The Universality of Ethno-Racial Consciousness

The New Zealand government has recently sponsored a report on the establishment of a Commission for Truth & Reconciliation, modeled on the South African example. The report is premised on Critical Race Theory, whereby words and phrases are invented or re-defined for the purpose of vilifying the White as the “inventor” of “social constructs” such as “racism”, which was supposedly conceived as a means of justifying “colonialism”, which in turn is claimed to be the product of “white supremacy”. According to Critical Race Theory, as expounded in this report, only Whites can be “racists”, as “racism” is unique to Whites.

In the following we shall consider several aspects of Critical Race Theory raised in the New Zealand report, with a focus on the universality and endurance of ethnic and racial consciousness.

“Uprising”

Briefly, the report Maranga Mai!, was prepared by the Tangata Whenua Caucus of the National Anti-Racism Taskforce (2021–2022) and Ahi Kaa, the Indigenous Rights Group within Te Kāhui Tika Tangata, the latter being the Human Rights Commission. The report purports to examine “[t]he dynamics and impacts of white supremacy, racism, and colonisation upon tangata whenua [Maoris] in Aotearoa New Zealand”.¹ Chief Human Rights Commissioner Dr. Paul Hunt writes:

The [Human Rights] Commission invited a group of eminent tangata whenua scholars and leaders to discuss and write about the racism experienced by tangata whenua in Aotearoa New Zealand over many years. Inevitably, consideration of racism led to the issues of colonisation and white supremacy.²

Hunt further writes that

Maranga Mai! provides a crucially important perspective on extremely challenging issues which will define Aotearoa for years to come. The report compels us to acknowledge the racism and white supremacy that was woven into the fabric of the British colony as immigrants settled in these islands.³

The means of addressing this Europhobic perspective on White settlement is by “truth-telling” (sic). This means following the examples of Canada and South Africa in establishing for three years a “Truth, Reconciliation and Justice Commission”, which “would hear and document tangata whenua’s experience of colonisation, racism and white supremacy and recommend meaningful pathways towards reconciliation and justice by 2040”.⁴

In 1984, Orwell called this type of commissariat the “Ministry of Truth”. Like the “World Controllers” in 1984, the authors of Maranga Mai! assure readers that “the truth” is central to the process, in this case, of “prohibiting racism”, by which is meant White racism because, by their definition, there cannot be any other type.

Maranga Mai! translates as “rise up!” The title alone is inflammatory, and one might ask whether it is intended to “excite” the very “racial disharmony” that the Race Relations and Human Rights laws were legislated to prohibit if it was not for the long-acknowledged fact that these laws were never intended to protect Whites. The title is a slogan and the content polemical, and is – one might conclude – intended to provoke hatred against “Whites” as colonial oppressors.

There is no distinction between the mass of poor Whites who settled in New Zealand from ca. 1840, whose descendants comprise the bulk of New Zealand Europeans, and the fraction of oligarchs who, despite being white-complected, shared no sense of kinship whatsoever with the majority of settlers.⁵ To what extent “White privilege” existed among the mass of White settlers might be ascertained by reading Friedrich Engels’s Condition of the Working Class in England,⁶ but such sources no longer serve the post-modern obsessions of the Left. Those who might object are accused by the authors of Maranga Mai! of “White fragility”,⁷ another term from Critical Race Theory invented to force Whites into a no-win position.

The Other

“Whites” are therefore the “enemy”, ethnographically The Other, by virtue of their birth: an inherited, collective complex of “White privilege” maintained by “White supremacy”, by which “persons of colour” (yet another meaningless, contrived term), in this case the Maoris, are collectively the victims of White “racism”, whether conscious or unconscious. Hence, even the most self-loathing liberal will unavoidably still harbour “unconscious bias”. The implication is that all Whites will forever require thought control and re-adjustment, as “racism” and its concomitant “white fragility” and “unconscious bias” are “mental health” issues requiring treatment.⁸ The burgeoning “human relations industry” intervenes with “consciousness-raising” courses for industry, schools, and government departments, designed to ensure that every White recognises his and her inherent “racism”, which must be perpetually subjected to cultic “self-criticism” and “group criticism”, in the manner of Bolshevik Russia, China, Korea, and Jonestown.⁹

