Professor of politics, Richard Shaw. (Image supplied)
Richard Shaw doesn’t shy away from examining the myths that Pākehā tell themselves about life in New Zealand.
He’s about to publish his third book on the topic of how Pākehā came to occupy this land and at what cost, while reflecting on the role his own Irish ancestors played in that history.
In this essay from The Good Settler*, released next week, he picks apart the concept of “race”, and considers why this invented idea just won’t go away.*
It happens, very occasionally, that you live through moments of intense consciousness in which you can feel your world turning on its axis. The seconds clot and time lets you know that something is in the process of becoming — not about to change, but shifting right then and there.
The births of my daughters were like that. The death of my father. I thought my selection for the Manawatū Under 19 rugby team might be one of those moments too, but it wasn’t. Instead, at our first (and my only) game, the ground announcer asked the person who had locked their bike to the large freezer outside the main stand to please remove it immediately, and I had to scoot away from the subs bench to sort that out.
A year or so after the freezer incident, I sat in a university lecture hall as sociologist Paul Spoonley methodically pulled a word apart, patiently explaining to us that while the use of the word “race” had real consequences for people’s lives, the underlying idea — that races are palpable, material phenomena — is an invention. Races, Paul pointed out, exist in the same way that elves and pixies do: in the imagination.
When he said that, space tilted a couple of degrees, and everything looked different.
That lecture took place 40 years ago but has stuck with me. Not only because a term that I casually used was revealed as a rhetorical emperor lacking clothes, but also for the wider message, which is that certain words are not what they seem. You need to know what you’re doing with this sort, and use them carefully. Especially if you live in a country with a long history of using language to keep people in their place.
*
Not long ago, I thought back to Paul’s class as I sat digesting a handful of emails from people who didn’t much like my writing on memory and forgetting among Pākehā settler families. Almost all of them drew on the lexicon of race. C– wanted me to know that even though he isn’t a racist, he reckons that my support of Māori wards makes me one. T– thought I looked “like a complete plonker when you spout that race baiting bullshit”, while D– was absolutely fine with what occurred to Māori here because, after all, “the human race has routinely oppressed others to dispossess them of their land”. At the bottom of the pile was an anonymous message from someone who accused me of being a “race traitor”. I’d not been called that before.
This country has always spoken the language of race.
An early settler looks to “European pay and employment” as the surest means of “weaning the savage from the barbarism of his race”.
A parliament passes a law aimed at suppressing “insurrections amongst the evil-disposed persons of the Native race” and legalising the taking of land (although not so much as to entirely dispossess “the Natives, so driving them to the hills and extinguishing the race”).
A member of the clergy bemoans that while the Irish “belong to a race that could boast of great virtues, there was one vice that was too much indulged in,
viz, drunkenness”.
The Auckland Star thinks it inevitable that “a savage people when first brought into contact with a race on a higher plane of social development contracts little of civilisation but its vices”.
The White Race League suggests that the best way of dealing with “the danger to the white population of Chinese immigration” is to make sure that “the white race should only trade with the white race”. “[M]iscegenation with Asiatic stocks” is held to be “a serious menace” to the nation.
In the 1970s, immigration minister Frank Gill links Pacific Island migrants with an epidemic of communicable diseases.
And so on and so forth.
We are presently at it again, courtesy of the bizarre war on race cultivated by the government cobbled together following the 2023 election. As far as I can tell, no other coalition agreement in the modern era contains the word race — including the one drafted by National and New Zealand First (NZF) back in 1996. (That one did, however, make mention of settling outstanding Māori Treaty claims “in a spirit of goodwill and integrity”.) Clearly, however, race has got under some skin, because the word features prominently in the two documents signed by National, NZF and ACT in late 2023.
In both, “ending race based policies” is trumpeted as a key priority for the government, while delivering public services “on the basis of need, not race” is tasked with strengthening democracy (in the National/ACT agreement) and ensuring equal citizenship (in the deal National struck with NZF, in which the parties also agree not to “advance policies that seek to ascribe different rights and responsibilities to New Zealanders on the basis of their race or ancestry”).
Right now, race is all over the show. Goodwill and integrity are less visible, having been left behind in 1996.
As generations of Māori, Chinese, Pasifika and other communities can testify, it is a serious matter when the resources of the New Zealand state are thrown behind a programme in which race features prominently.
It is not just that governments have the clout to get a lot done — pass laws, change language, order words to be removed from books, establish or do away with programmes and organisations. They also send signals to the rest of us about what is acceptable or beyond the pale. Ministers’ language provides permission to act in particular ways. Directly and indirectly, they authorise certain patterns of behaviour. The words governments use matter.
For these reasons, the fact that race is a nonsense term of which the present administration is unhealthily enamoured is an issue.
