So, today’s question is from Roger Green, who asked:
From your vantage point, how has race and racism changed in the United States compared to, say, when you were living in the United States? Was Obama's presidency helpful or harmful in addressing racism; likewise, black lives matter, affirmative action, DEI. What has moved the needle in terms of race in America and in which direction? While you're at it, you could talk about race in New Zealand, which is a different animal, I know.
This topic is one of the most fraught because the opinions have become so polarised, and, for many it’s become a kind of moral litmus test. In my opinion, and from what I’ve seen and experienced personally, the folks on the Left seem to approach the topic from lived experience or based on their values (or both). In contrast, those on the Right seem to come, more often than not, from a place of fear and/or ignorance—which doesn’t mean they’re stupid, just that they’re uninformed, and, sadly, too often by choice.
I watched race and racism in the USA improved steadily, culminating in the election of President Obama. The rise of the “tea party,” however, led to a rise in openly racist rhetoric, leading up to and getting stronger after the 2010 Midterm Elections. To me, it’s been all downhill from there, and the situation is worse now than it was before I left the USA.
President Obama’s election in 2008 broke a barrier, one that can’t be rebuilt. Now, the idea of a black man being president is no longer weird, because it’s already happened. In that sense only, President Obama’s election in 2008 was very helpful. However, he also played down the historic nature of his election and administration, so it didn’t have the legacy-building it could have had. That, however, wasn’t the reason the USA started slipping backward: That was the deliberate work of the Rightwing.
The USA’s Rightwing spent a lot of time and effort spreading propaganda that was built on deliberate lies and disinformation, like, for example, when they said the Affordable Care Act would lead to “death panels”. Many Republican leaders, elected or not, used dog-whistle rhetoric to imply that President Obama and his supporters were "less than” in many ways, though often unspecified. Again, this took flight with the rise of the teabaggers, something I wrote about a lot at the time.
Affirmative Action was a useful policy for reducing systemic barriers to black people (in particular) breaking getting a chance in education and employment, but it was created in a different time when politicians saw the value in lifting up those who had been deliberately excluded from so much of society. Its success reinforced opposition from traditional conservatives, and created resentment among white people who felt that if someone else succeeded, it inevitably meant they (the white people) would have to fail. That was absurd, but telling disgruntled people that their feelings are absurd and not based in reality doesn’t make the disgruntled folks change their minds, it makes them more firmly disgruntled and very angry, something that inevitably leads to reactionary politics and turning back the clock. So, Affirmative Action started out as a positive, but because the resentment of white folks was never properly addressed, it became a flashpoint for everyone who was certain (though almost always wrong) that they’d been deprived of something by “a minority” person. Its downfall was predictable.
The Black Lives Matter movement was, like President Obama, the victim of unrestrained and often unhinged Rightwing rhetoric. By the time that BLM emerged, the Rightwing propaganda system was fully developed and operational, and when combined with legacy media failing to report fairly or accurately, that meant it was possible for people to never hear facts or reality in reporting on BLM, and that meant it was easily scapegoated by white folks who blamed it as an example of why they weren’t rich and CEO of a major corporation (or whatever).
This same fate befell DEI and even Critical Race Theory.
DEI is something that many people didn’t understand at all. Some may have had “cultural training” of some sort at work, which was intended to make sure workers weren’t insensitive to fellow workers or customers who were different from themselves, but it morphed into meaning a different version of affirmative action, leading to their claims that “unqualified” people were supposedly given preferential treatment over “qualified” people who were passed over because they weren’t part of a recognised minority, and that, in turn, led to it becoming an all-purpose epithet against anyone who wasn’t a white, cisgender, heterosexual male, such as, derisively calling someone a “DEI-hire”.
It’s certain that everyone spewing angry rhetoric about CRT has never had anything to do with it, since it was only ever part of graduate-level coursework in very particular fields. Many of the folks complaining the loudest barely completed high school, if that, and because they didn’t know what CRT was, they bought the Rightwing propaganda that it was about teaching 5 year old white kids to hate the fact they’re white—because so many of 5 year olds are doing graduate coursework at universities these days…
So, overall, race and racism have gone backward in recent years, and the main reason is that for far too many Republicans, nativism, white nationalism, christian nationalism, etc., have become defining characteristics of their politics, something that’s been driven by an extensive Rightwing propaganda media ecosystem and politicians eager to exploit it.