That Whites are The Other is itself an affirmation of the universality of race consciousness. Such consciousness is not evoked until and unless there is something other with which to compare. This universal ethnographic phenomenon only becomes a problem when it emerges among the White ethnicity. Only White ethnic consciousness is defined as “supremacist” and a contrived justification for colonisation. It supposedly does not exist in a negative manner among any ethnicity or race other than that of Whites.

Colonialism: a Universal Phenomenon

That “colonisation” is not confined to Whites but is a universal phenomenon, and not necessarily the product of a specific stage of economic development, can be readily adduced by considering the empires that have existed among a variety civilisations, cultures and races. Internal colonisation among rival Maori tribes was so common as to result in the Northern – Ngapuhi – Maoris appealing to Britain to intervene and establish British law, without which the internecine tribal warfare would have resulted in self-annihilation. The Maori chief Te Rauparaha, called “the Napoleon of the Southern hemisphere”, established an empire by colonising the lands of sundry tribes, subjugating those tribes or driving them from the conquered lands. Orthodox historians continue to describe Ngati Toa’s “maritime empire” yet insist that only Whites are colonisers because Ngati Toa were Maoris subjugating other Maoris. Hence, “racism”, which can only be White, was not involved.

Christianity, and, as one might expect, Catholicism particularly, is targeted as providing theological premises for “white racism” and “white supremacy”.

‘Race’, however, has a distinct historical trajectory of its own. As a European-centric way of understanding human society, it emerged out of a particular sociohistorical context in early Latin-Christian Europe, some five hundred years ago. This was a world dominated by the Church, where ‘to be human’ meant ‘to be Christian’. In the early Church-dominated colonial world, God sat atop a chain of being with humans descending hierarchically below ‘from civilised to savage’. Europeans were pure. ‘Heathens’, ‘nonbelievers’, and non-Christians were subhuman ‘others’, ‘sinful by nature’, and to be treated as such.¹⁰

The assumptions of the Human Rights report are precisely that – assumptions, perhaps ultimately derived from those of Raphael Lemkin who sought a Europhobic interpretation of history to justify his doctrine on “genocide”. Lemkin contended that only European Christendom had a devastating impact by the expedient of seeing only good in all others. For example, Lemkin thought the Aztecs a wonderful empire that had been victims of “genocide” by Christendom.¹¹ Rather, the small band of Conquistadors under Cortés were enabled to defeat the Aztec Empire thanks due not only to their courage but also to the support they received from the many tribes oppressed by Aztec imperialism. Here was an empire where blood provided the fuel for its maintenance. Professor Steven Weidenkope writes:

Every imperial city and large town had a central square from which a temple pyramid, where human sacrifices were performed, rose to the sky. The victim was laid on a table, where a priest would cut out his beating heart and hold it aloft for the worshipers to see. Imperial law mandated 1,000 human sacrifices a year in every temple, which totaled nearly 20,000 victims annually. Thirty years before the Spanish arrival in the city, the human sacrificial toll surpassed 80,000 during a four-day inauguration of the Great Temple.¹²

When liberals, leftists and even those within the Church, including Popes, bleat in apology for their “suppression of indigenous culture”, what they are referring to is the halting by Europeans of this mass genocide of other indigenes by Aztec colonialism. The same situation pertains generally to European colonialism, including that of New Zealand settlement by Britain.¹³

“Racism” a White Social Construct?