*
Race is a junk word. A scientifically bankrupt concept that flows from the long-discredited view that a person’s attributes — intelligence, appetite for hard work, capacity to keep the gorse down, willingness to use land productively, that sort of thing — are determined by aspects of their physical appearance. Skin colour primarily, but also hair type, the shape of the skull or the nose, or some such. Lips can be an issue and bandy legs a bit of a giveaway.
Bluntly, whenever the word race appears, the twisted belief that someone’s biological characteristics are responsible for their character is right behind it.
So is an entire edifice of shonky science. Along with all of the other good things the British brought to Aotearoa (parliaments, the rule of law, land speculators and what have you), they also brought scientific racism, the peak colonial-era theory that promoted the existence of a hierarchy of races. Naturally, the white one sat at the top of the pile, while all of the others (the precise number and name of which seemed never to be settled) straggled along behind, trying to catch up.
One of the earliest of these taxonomies was developed by the German anthropologist JF Blumenbach, who used skin colour and conformation of the head to characterise just five races: American, Caucasian, Ethiopian, Malay and Mongolian.
This sort of typology meshed beautifully with the colonial projects of major European powers, providing both an explanation and justification for the colonisation of the lesser races and their lands. As the scholars Arcia Tecun, Lana Lopesi and Anisha Sankar put it, “Europe took its method of social categorisation to the world”, the higher racial orders asserting both the natural right and moral duty to bring civilisation to savages.
Telling people where they stand relative to others is also a way of keeping them in their place — the one you have picked for them. And the practice of determining these weird systems of classification was drawn from the same colonial well as the presumption of the right to name mountains, rivers, landscapes, oceans and other places that already had names. It was part of the impulse to remake the world in our own image.
You still hear the echoes of this sort of thinking in the language of those who insist that colonisation was an unreservedly Good Thing for Māori. That, given their subordinate position in the racial pecking order, Māori clearly stood to gain from contact with the higher-ups. Surely it was the duty of the British to bring light into their world? Surely Māori should be grateful for this? Surely this is all natural?
Well, no, because the science behind the position of those who continue to think this way has long been discredited. The taxonomies developed by Blumenbach and others predate modern knowledge of genetics and the human genome. Moreover, those systems of classification were “contaminated by scientifically incorrect assumptions that seem to have been motivated by our tribal tendencies to justify how ‘us’ is better than ‘them’”. In other words, you take your self-interest and call it “science” and then it’s all good.
From a scientific (but not political) point of view, race has no validity: it is not a meaningful way in which to categorise people.
The idea that races exist is maintained by societies, not geneticists or evolutionary biologists. These days you simply cannot stand on science and argue that the human population can be organised into discrete biological categories. This does not stop people from doing so, of course. But races aren’t real. They are figments of overwrought imaginations.
Think about the ways in which the word race is used. It attracts so many adjectives, it is descriptively useless. For a start, as T– pointed out, there is a human race. Depending on who you listen to and what you read, there is also a white one, a brown one, a red one and a yellow one (aka a peril).
Some think there is an Irish one, there is definitely an English one, and on a good day there might also be a New Zealand one. Darwin thought there was a South Australian race and an Australian one (and, of course, a Greek one), and in Blumenbach’s time people spoke of Ethiopian, Malay and Mongolian ones. But you don’t hear as much about them now.
There is also at least one race named after a mountain range (the Caucasus), a second after a region, and a third after a continent — although whether Asia and Europe count as single or many racial categories is complicated by the tendency of their boundaries to shift around. (And the English one, which used to be part of the European one, has now gone rogue.) One grizzled New Zealand politician is inclined to talk about the Chinese one from which the Māori one is apparently descended.
This is classificatory chaos. Four of these adjectives are colours, some are nation states, one is a topographical feature, and two are very large parts of the world containing dozens of countries and hundreds (if not thousands) of languages. Several are ethnicities. Race is worthless as a sense-making category because it is hopelessly imprecise. You just choose your adjective and away you go.
Sharper people than me have made this point.
Darwin himself, whose classificatory interests extended to hair texture, bone length, lung capacity, skull size, the circumference of bodies and “the convolutions of the brain”, was deeply frustrated by the inexact nature of racial typologies. **“**Man,” he huffed, “has been studied more carefully than any other organic being, and yet there is the greatest possible diversity amongst capable judges whether he should be classed as a single species or race, or as two (Virey), as three (Jacquinot), as four (Kant), five (Blumenbach), six (Buffon), seven (Hunter), eight (Agassiz), eleven (Pickering), fifteen (Bory St. Vincent), sixteen (Desmoulins), twenty-two (Morton), sixty (Crawfurd), or as sixty-three, according to Burke”.