You didn’t ask about this, but one of the solutions, in my opinion, is to develop a strong alternative media ecosystem for the centre and the left, one that reports fairly and accurately, without resorting to the lazy “both-sides-ism” of the legacy media, nor the deliberate disinformation the Rightwing uses. If we can’t get back to facts-based and reality-based policy discussions, we won’t have a hope of moving things forward.
Pretty much everything I’ve said is also true for New Zealand, albeit with local flavour and issues specific to this country. The current Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister, Winston Peters, the leader of a rightwing populist party, campaigned using rhetoric lifted directly from the USA’s MAGAts. Just like their Dear Leader, Winnie (as he’s “affectionately” known) railed against transgender people (such as, he wanted a law that would require restaurant and cafe owners to ensure the public toilets customers used matched their birth gender—though he never said how that was to be done, like, maybe a quick genital check?), and he said that every policy he didn’t like, no matter how sensible, was "woke"—including government programmes designed to help Māori. In a plot twist, Winston is Māori.
Similarly, the leader of a hard-right neoliberal party, and set to become Deputy Prime Minister in around six months, David Seymour, railed against “special treatment” for Māori, and wanted a national referendum on the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi, the nation’s founding document, to strip out everything he decided was “special treatment” for Māori in favour of one standard based on English law and customs. He, too, is Māori.
The current Prime Minister, the leader of the conservative National Party, has also railed again Māori, including demanding that all government agencies must use their English language name first and most prominently. This was in reaction to government departments using their Maori name first, as is the ordinary custom. For example, we used to have Te Whatu Ora – Health New Zealand, and now those two are reversed. Similarly, Waka Kotahi–NZ Transport Agency is also switched around. In both cases the English name is stylised at a much larger type size than the Māori one. It will surprise no one who knows anything about me that I continue to use the Māori names, and exclusively.
In doing so, the PM was pandering to the older, mostly white base of his party who “don’t like all that marry [sic] stuff” (older white folks often incorrectly pronounce Māori as “marry”, and it often seems deliberate. During the campaign, the PM said that “no one” could remember the Māori names of government agencies and got them confused, which was an incredibly condescending thing to say: The English names of LOTS of government agencies have changed—sometimes multiple times—and yet the PM apparently thinks that people magically didn’t have any difficulty remembering the changed English names.
Those of us who oppose the current government call it the “Coalition of Chaos” (or CoC) for their general incompetence, the corruption of some ministers, their lies, and their ulterior motives for some of their initiatives. But nowhere is opposition stronger or louder than against the COC’s “war on Māori”, as the loudest critics put it. The haka in Parliament and the <i>massive</i> hikoi (march) to Parliament are probably the best-known overseas. The PM agreed to support Seymour’s Treaty Principles Bill only to the First Reading, and then will oppose it at the second and third—something that Seymour has attacked, of course. With National and all the Opposition parties against it, the bill cannot pass, no matter what the mercurial Winston does (though he’s unlikely to support it, if for no other reason than that it’s Seymour’s central policy objective.
Having said all that, there’s a very important way in which New Zealand is very unlike the USA: We can change it at the next election in 2026 by making the CoC a one-term government. If the Centre-Left win the next election, they will undo the worst things the CoC has done to Māori, as well as poor and working people generally. NZ doesn’t have the kind of “establishment consensus” that too often keeps Democrats from making real progressive change when they have power—and, arguably, that’s part of why Democrats lost so badly in 2024. Both the Democrats in the USA and the Centre-Left in NZ have every opportunity to come roaring back in 2026 IF they back real concrete progress. If they do, the conservatives’ failures on race will likely be one of the reasons the Right will be shown the door.
Thanks to Roger for today’s question!
All posts in this series are tagged “AAA-24”. All previous posts from every “Ask Arthur” series are tagged, appropriately enough, ”Ask Arthur”.
Previously in the 2024 series:
”Let the annual inquisition begin for 2024” – The first post in this year’s series.
”Ask Arthur 2024, Part 1: Pardon?4”
”Ask Arthur 2024, Part 2: An Orange hue”
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