Race consciousness, or what is often called “prejudice” and assumed to be a negative trait when discerned among Whites, is universal and hardwired. However, Maranga Mai! contends that only Whites can be “racist”. This is achieved by the expedient of redefining the word “racist”. Academia has incorporated the definitions of Critical Race Theory. One typical example is that

[t]he notion of race from which modern popular understandings have evolved derives from a period of colonial expansion when scientific developments in Europe provided a means for classifying people into racial groups. These ideas assisted the ideological justification of colonial exploitation but also served to justify slavery, especially in the United States, as well as colonisation more generally¹⁴ Skin colour, a key marker for identifying different social and cultural groups, proved to be a useful mechanism for classifying people into races and for ranking them as either superior or inferior. This in turn implied their innate suitability for positions of either servitude or domination.¹⁵

Similarly, Maranga Mai! defines “racism” while claiming that the destructiveness caused by “white colonisation” was “unprecedented”:

The combined conquests of all former empires paled into insignificance compared with the worldwide reach of white colonisation. The devastation and harm were unprecedented and the extensive religious and philosophical justifications unparalleled in world history. These included religious doctrine and theorising, Social Darwinism, race hierarchy, cultural evolution, colour, craniology, so-called scientific racism, planned breeding and eugenics. Based on self-serving myopic assumptions, the white Western world classified and ranked ‘others’ according to degrees of civilisation or primitiveness, advancement or backwardness, and cultural superiority or inferiority or in-betweenness. Whiteness presumed fair-skinned ‘races’ represented a civilised peak – intelligent, morally pure, brave, advanced and superior; and darker races primitive, backward, cowardly, untrustworthy, less intelligent, childlike, and inferior.¹⁶

One might now begin to comprehend the depth of Europhobia that motivates such documents. In psychological terms it is projection. Such Europhobia projects its own motives of hatred onto The Other, that is, in this instance “white Western civilisation”. In any other context, this would be regarded as a rationalization of genocide, as defined by Raphael Lemkin, who could see nothing but good in the “Noble Savage” and nothing but evil in the White.¹⁷

Maranga Mai! asserts that “[r]ace is a social construct fabricated by white society to structure and divide society on the presumption of white supremacy”.¹⁸ Maranga Mai! cites some sources for this, namely, Critical Race theorists such as Shannon Sullivan.¹⁹ Countering with a list of works by physical anthropologists and geneticists is superfluous.

The Place of Prejudice

Sir Arthur Keith, called the “dean of British physical anthropologists”, regarded “race prejudice” as a necessary mechanism for the preservation of stable gene pools (races), without which there would have been constant gene flows among disparate populations, preventing the development of races.²⁰

Three decades after Sir Arthur’s rectoral address to the students of Aberdeen University, which formed the basis of the monograph The Place of Prejudice in Modern Civilization, A. James Gregor considered the topic from a sociological viewpoint, tracing “race prejudice”, or a preference for one’s own kind, through history.

Pre-empting sociobiology,²¹ Gregor pointed out that the primate exclusion of strangers manifests in man as “tribal, class, caste, national or racial exclusiveness, the explicit form of preference being determined largely by historical, social and political circumstances in which the particular human group finds itself”.²² Those tribes that have not had contact with other races nonetheless distinguish themselves from other tribes of the same race as “superior” or otherwise somehow unique, such as being “favored by the gods”.²³ The notion that “colour prejudice” is unique to White cultures is repudiated by the universal phenomenon of preference for one’s own type. Albinos born among the natives of Mexico were sacrificed to the gods to eliminate an aberration. A child born of lighter hue among the Papuans was “held assiduously over a fire of green branches until it was tinted the proper colour”.²⁴

Across Time and Place

Critical Race Theorists having claimed that racial categorization was the product of Western Enlightenment science must do so by rationalising or denying the existence of contrary evidence on the primordiality of the phenomenon. One might counter that their own theories are premised on the fanciful notion of the “Noble Savage” that also arose during the Western Enlightenment, and are probably peculiar to Late Western civilisation.

