.
What is being decolonized?
Here is the answer :
“That’s why I admire Cape Verde’s president, Artistides Pereira. He gave a speech in Praia in which he made an extraordinary statement that has a lot to do with our conversation now: “We made our liberation and we drove out the colonizers. Now we need to decolonize our minds.” That’s it exactly. We need to decolonize the mind because if we do not, our thinking will be in conflict with the new context evolving from the struggle for freedom.”
-Paulo Freire
The Politics of Education
1985 or so depending on translation
p. 187
“The university” can easily be the esoteric notion of some sort of History of the development of thought – from beginning to End, which only a gnostic consciousness can perceive.
To be polite, this is sociological gnosticism.
To be clear, these are tenets of a Gnostic and Hermetic (keyword : “transformation”) cult.
Short follow up : To connect to the “mind” idea, consider the Greek idea of nous :
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nous
Or
http://www.rep.routledge.com/articles/thematic/nous/v-1#
There’s a lot there but relevant to gnosticism is the mind of god or an ethereal sort of mind which the demiurge has imprisoned from humans.
The decolonization is the gnostic salvation of our own minds – with god’s power – from the prison of the material world.
Another key word is liberation.
These 2 psuedo academics omit the fact that they are:
1, Suffering from the Hegelian bite, which Chantal Delsol in Unlearned Lessons of the 20TH C describes so well. Delightfully linking it to St Gregory of Nyssa. Hegel was a Hermetic, Marx a gnostic per Eric Voegelin. Gregory, Hegel and Marx were Euopean;
2. That they have been emotionally and intellectully colonised by the verbal sorcery of 2 European men and a Brazilian.
3. The pablum of the 2 academics echoes that of Diangelo and Sensoy in their text for education students. Social justice activism is a life long commitment, also known as a cult and the episteme is not common sense or traditional academic inductive knowledge but deductive critical theory,
I am a University of Canterbury graduate and UC Alumni won’t be geting a cent.
“Hegel was a Hermetic”
If anyone wants to see where that notion came from, I’ve posted it before but worth it :
Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition
Glenn Alexander Magee
Cornell U. Press
2001
An excerpt:
“Hegel is not a philosopher. He is no lover or seeker of wisdom—he believes he has found it. […]By the end of the Phenomenology, Hegel claims to have arrived at Absolute Knowledge, which he identifies with wisdom.”
Glad to hear some other readers are wise to this. I imagine it is faux pas to suggest Hegel was doing alchemy with thought.
Meanwhile, these “white settler institutions” seem to be producing great results in China, Korea, Japan, Singapore, Taiwan…
So-called “positive discrimination” is actually reverse discrimination; and the so-called “decolonization” of European/Western/White culture (including its scientific institutions) is actually reverse deculturation. There was a time when white colonizers deculturated indigenous peoples, and now we see woke revenge in the name of “social justice”.
(“to deculturate = to cause the loss or abandonment of culture or cultural characteristics of (a people, society, etc.)” – Collins
“deculturation = the processes, intentional or unintentional, by which traditional cultural beliefs or practices are suppressed or otherwise eliminated as a result of contact with a different, dominant culture.” – APA Dictionary of Psychology)
I suggest the person who is suggesting such should live by example and leave go back to the UK give her property and degree back to the Maori people . And then her parents and brothers and sisters. And then let see if they still truly believe the shit they preaching when they have nothing. Sometimes fighting ghosts is more damaging to the indigenous people than you think. I lived in New Zealand for two years , I left to Israel as it was bad back then towards academics. My family who immigrated from south Africa could not live in a society that lives with no merit. Or encouraging excellence. Or rewarding good hard work . It was very hard to swallow and that was in the early 90s. My family now live in Australia and I live in the USA now the USA has caught up to new Zealand no merit
nonsense. My father could not bear taking his grandkids to play soccer and both teams won . And got a trophy when clearly one lost. I knew it would just keep going down hill it must be awful now.
I met quite a few Sth African immigrants in NZ and Australia in the 80s and early 90s. From what I know now the ones who went to Australia did very well, less to the NZ bound ones. I think many moved to Oz when they had a kiwi passport to do so freely.
My synagogue area in Melbourne was heavily Sth African.
D.A.
NYC
These things are only comprehensible if you understand that Lenin called Colonialism the highest form of Capitalism. What is under attack is Capitalism, which, in the Marxist view, drives all the societal superstructure. The only way to “decolonize” is to destroy Capitalist society, of which “Western Science”, like the family, is part. They are just sapping the foundations until the revolution comes along and establishes the communist utopia.
