The Conscience of our Society

Te Ao Hou, December 1963, Page 17

The Conscience of our Society What can be done. I am suspicious of recipes whatever name is attached to them and I think that official moves in the race relations and educational fields can only be slow and related to specific cases. You cannot legislate people into knowledge nor can you expect much from the man in the street. It remains then for us to become the conscience of our society in all matters of race relations. White New Zealand needs the services of the needle that punctures the pompous phrase, the piece of pious humbug. Social problems are not a product of numbers alone; they exist as the product of ideas in the minds of individuals. It

is you the Maori people who must goad us, the whites, into looking within ourselves for the source of our actions, and you must do likewise. The role of the education system in this is important. To conclude I should like to quote to you a passage from the American Negro writer James Baldwin whose eloquent essay, ‘Letter from a Region in my Mind’, I recommend to you. Although he is speaking of the American situation there is much here of importance to Aucklanders also. He says … ‘If we … and I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on or create the consciousness of the others—do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare and achieve our country, and change the history of the world.’