The Egyptians were colour-conscious in distinguishing races. They designated their own predominant type, with dark skin as Rot, as “the human race par excellence”.²⁵ The blond and white-skinned Libyans were described as “barbarians”, and the black-skinned was considered as a “perverse race”, often depicted as under subjugation.²⁶ Egypt was the centre of the world, the axis mundi, and resident foreigners had to subject themselves to all things Egyptian.²⁷ That is to say, there was Egyptian colonisation, Egyptian hegemony, Egyptian supremacy, as there has been that of many others. In examining the Egyptian texts and art it can be concluded that “Egypt not only represented the centre and the foreign lands the periphery, but Egypt stood for order against the chaos of the foreigners and this is why they had to be smitten and trampled on”.²⁸

A limestone relief from the tomb of Haremhab now in Leiden shows prostrate foreigners. Nine people are shown – they are the traditional enemies of Egypt […] Asians, Libyans and a beardless Kushite. Their hands are in a gesture of begging, or as the text has it: ‘The princes of all the foreign countries come to beg life from him.’ Some are crawling on their bellies, others are on their backs, again reminiscent of what is found in the Amarna letters: ‘At the feet of the king, my lord, seven times and seven times verily I fall, both prone and supine.’²⁹

The Nubians/ Kushites are sometime described in very degrading terms, as on a boundary stela of king Senusret /Sesotris III: ‘they cannot be trusted, they are not people (ni-remetju) one respects. They are wretches, craven-hearted.’ The Egyptians called themselves ‘the people’ remetju, the (proper) people. […] However, in contrast the Nubians are referred to as ni remetju, non-people, nonhumans, or savages. ³⁰

While the preceding refers to “blacks”, the Whitest of peoples, the Libyans, fared no better in Egyptian estimation, and were “described as ‘wretched/vile’ on a stela of Merneptah”.³¹

The Hebrews codified race consciousness as a religious premise in their maintenance as a distinct people amidst a multitude of others. Israelites are said in the rabbinic literature to be placed above all others as the recipients of wisdom:

Ten kavim³² of wisdom came down to the world; the land of Israel took nine and the rest of the world took one.

Ten kavim of beauty came down to the world; Jerusalem took nine and the rest of the world took one.

Of the Kushites, or “blacks”: Ten kavim of drunkenness descended to the world; the Kushites took nine [and the rest of the world took one].³³ “Though the Talmud here uses Kushites, the term likely refers to black people in general and not just Ethiopian”, writes Viswanath, a South Asian Jewish scholar.

In regard to Abram’s wife Sarai, the Talmud explains:

Azariah in the name of R. Judah be-Rabbi Simon: [Abram said to her:] ‘We have travelled through Aram-naharaim and Aram-nahor, and [although we have seen beautiful women] we haven’t found a woman as beautiful as you. Now that we are going to a place of people who are ugly and black, “say that you are my sister so that they will be kind to me on your account…” (Gen 12:13).’”³⁴

On Ham’s sin being at the foundation of the “Black” races, the Talmud (j. Taanit 1:6) explains:

Ham, dog, and raven behaved badly (=they had sex with their partners on the ark while all others, human and animal, were celibate). Ham left [the ark] darkened (mefucham, a play on his name), the dog left as a public spectacle in his intercourse (they have sex in public), and the raven left as different from all other creatures.³⁵

Viswanath points out that it is the curse of Ham, as it is often called, that came into Christendom from Judaism:

Numerous pejorative statements about non-Jews can be found in Jewish texts, and most of these are general in nature. The texts surveyed above, however, and others like them, single out a specific group for opprobrium by virtue of their skin color. Thus, Abraham Melamed, professor of Philosophy at the University of Haifa, writes in his monograph, The Image of the Black in Jewish Culture:

“In rabbinic literature the black appears for the first time in Jewish cultural history as not only other and different, but as a consequence, inferior too, and in this light the Bible texts about the black were expounded. For generations, these commentaries determined the image of the black in Jewish thought.”³⁶

The widespread use of racial and ethnic pejoratives across time and place indicate the universality of race consciousness:

Abeed – Arabic: Black African (originally referring to slave)