+1
… except Lenin wrote Imperialism – not … colonialism…
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperialism,_the_Highest_Stage_of_Capitalism
But definitely relevant.
Which will last about a year before ‘Real Communists’ decide that they wish to be in charge (and benefit from it personally).
I don’t know about other communist countries, but seen from the perspective of the defunct German Democratic Republic, it’s strange what gets subsumed under Marxism/communism these days. The GDR had a better math curriculum and much better teaching/learning materials than we have now in unified Germany (they were pretty successful at the math olympiads too, for such a small country), and a lot of what purports to be leftist ideology now was/would be seen as bourgeois nonsense by the then dominant caste, including the bending over backwards to accommodate pre-scientific woo when it comes from some protected class.
Indeed, the east German math & natural science books where (save a few words about Marxism/Leninism in the foreword) pretty good with a “no BS approach”.
I traveled by bicycle for a month right across the former East Germany in 1992, just after reunification.
All of the adults had fled to the west. The towns were empty shells, with only old people and children. The west Germans had come through and paved the main highways. The rest of the roads were wrecks.
There was a brand new, yellow DT phone booth in the town square of every village. People told us that it was the first ever phone in their village. (My German was pretty fluent then.)
Poland and Czech Republic seemed fairly normal to European standards that summer. The former East Germany was a burnt-out shell. It looked like it hadn’t changed since 1940 in any significant way.
They may have had good math books. But the rest …
It was a very interesting time to visit eastern Europe.
It would be of great benefit to the world to arrange for the academy to experience life in the state of nature they extol.
Amusing to watch, too.
They would survive for a few weeks by looting the grocery stores, then the food distribution terminals (if they knew where to find them and if any of them could drive an 18-wheeler.) Then, when the electricity went out for good and their refrigerators died forever, they would start to starve and resort to eating each other. What else could they do? But could they split wood to make cooking fires?
Actually the water and sewage treatment would fail first, I suppose, although it would depend on how long the hydro-electricity lasted on autopilot. (Remember in On the Beach where the generating station north of Brisbane was still going even though all the operators were dead from radiation?)
Yes Leslie. See my critique below. The “New People” would be sent to the country to be killed by the “Old People” by illiterate teenagers with machine guns as they empty the cities.
And they thought it was crowded on the Southern Motorway south of Auckland on a Friday night already*
D.A.
NYC
*Memories of life in NZ
Time to read Earth Abides. Now rather dated, but deals with exactly that scenario.
Thanks for that, Christopher. From the Wiki synopsis— I had never heard of the novel and I’m glad now to have — I think I would enjoy it.
In return, you might like The Last Ship by Paul Brinkley, bears no relation whatever to the TV series. Covers a shorter post-apocalyptic time interval, has themes from both On the Beach and Moby Dick. The Wiki page has too many spoilers.
When Azarmundi or Tolbert have a toothache, one has to wonder whether they search out practitioners of anti-colonial feminist dentistry. One can’t be too careful in avoiding the kind of knowledge that has been stolen (along with land and water) by that infamous European/settler science culture. Its origin in the 1500s or even earlier was surely stolen from the superior Indigenous cultures of North Africa, the Middle East, and, uhhh,
maybe the enlightened Polynesians.
I’m sure it was just my inegalitarian, settler-colonialist, prejudicial experiences in NZ which enabled me to experience at the hands of my settler-colonialist dentist (Chinese) a pain-free extraction of a badly cracked molar several weeks ago – nothing to do with the non-indigenous X-ray, non-indigenous metal extraction tool, or the non-indigenous local anaesthetic injections. (The extraction was pain-free, but it took several non-indigenous paracetamols to get some sleep in the next five nights.)
They appear to have used the full bingo card of liberation catchphrases. Probably ChatGTP could write this stuff now, with the right prompt.
The paper appeared in June 2023. The new government was elected in October. It’s likely that it has not been noticed by either the Government Ministers or the hard-fisted armed men of New Zealand who could actually carry out the violent ethnic cleansing that decolonization requires when those to be cleansed are 1) the majority and 2) have no other country of citizenship they can be deported to. The Tasman Sea awaits them, I guess. Small boats while quantities last.
The paper is really an exercise in mutual mental masturbation by a lecturer — a foreigner to boot! — and a university administrator. That’s why I doubt anyone in government or in the ranks of those who use violence will have read it. One must step carefully in a country where 16% might take inspiration from it but really this paper is nonsensical hogwash.
