Solidarity and the pathway to Pākehā Liberation / A.J. Hendry

It has been believed that charity is a social, and in my own context, a Christian one.

That charity is what good people do, and that if we want to “do our part in the world” we should volunteer, donate our time, our money, support initiatives that provide charity to the poor and “under-privileged” in our society.

But, charity is not the virtuous activity that we have allowed ourselves to believe it to be.

Charity is a cancer.

It poisons our soul, inoculating us against the true root of our people’s oppression.

Charity acts as a balm, an ointment to our conscious, providing us with the opportunity to feel like we’re doing something, when in fact we are not.

We – atheists, Christians, Muslims, Jews - humans are called to enact Justice for our people.

To see the Divine image in the other, to recognize that there is in fact no other at all, only us.

To recognize, that when one suffers, so do we all.

Our nation faces a crisis. Our communities are disintegrating staggering under the weight of poverty, suicide, anxiety, homelessness, and isolation.

To think that charity can solve these ill’s is ill conceived.

It is a farce.

Charity cannot enact Justice.

And it is Justice we so desperately need.

For charity does not contribute to the solution, it sustains the problem. Charity feeds the people, while ignoring the reason they are in need of food in the first place. Charity is a tool utilized by the Empire, appeasing the conscious of those who can enact Justice, yet choose not to. But, Justice, justice seeks to make what is wrong, right. Justice recognizes that giving a piece of bread to a starving man is not enough, when you were the one who deprived him of the means of making bread in the first place. Justice requires action. Justice requires change. Justice requires the disruption of the status quo.

And yet, Pākehā for too long, and too often, have considered charity an appropriate substitute for Justice. Content to donate time or money to a cause that makes us feel good, while continuing to support and benefit from the system that is oppressing the people.

A great sadness for myself, as a person of faith, and a follower of Jesus, is that the Pākehā church is largely no different. We have for too long comforted ourselves with acts of Charity in place of movements of Justice. We have contented ourselves with food parcels, and community clean ups, and have given our used clothes, and unwanted food cans to the poor, and named that a job well done.

And meanwhile the poor remain poor. The unhoused, remain on our streets. And the margins grow wider and are pushed further.

But, to give charity, and deny Justice, is perverse.

It is perverse, to donate your spare cans to a food parcel, while opposing the development of an equitable tax system that would tax the wealthy and redistribute the nation’s wealth to the poor.

It is an abomination, that the pākehā ruling class, would donate clothes to the Mission for the homeless, while mobilizing to oppose a capital gains tax, or healthy home standards.

It is abhorrent, for pākehā to volunteer at a soup kitchen, while resisting welfare reform, and opposing the rise in benefit levels.

There is something deeply wrong with pākehā.

We have dehumanized ourselves to the point where we have become untouched, indifferent, to the suffering of our māori whanau.

It is not a contestable point that western colonialism has harmed and is harming tangata whenua, and yet we contest it. Our māori whanau are overrepresented in every negative statistic, from homelessness, to health, to the justice system. Overwhelmingly, it is māori who are living in poverty, and suffering due to a system that benefits and was built for pākehā. And yet, we bend over backwards to argue this point, preferring the comfort of the status quo, than the discomfort of change that could make a real difference.

And as we’re seeing, the way we are doing things is harming both pākehā and māori. Though māori are disproportionately represented wherever you find statistics reflecting injustice and inequality, pākehā are also being harmed by a system and way of being that just does not value human life.

We can do better as a people, as a nation, we can create something uniquely different from anywhere in the world, a place where te ao pākehā and te ao māori ways of being are held up equally, just as our ancestors envisioned.

Yet, as pākehā we would rather the status quo (a point evidenced by the fact that the status quo remains the status quo), then the discomforts of change that could save the lives of our māori whānau.

That says so much more about us, the coldness of our own hearts, our own inhumanity, than it says about others.

We pākehā are in bondage to a way of being that does not allow us to see the humanity of others, let alone allow us to reflect our own humanity. Our focus on growth, on the accumulation of wealth, the GDP, capitalism, property investment, on our own comfort and security, it is killing our soul.

When we, who have taken so much, can cry out in protest against māori seeking only the slightest acknowledgement of their rights from their treaty partners, our humanity has been distorted

If our nation is to flourish, if we are to heal, if we are to respond in any meaningful way to the growing inequality that exists within this whenua, then pākehā must be liberated.

We must liberate our minds, our souls, we must kill the colonizer within, and we must do away with acts of charity, and commit ourselves to movements of Justice.

But, Justice will not be achieved if we remain apart from one another. To realize Justice within our societies we must move past charity, past soft and easy platitudes, past hope in solely legislative solutions. We must move past what is easy, and step onto a path less travelled. A path that will require the restructuring of our very existence. A path that leads us into solidarity with one another.

This is no easy path. We will sacrifice much to travail here.

For solidarity requires movement. We must move towards the other, and they towards us. We must join with one another, identifying with each other’s grief, suffering and joy, until the other is no more, and we are all that remain.

We cannot be free, we will not be human, until we renounce our privilege and join with those we have oppressed.

This is the key to pākehā liberation.

This is the pathway to our salvation.

A.J. Hendry is a Laidlaw College graduate, and now a Youth Development Worker and housing advocate, working in the Youth Housing and Homelessness space. He leads a service supporting rangatahi experiencing homelessness and is also a steering group member of Manaaki Rangatahi, a collective working to end youth homelessness in Aotearoa. He is also the curator and creator of When Lambs Are Silent.