whiteness

Although I may study discourses of racism, it never ceases to upset me each time whiteness is so dominant in the working order of everyday life, that it is in the expense of my identity.

Recently at work my colleague laughed when I said that I was a Kiwi. He said, “I’m sorry, but you only have to look in the mirror to know that you are not Kiwi. You are black.”
Indeed I am. I am Fijian-Indian, and although I was not born here, I’ve lived here for 15 out of the 19 years of my life. I would say that I have assimilated to New Zealand culture, on account of moving here so young – I didn’t know I had to adjust to something else.
I challenged my colleague’s point of view, asking that say hypothetically if I was a white German who had lived in New Zealand for the same amount of time, we would not even be having this conversation because the fact that I would be white would be enough to constitute me as a Kiwi.
He agreed.

This was clearly an example of what Richard Dyer states in his book White, that, “the property of whiteness, to be everything and nothing, is the source of its representational power.” My colleague’s point of view completely removed all the non-white New Zealanders from claiming selves as Kiwi. To belong, to be normal and indifferent, one must be white.

Interestingly, my colleague has only lived here for three years, and he himself is not white. As Herman Gray argues, “whiteness is the privileged yet unnamed place from which to see and make sense of the world.” Whiteness has a prevalent and superior affect on those living, or associated with colonised land. I have never disagreed with the fact that my ethnicity is Fijian-Indian, but when my Kiwi nationality is disputed, despite many struggles to integrate from my family, it is frankly disheartening.

Identity should not be invalidated by others in its exercise of Whiteness, it should matter only how you identity yourself.