The “K. Wayne Yang” they cite is the co-author of Tuck and Yang, “Decolonization is not a metaphor”, a 2012 monograph I have cited often here. T & Y argue that the ethnic cleansing during decolonization will not spare the “oppressed” groups that Azarmandi and Tolbert think it will, including themselves personally as women I presume. Rather it will require the purging of all non-indigenous people including those descended from those who were brought against their will to the Americas as slaves. We sympathize with your oppression, they say, but you still don’t belong here and will have be to sent away. Somewhere. (This will go down well in America, I can imagine.)
That a paper like this saw the light of day in any enlightened country is profoundly disappointing but it is a university school of education, the kind of madrassa where this stuff is par for the course and has been for many years. That’s about all future school-teachers learn nowadays.
“Small boats while quantities last”
Indeed. After that, you’ll have to make your own. Without any evil colonizer tools.
Get used to it. It’s your future.
That’s so Khmer Rougey, if you will. I refer to the original thesis of Khieu Samphan in Thailand in the 60s which formed the intellectual architecture, such that is was, of hte entire Cambodian project./disaster.
That itself was influenced in the 70s by Marxists.
We think of the KR through one lens: The Killing Fields and some other data but it was a deep, complex example of humanity gone off the rails. An interesting study.
The above kiwi insanity seems based on it. Probably unintentionally. Who the eff is PAYING these people to write such aggressive, disruptive drivel?
Give children and the retarded tools and they’ll play with them. Badly.
Who is giving these people the tools/money to inflict this on a formerly sane country?
Kudos to WEIT and our anonymous kiwi friend for bringing it to our attention.
This needs a louder megaphone.
D.A.
NYC
All aboard the self flagellation bandwagon!
An interesting article here about a case from a couple of years ago illustrating the sort of thing that can happen if you query the orthodoxy in the New Zealand Edbiz:
https://plainsight.nz/whos-teaching-our-teachers-punishing-dissenting-voices-in-education/
Ugly neologism of the week: “peripheralising”.
(It easily overtakes the former front-runner “chemophobia”.)
And have the authors any clue that their indigenous tribal utopia would be a dictatorship run by warlords? They couldn’t possibly prefer life in (say) Haiti or Somalia or Gaza, could they?? This must all be self-flagellation, Queers for Palestine writ large. Der Untergang des Abendlandes anyone?
Oh yes – I loved “extractionist” – new to me.
I was curious to see where the “feminism” came in but besides possibly lumping women in with everyone who wasn’t a white male it doesn’t really seem to make an appearance, does it? It could have been a “penguin lovers decolonization of higher education” or a “red-headed vegetarian decolonization of higher education” or any other random and irrelevant doctrine or attribute. It just has to be understood as somehow including a deep desire for decolonization, and not much interest in higher education.
The authors are white privileged women, and even admit they are. Feminism is the only game in which the cards they hold would make a valuable hand.
So shall all 8.1 billion of us return to some small area of Africa? I doubt many think that’s a good idea (especially those who live there now), but most of the rest of the species on this planet might appreciate it. We must not forget to take along all of the species we have brought with us either intentionally or unintentionally and drop them off at their place of origin.
If not to our very early origins, then to what year do we need to return and who gets to choose that? It seems that if those of European ancestry in New Zealand need to ‘go home’, then the Maori should probably also go home to the Polynesian Islands or perhaps the Taiwan area (or Africa). They only arrived in New Zealand 300-400 years before those of European ancestry and they acknowledge that. Then there is always that sticky question about those of mixed ethnic heritage. Where do they go?
Sorry, this extreme nonsense is bringing out my snarky side.
Stephen Colbert used to do this bit on the Daily Show where he parodied the righteous and self-important aggrandisement of the art critic world, and this reminds me of that. A paper/thesis so over the top that it becomes a laughable mockery of the very thing it believes should be taken seriously, and, in so doing, ensures that it cannot be.
Entertaining though it is, I wouldn’t read too much into this; at best, it represents the views of the tiniest of tiny minorities (who if push came to shove probably wouldn’t even believe it themselves). Even the mainstream NZ media — no enemy of daft ideas — steers well clear of this sort of nonsense.
It certainly doesn’t represent the views of many Maori. A recent opinion poll found that 58% of those surveyed believed that local voters (as opposed to councillors or bureaucrats) should be given the final say on whether not separate Maori wards should be established in their area — compared to 67% of Maori Party supporters! Almost all Maori know full well that Azarmandi, Tolbert and their few fellow travellers are not reputable scholars, but are actually batshit crazy and don’t want to be associated with them in any way, shape or form.