That is a total of 223 possible racial categories from which to choose, including the “taciturn, even morose, aborigines of South America”, “light-hearted, talkative negroes” and a group of folk who once lived in “the caverns of Belgium”. It is an awful lot of variance for an intellectual endeavour purporting to be a science. In the end, Darwin sighs, all we learn from “this diversity of judgment” is “that they [races] graduate into each other, and that it is hardly possible to discover clear distinctive character between them”.
*
And still this hopelessly imprecise, deficient expression continues to contaminate our thinking.
We should have jettisoned it long ago in favour of a more useful word — like ethnicity. Ethnicity speaks to affiliations with others based on shared traits such as language, religion, cultural traditions and so on; it also lets people decide for themselves who they are, rather than having their identity decided for them by someone else.
Plenty of other relics from Darwin’s age — child labour in factories, the poorhouse, the pneumatic tube systems that used to fire small items around department stores — have been left behind in Aotearoa, but not this one. Why? Why does a word dragging such a dreadful history behind it endure?
Well, for a start, race allows us to deny the parts of our past we are unsettled by. As it was intended to, it continues to justify the ongoing ignorance of or refusal to tackle the consequences of colonisation — because if we keep on asserting the existence of a natural hierarchy of races at the top of which we perch, then we can also keep on believing that whatever our forebears got up to was natural, normal and right.
Race lets us keep on telling the settler story without having to address its unsavoury bits.
Second, the word’s malleability is useful. Listen to those who rail against race-based policies and you could be forgiven for thinking that, you know, they have a point. If race is a mirage, then why not do away with it and instead use criteria like “need” or “treating everyone equally” to support people? Seems reasonable enough.
Until it dawns on you that there is need out there, and it has been created by decades of state policy predicated on the belief that race does exist and, moreover, justifies both taking and withholding resources from people further down the official food chain. Taking their land without paying for it, for example. Charging Māori occupation licences to live on their own soil but barring them from farming it. Refusing Māori access to government loans to improve the slivers of whenua they are allowed to maintain. Belting them for speaking their language.
That Māori wind up grasping the wrong end of any number of sticks has nothing to do with the shape of their heads — it is because the New Zealand state has historically dealt with them on the basis of a scientifically racist playbook. This is not by accident or happenstance or courtesy of genetic inheritance. It is by design. Keep the subalterns — those whom John Stuart Mill and other liberal luminaries considered ill-suited to the glories of representative democracy — under the cosh, and then blame them for the state they find themselves in and start talking about equal treatment.
Wait. What? Treat Māori differently by taking their land, language and livelihoods, and then talk about equal treatment? Queer the pitch and then blather on about level playing fields? Seems a bit rough.
Treating people uniformly when some of us do not start from the same place as others will simply entrench inequality. Ask the Irish. Centuries after the English visited colonisation on the Emerald Isle (and not long after a politically engineered famine), so many Irish were living in such dire conditions that many of them had to leave — some, like my ancestors, to come to New Zealand.
It is grotesque that, fired by enthusiasm for the erasure of race and its replacement with equal treatment, our current government is denying Māori support they might find handy in dealing with the repercussions of having been treated differently on the basis of racist ideas.
If there’s anyone who has experienced “privilege” in this country, it is those of us whose ancestors came here for a better life and have since benefited from the various forms of violence perpetrated against Māori.
Furthermore, those taking the view that all races should receive equal treatment miss the point. The historic mission of the word race is to impose inequality. So you cannot both use a word coined specifically for the purposes of justifying the hierarchical organisation of the world’s peoples and suggest that they are all equal. You do not get to have this both ways.
All the same, race is useful to have lying around. Invoke it whenever someone suggests that this or that group should be treated differently (say, when the adjective “Māori” is attached to an institution or initiative) and you a) discredit the case and the person making it, and b) justify continuing to treat people unequally, because of course anything else must be racist. That’s two birds with one stone.
Race also lets us, the children of the Age of Reason, tell others what it means to be them. The thing about scientific racism is that the boffins ascribe meaning to the objects of inquiry. Those who called the scientific edifice of race into existence, not those on the sharp end of bogus lab work, decided what meant what and who fitted in which categories. And we, their cultural descendants, continue to do much the same when we use the vocabulary of race we have inherited to shape the world, confusing garbage science with serious discourse.
Best of all, race is natural, immutable and eternal. It is forever. Which is terrific if you happen to have been born in the right one. Even if you accept the logic of scientific racism, you have not done anything to earn your particular categorisation. Liberal notions of merit are out the window here: you are either born into the right category or not. Either way, there is no way out.
Words are not banal. They do not exist outside of history. They have prior lives which they carry around. Words do not give their past the slip simply because we are careless of or unaware of the backstory. Wittingly or otherwise, each time we use the word race we invoke the ghosts of scientific racists past. We keep a long-discredited science that sought to classify people on the basis of the shape of their skulls alive just a little longer.