Akhbaroshim – Hebrew: Arab rats

Bule – Indonesia: Whites (from albino)

Chankoro – Japan: Chinese (slaves)

Chi chi – South Asia: mixed race: Anglo-Indians (“dirt”)

Cushi – Israel: dark-skinned (derived from Kushite)

Farang khi nok – Thailand (ฝรั่งขี้นก)/Laos: poor Whites (from khi=faeces; nok= bird)

Gaijin (外人) – Japan: non-East Asian

Galla – Ethiopia: Oromo nomadic people of Somalia and Kenya

Goyim – Hebrew: non-Jews

Guizi (鬼子) – China: non-Chinese

Gwello, kwai lo (鬼佬) – China: Whites (from “white ghost”)

Jjokbari – Korean (쪽발이): Japanese (from “pig’s foot”)

Kalar – Burmese: black-skinned Muslim

Kalia, Kalu, Kallu – Hindi: “blackie”, “darkie”

Habshi– Hindi: negro, African, criminal

Keling: India: dark Malaysians, Singaporeans, Indonesians

Mabuno/Mahbuno – Zimbabwe: term of racial hatred for Whites

Malakh-khor (ملخ خور) – Iran: Arabs (from “locust eaters”)

Malaun – Bangladesh – referring to Hindus – derived from Arabic “ملعون” (mal’un), = “cursed”

Marokaki (מרוקקי) – Israel: Moroccan Jews (derived from “Maroko” (Hebrew for “Morocco”) + “Kaki” (“crap” in Hebrew)

Tiko – Indonesian: indigenes = from Tikus kotor (“dirty rat”)

Xiao riben guizi – China: “little Japanese devil”

Colour Hierarchy among the Maoris

Maori social ranking was colour-coded. There was the custom of chiefs being painted with red ochre and slaves with charcoal.³⁷ Fair complexion was associated with high rank among the Maoris. The tribe Ngäti Ira had a saying that associated fair hair and complexion with high rank, cited by the Maori anthropologist Peter Buck:

He aha te uru o to tamaiti? Kapatau he uru korito, he koraki, he uru ariki no Pipi.

What is the hair of your child. Were it flaxen hair or whitish, it would be the hair of high chieftainship from Pipi.³⁸

Among some Maoris, “flaxen hair” indicated descent from the ancestral chief Pipi.³⁹ Hazel Petrie, from whom the above on Maoris is cited, predicating her paper on Critical Race Theory, raises the problematic matter of “colour prejudice” among the precolonial Maoris, stating: “Other writings from the early 20th century imply or refer directly to fairskins as signs of chiefly status.” For example, she writes:

The association between fair skin and chiefliness was again made explicit in an article published in the Mäori language newspaper Te Toa Takatini in 1926, in which Reweti T. Kohere described Te Kani Takirau as being: he tangata tu rangatira, he roa, he kiritea, he ataahua. He urukehu ona makawe, he mingimingi. Kaore he tohu o te rangatira i ngaro atu i a ia. I te mea he tangata tino rangatira ia ko tona ahua ki tona iwi he tangata tapu.

This she translates as, “a man of high rank, tall, fair-skinned, handsome. His hair was fair (or reddish) and curly. He lacked no chiefly attributes. Because he was of very high rank, he was considered by his people as a tapu person.”⁴⁰

Rawiri Te Motutere, a 19th-century chief and warrior of the Puketapu tribe (Taranaki district), both “fair skinned and light haired”, “was so proud of his fair complexion” that he protected his face from the sun by wearing a mask, according to his granddaughter.⁴¹

There seems to have been three complexions referred to among the Maoris: “In 1893, Ngäti Porou’s Tuta Tamati explained dark-skinned people were referred to as kiri-parauri, light-coloured people as kiri-tea, and those considered to be red-skinned as kiri-waitutu” […]⁴²

Imperialism Was not “White Supremacy” or “White Privilege” Per Se

The condition of fellow Whites among the proletarians of Britain and elsewhere, including that of the indentured servants, such as the “Red Legs” of the Caribbean, suggest that an oligarchy existed that was only nominally “white” at best. This oligarchy had no sense of racial kinship but was (and remains) at the altar of Mammon. Under this oligarchy, to what extent was “white supremacy” the motive when dealing with the Gaels of Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, or the Afrikaners?