None of which, of course, means that the ‘worst’ can’t still happen. But it’s a very long way from being ‘unstoppable’.
Sorry, but if this is a one-off, how come I am sent so many by Kiwis, and how come none of the Kiwis want their names used. They are fearful of being ostracized. This was published in Times Higher Ed, hardly an unknown place. And we all know that the movement to make indigenous ways of knowing coequal with modern science in primary through tertiary schools. You give no evidence that almost all Maori think these authors are batshit crazy—how do you know this?
Remember the Listener Letter and how its authors were not only ostracized but persecuted by the Royal Society of New Zealand? And Dawn Freshwaters promise to hold debates about Matauranga Maori vs. modern science at Aukland Uni—a promise that was not kept?
If this was a one-off, why do I get Kiwis sending me related stuff about decolonization (always anonymously) every week? Sorry, but I think you are minimizing the problem.
I agree about “unstoppable”, simply because of the momentum and the support this now has among the “elites” who have the say over education, and who have either been ideologically captured or no longer dare to publicly state that the emperor has no clothes.
But that’s not the fault of Maori. The ostracizing is not done mainly by Maori, certainly not by Maori who are not themselves part of academic grievance culture and don’t profit from the many new opportunities for grifters. What we do know is that the Maori party representing this line of thought gets a low share of Maori votes, less that the programmatically comparable French or German nationalist anti-immigrant far right get among their respective constituencies. The video of the Maori party functionary spewing venom about destroying the system and “sovereignty” you shared the other day got quite a few comments from people who say they are Maori and this doesn’t represent them. This is not average Maori against average European settlers (if the two groups can even be separated after so much mixing and mingling), this is a revolution from the top of the state and educational and bureaucratic hierarchy pushed on the rest of society. At least this is what it looks like to me from the other side of the world.
Left unchecked, radicals tend to propose escalating actions toward their ultimate goals and the goal posts tend to move in ever more radical directions as they enjoy success. It’s human nature at its most determined. Pushback and gentle professional ridicule of their ideas or time in the professional wilderness may be the best ways to help them see the wisdom of pursuing less toxic goals. At least one could hope so.
The biggest issue for me is the fact that they are attempting to radicalize the teachers of the next couple of generations of youngsters and that means that they can do more harm than the average academic by being responsible for the indoctrination of thousands of schoolchildren with their ideas.
+1
“but the way we act within our natural and knowledge environment must not be extractivist”, so say our non-indigenous feminist decolonizers.
But being “extractivist” is the essence of Homo Sapiens. All life forms live by extraction, but with Homo sapiens, it has assumed an extreme form. Maori were unsustainably extractivist in their treatment of the virgin territory they settled, and the megafauna is no more. Every human artifact is of material extracted from the natural environment. Exchanging knowledge with other groups (“extracting” knowledge, in our elect authors’ terminology) has been a hallmark of Homo at least since Neandertal times, when Neandertals “extracted” techniques and fashions from the Out-of-Africa colonists. All through the Holocene, Eurasia has been one large interconnected web of knowledge where useful discoveries, like bronze, iron, wagons, horse stirrups or newly bred plant varieties, radiated out from their place of origin, sometimes with the people who invented them, who had the technological edge for a while, and were adopted elsewhere. The Polynesians and later the European seafarers and settlers who crossed the oceans just enlarged the web of knowledge and of product/invention exchange, bringing in areas of the world that had previously been somewhat isolated from the world’s population center, Eurasia.
If our authors, posing as the high priests of decolonization, want to stop being extractivist, or tone down their extractivism to pre-contact Maori levels, the first thing they need to do is stop using computers and electricity.
The sound of NZ Unis slowly swirling down the loo. I’m sure knowing a bunch of Māori words will really help them in their careers. LOL
These kinds of articles, written by academics in the social sciences, aren’t really about wanting to change the system. It’s about scoring Brownie points (pardon the pun). These people need to perpetuate the myth of rampant racism in a country that clearly is one of the least racist countries in the world, because that is good for their careers. They will continue to to search for evidence of ever-declining racism in the increasingly-obscure crevices and dark corners of an otherwise liberal society. Like god-of-the gaps, this is racism-of-the-gaps.
The true racists in New Zealand are groups like the Maori Party, ‘anti-racist’ academics, many social scientists, and numerous (but not all) left-leaning politicians.
But, of course, they can’t be racist, because ‘we’ have all the power.