More Subtle Attitudes

Te Ao Hou, December 1963, Page 16

More Subtle Attitudes These are crude examples of white superiority attitudes. But there are more subtle kinds of ethnocentricity, attitudes of tolerance and patronage, of the some-of-my-best-friends kind. Most subtle of all is the kind of attitude held

often enough by white liberals. Here the supposition is that Maoris become acceptable as they become less Maori and more like middle-class whites, as they show the favoured forms of diligence, temperance, and the like. There is also a counter attitude in which Maoris are admired for their simplicity and vitality. Do not think that these attitudes are held only by whites. Maori children quite often carry the same or similar attitudes, and one is as likely to hear an anti-Negro or anti-Semitic remark from them as anyone else, although of course one encounters a reverse version of the white forms of prejudice where these are directed specially at Maoris. Teachers are no less likely to be prejudiced than anyone else in the community and though in the only case that I know of where a teacher acted in a discriminatory fashion toward Maori pupils this was very strongly disapproved by his colleagues, nonetheless these same people often enough displayed innocently prejudiced thinking. Because I have seen a good deal of this kind of thing and have run all too frequently into the most astounding over-simplifications of race-relations problems I think that the time is overdue for this to become a compulsory part of teacher education.