New Zealanders hear much about the alleged suppression of the Maori language, and within living memory the alleged punishment of Maori children for speaking their language at school. Maranga Mai! includes an entire section on the supposed colonialist suppression of the Maori language among children, in the interests of “white supremacy”.⁴³

Critical Race Theory confuses British hegemony with “white supremacy”. Within the European empires there were sundry dichotomies at work, where heroic soldiers, settlers, statesmen and dedicated civil administrators existed alongside oligarchs, speculators and monopolists. The hegemonic character of the economic system leveled cultural pluralities including those of White ethnicities. It is nonsense to refer to this as the result of “white supremacy” or “white privilege”, as indicated by the condition of White proletarians, indentured servants and child labourers. White ethnicities succumbed to the leveling character of Late Western capitalism. On the suppression of Gaelic dialectics:

The Laws in Wales Act 1535 decreed that English was to be the only language used in Welsh courts and that monoglot Welsh speakers were barred from holding public office. The stated aim of the act was to prevent: “the people … using a speech nothing like the natural mother tongue (English) within this Realm … and to extinguish the sinister traditions and customs differing from the laws of this Realm (England).”⁴⁴

The last discriminations against Welsh were removed in 1993, but few can speak the language fluently. Restrictions on Irish were enacted in 1367 in The Statute of Kilkenny, among English colonists and Irish. In 1541 Irish was banned in areas under English rule.⁴⁵ From the late 18^th to early 19^th centuries, the Highland Clearances destroyed the clan and other traditions of the Scots. After the Battle of Culloden (1746), clan tartans and bagpipe music were banned. Outsiders were enabled by British legalisation to obtain the land. Thousands of families were evicted and their houses burned. Starvation ensued in 1846 with the potato blight. The situation continued until the 1886 Crofters Holdings Act.

Boerhaat or Boer hater was a term coined to refer to hatred of the Afrikaners. The Afrikaners were subjected to a policy of anglicisation to an extent beyond that of the Maoris and other colonial “persons of colour”. From the mid-19^th century,

[i]n the schools the English language was enforced. Even the farm schools were conducted in English. Dutch or Afrikaans in the school or on the playground were punished. The punishment differed from school to school. In some cases it was corporal punishment, whereas in others the far more cruel methods of making a fool of the child before the other children was adopted. Often the child had to stand in front of the class in the corner, with a placard around his neck on which was written – ‘I must not speak Dutch.’

The procedure in courts, the form of local government, later the parliamentary government, were all copies of that in England, or had an entirely English character. The architecture in the towns, the form of the shops and hotels with their bars, were according to English customs and practices […]⁴⁶

Even the Dutch Reformed Church was the subject of anglicisation. Scottish parsons were introduced. Anglicanism subverted Calvinism.⁴⁷

To claim that an actual “social construct”, that of the nebulous “persons of colour”, remains uniquely oppressed by “white supremacy” and “white privilege”, then to paradoxically claim that “race” does not exist – insofar as the identity only of Europeans is denied – is not only an injustice but obfuscates the oligarchic character and causes of oppression, which are the result of the denial, not the affirmation, of “race”. Indeed, considering the nature of this oligarchic system, or globalization, race becomes, to paraphrase Julius Evola, a “revolutionary doctrine”. Or, to draw from the comments of a leftist icon, Noam Chomsky, stated most cogently:

Over the long term, you can expect capitalism to be anti-racist – just because it’s anti-human. And race is in fact a human character – there’s no reason why it should be a negative characteristic, but it is a human characteristic. So therefore identifications based on race interfere with the basic ideal that people should be available just as consumers and producers, interchangeable cogs […].⁴⁸