Aroha Gilling, who works as a public servant, reflects on the persistent racism she’s experienced in the workplace. (Image supplied)

Patterns of racism and privilege play out daily in workplaces and offices around Aotearoa.

Here’s public servant Aroha Gilling on some of the subtle methods of silencing she’s experienced.

While I was at university, I got my first job as a care assistant in a rest home.

I was rostered on to help feed and settle patients in the evenings. One of my favourites was a tiny kuia with the loveliest white hair that I looked forward to brushing before helping her prepare for bed. She and her husband were both residents. She couldn’t speak, but her eyes and gestures more than compensated for her lack of vocalisation, and every evening she asked to sit with her husband for dinner.

He would hold her hand and feed her small spoons of food, and she revelled in his attention and care. One night, my supervisor, who rarely appeared at dinner, instructed me not to seat them together. She said it prolonged their mealtimes and meant I took longer to get through the evening tasks. When I pointed out how happy they were together, my supervisor’s response was quick and vicious. She told me they were too far gone to know any better. She then said: “Of course, all you ‘maaris’ stick together.” She finished with the threat that if I didn’t want to get kicked back to the pā, I’d shut up and do as I was told.

From then on, the pair was separated for dinner. As long as I live, I will be haunted by the pained longing in the kuia’s eyes as she looked across the room at her tāne, and the agony and deep disappointment in his as he looked from her to me and back again.

Such an outright racist attack is shocking, but at least it’s obvious what’s happening.

There are other methods of attack, which are more difficult to identify but just as brutal in the end.

In my early days of teaching adults, I delivered a Treaty workshop to a group of counselling students. Every time I tried to use an experience from my own life, a student attempted to rationalise and explain the behaviour away. An example is when I described standing at a counter in the chemist and being passed over by the assistant in favour of the white customer behind me. The student said: “Maybe she didn’t see you?” Unlikely, I’m hard to miss! Then the student suggested: “Maybe she was already helping that lady.” Maybe she was, but good customer service protocol dictates you explain that to the customer you’re bypassing. Still another excuse followed. “Maybe the other customer needed something urgently.” Maybe I did, too, but the assistant didn’t even try to find out.

These attempts by the student to invalidate my experience rocked my confidence and made me question the truth of my experience. With a bit more time and teaching, I soon learned that the interaction showed me more about the student than anything else. It illustrated her inability to acknowledge societal racism and white privilege.

Here’s another workplace example. In a regular team meeting, a senior colleague often seemed not to hear items I raised. At first, I thought it was because the team tended to talk over each other. Then I started to see a pattern. She heard me fine when the topic was humorous or unthreatening — such as whether to stock Milo in the staff kitchen. But when my suggestions had anything to do with the Māori course content or Māori students, my voice appeared to fall into a void. Her failure to respond to these concerns essentially rendered me voiceless. Her lack of acknowledgement affected my willingness to raise concerns. Eventually, I stopped going to the meetings as it seemed futile.

Nowadays, that kind of behaviour just makes me more likely to attend meetings and to raise my voice and persist, but that’s the benefit of experience talking.

Not long ago, I was cleaning out my home office and came across a poem I’d scribbled on the back of a receipt. I could just make out the date, October 1992.

You will not tell my story

When you cannot speak your own

You won’t define my truth

While your own remains concealed

You cannot silence me

When I falter another voice will pick up the thread and keep the story alive

Ka whawhai tonu mātou, āke, āke, āke!

Judging from the date, I was finishing my post-grad and had just got my hands on a copy of Ranginui Walker’s book Ka whawhai tonu matou — Struggle Without End. At that time, I had also been introduced to the poetry of Maya Angelou, and I could hear echoes of her work in the frustrated lines I’d jotted down years before.