Race is the linguistic equivalent of a zombie in a George A Romero movie.
*
If the word race itself is meaningless, the material effects of its use are very real indeed. Race may make no biological sense, but this does not reduce the power and reach of the idea that it does.
Race is one of those notions used (including by members of the New Zealand government) not only to shuffle people into categories but also to manage the distribution of scarce resources.
In this country it has always been used to ration, restrict or remove Māori access to economic capital (all that unproductive Māori land: we’ll have that, thanks), state support (paying Māori pensioners less than Pākehā pensioners), political participation (barring Māori from contesting European seats) and so on.
Race might not be real, but racism — an ideology of domination in which the “presumed biological or cultural superiority of one group is used to justify or prescribe the inferior treatment of other groups” — most certainly is. Racism is a practice which has consequences for people’s lives.
There are lots of ways of coming at this.
Institutionalised racism — the stuff that is woven into the fabric of our laws and our public spaces — is easy enough to spot. But what the academic Philomena Essed calls “everyday racism” can be harder to see. For Essed, the insidious thing about the careless use of the word race is that it normalises racist notions that inform the common-or-garden-variety actions that make up our daily lives. The joke, the look, the thought, the retort. The casual remark, the heightened sense of alertness, the glance that slides away. The discomfort and the wish to move away from.
Racism happens out there in the world of government and politics, but it is also routine, familiar, quotidian. It is in the office, on the street and at Saturday morning sport. Racism is also at home. It is just the way things are.
There is a link between this kind of everyday racism and the words and actions of governments and institutions. Racism on the ground doesn’t spring out of nowhere. People inherit the ideas about race and racial superiority that are woven into their social and political worlds. We don’t just make this stuff up, nor are we born with it — it is learned.
Here are a few examples of the way this works.
If you have grown up in a place in which, until quite recently, the law has been used to compulsorily acquire Māori land that has been lying around being “unproductive” (meaning unoccupied or not “kept properly cleared of noxious weeds” or “not being used to proper advantage”), you might well have inherited the view that Māori are “constitutionally idle”. You probably won’t use that language, not exactly, but the general idea will be lurking around in the back of your mind. And perhaps it will sometimes find expression in what you think, say and do.
If you rather like Kennett Watkins’s 1893 painting The Death of Von Tempsky at Te Ngutu o Te Manu (which grants soldier of fortune Gustavus Ferdinand von Tempsky a glorious death but renders Tītokowaru and his warriors invisible, even though they were the victors in the battle) or Louis Steele and Charles Goldie’s 1899 The arrival of the Maoris in New Zealand (depicting apparently near-dead Māori navigators happening upon Aotearoa), those artists’ assumptions might become your assumptions. That Māori are accidental arrivals, lesser combatants, not really worthy of the artist’s gaze. Such dispositions might slip into and subtly shape the way you interact out there in the world.
And if you find yourself living in a country in which, in the year of our Lord 2025, the Minister of Education directs the removal of Māori words from future Ministry of Education publications, worried that young English-speaking New Zealanders will have their early learning impeded by close encounters with te reo Māori, then you might find that those ideas make sense, and go on to develop similar views on the best place for Māori in polite society.
Racism is not necessarily about bad people. It is always, however, about the ways in which the logic of superiority that sits behind the word race are normalised, disseminated and reproduced through everyday actions.
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And so all the way back to being labelled a race traitor for having, among other things, cast doubt on the existence of that which I am accused of betraying.
My initial response was dismissive: the phrase is gibberish, for you cannot betray something that does not exist. But it does not pay to be flippant about this because, of course, race very much does exist — as a notion based on the dregs of 19th-century science which continues to be used to organise and order the world. It is a form of social shorthand that is still part of the vernacular, still treated as common sense, still tacitly assumed to be in some way true.
We tend not to think about this, any more than we give much thought to other ideas we regard as “common sense”. But the word does damage. The world of race is one of blood and bones, skin and skulls, hide and hair. It has its own sinister, binary lexicon: pure/impure, clean/dirty, civilised/savage, master/slave. It is a terrible place, built on an appalling idea which drove millions to the ovens of the death camps. The appropriate reaction to the phrase “race traitor”, with its thinly veiled allusions to racial hygiene and cleansing, is revulsion.
But disgust is not enough. The word at the root of this evil, which hides its violence in plain sight, needs to be systematically dismantled. Then the pieces need to be scattered to the wind.
This is an extract from The Good Settler, published by Massey University Press (RRP $39.99)
Richard Shaw is a professor of politics at Massey University’s College of Humanities and Social Sciences. He is a regular commentator on political issues and the author of a number of academic publications about government, parliament and politics in Aotearoa New Zealand. His first two books, The Forgotten Coast (2021) and The Unsettled (2024, which was a finalist in the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards in 2025), were also published by Massey University Press.
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