Ae Marika!
By Hone Harawira
MP for Tai Tokerau
04 May 09

Racism – 30 Years On

30 years ago last week, a group of Maori and Pacific Islanders put an end to 25 years of racism at Auckland University.

For years and years, Pakeha engineering students had been using graduation week to dress up in hula skirts, workers boots and helmets, paint obscene slogans and symbols on themselves, get drunk, and stagger around Auckland city performing a mock haka and abusing people – because they thought it was “a bit if fun”.

And they’d done it every year, despite pleas from Maori and Pacific students, the students own association, the Race Relations Office, the university itself, Maori leaders and many others.

In 1979 though it all came to a swift and abrupt end, when He Taua decided there had been enough talk, and took action.

And then last week, a student wrote a complaint to everybody he could think of, about the language that I was using during a lecture I gave at Waikato University, and I was immediately reminded of the He Taua incident that I had been part of all those years ago, and how some things hadn’t changed very much at all.

Over more than 35 years of public speaking, I have learnt to “sniff out” a redneck in the audience, and it seems that last week at Waikato, I’d picked out another one.

University students are notorious for their lack of respect for authority, their use of bad language, and most people who know me know that I’m cool with that. Students are also encouraged to challenge arguments and theories as well, and they’re also used to winning because in most cases they operate in big groups, 100 of them to one lecturer in most cases, but it seems that they ain’t that comfortable when somebody turns up and rams their arguments right back down their throats.

So when this smartarse started laying on his educated drivel about Maori being a minority in this country “like Asians and homosexuals”, I decided to teach him a few lessons – like (1) as a guest lecturer I don’t operate by the same rules as his other lecturers (2) just because I’m a politician don’t mean I have to play intellectual handball with him (3) as an intelligent individual I don’t have to put up with his racism (4) as a Maori activist I am more than happy to put him in his place.

Seems that just like 30 years ago, rednecks and racists still like to strut their stuff behind the walls of academia, safe from the prying eyes of wider society. Unfortunately for them, 30 years on there are still people like me happy to turn up and knock some of those walls down.

Oh yeah, and one other thing. When I nailed this guy guess what happened? All the Maori students in the audience clapped.

ENDS

© Scoop Media