But I struggled to recall what I’d been so upset over. Then I remembered a tutorial on Patricia Grace, one of the few Māori authors on our reading list. I’d been looking forward to her book and the tutorial, having grown tired of all the “white man alone, forging a great British nation in the South Pacific” works we’d been reading. But the lesson was lacklustre, relied on stereotypes, and completely missed the beauty of the novel. Afterwards, I scrawled out my poem in frustration.

More than 30 years later, I still find meaning in my words, as we confront attempts to redefine, conceal or retell multiple aspects of our world.

When I teach today, I often talk about the Māori ability to hold multiple narratives in our heads — how we accommodate various origin and creation narratives and try to acknowledge the differing perspectives of hapū and iwi in these matters. I think this is a skill to be proud of. It encourages a diversity of thought that is quite different from deliberately skewed thinking or just plain getting it wrong.

When I was visiting another office recently, I was invited to attend their waiata group. Some of the songs were familiar and some new. Unfortunately, the guitarist had translated several of the waiata incorrectly and also retold our narratives in a way that privileged a western perspective. When I tried to point this out as tactfully as I could, he completely dismissed my contribution and told me I was wrong. He just kept repeating his assertions and increasing his volume. Redefining and talking over are yet more ways of silencing Indigenous voices.

“Well, at least it’s not as bad here for Māori as it is in Australia!” I hear this mitigation for colonisation in Aotearoa New Zealand all too often, and my response is always the same.

It doesn’t matter what the method of colonisation is when the result is the same across Indigenous populations. We are at the bottom of the socio-economic pile, disconnected from our language, values and beliefs. We end up vilified. Intergenerational trauma is frequent, and our life expectancy and quality of life are considerably less than that of the dominant culture.

Comparing and contrasting is a well-known psychological tactic used to confuse the victim in a violent relationship and convince them they should be grateful, no matter how horrific their situation.

There are many other tactics and variations but the penultimate ploy I want to reflect on is road-blocking. As the name suggests, this is the use of power and process to prevent access to platforms, support or resources.

In line with this tactic, I’ve been banned from attending meetings because I upset people (meaning I don’t agree with the dominant narrative). I’ve had meetings rescheduled, and no one told me or sent an updated invite. I’ve seen a pattern in one organisation of scheduling meetings for a time I’m unavailable despite there being plenty of alternative times when everyone in the team was available. Or suddenly, I’ve had to adhere to processes that have never applied to any of my colleagues. Or benefits are off limits to me because of my role or status in the organisation when the opposite is true for my non-Māori colleagues.

All this might sound paranoid to someone who has never experienced these things. But when days, weeks, months and eventually years of the same behaviour occur, it becomes a systemic pattern of racist, obstructive and destructive behaviour.

As I age, I’ve become less and less tolerant of these tactics and the variations I’ve described. These days, I don’t muck around trying to mirimiri sensitive feelings and delicate dispositions and I make no apologies for confronting racism head on.

This tendency to be direct often results in a blame-based response couched as constructive feedback from my Pākehā managers and colleagues. They will say things like, “Just give so and so a chance”, or “If you choose your words more carefully . . .”, or “Sometimes you can be a bit scary.”

I call bullshit on that! I’ve spent a lifetime being gracious and kind to careless, well-intentioned but hurtful, crass and outright racist people, and I’ve had enough.

How about they choose their words more carefully? And how about you giving what I’m saying a chance?

I am passionate because I’m living the impact of colonisation every day. My whānau must daily confront our lack of housing security, inequitable incomes, shocking service, poor health outcomes and reduced opportunities despite our hard-fought-for education, our years of working, often in multiple jobs, and our constant struggle to live, raise our voices and be heard.

To quote the wonderful Maya Angelou: “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” I will tell my story no matter what.

Aroha Gilling (Te Whānau a Apanui) is an adviser to government departments on Te Tiriti o Waitangi and mātauranga Māori. She has a Master of Indigenous Studies from the University of Otago and a background in adult education and social work. She lives in Nelson.

E-Tangata, 2024