Let yourself let go: RANT TIME

smile-when-youre-sad:

I don’t understand how in New Zealand we have specific scholarships and schools just for Maori people. I mean, if someone said “Oh sorry, Maori aren’t allowed to apply for this scholarship/go to this school” everyone would get SO offended and say we were being racist! Yet, apparently it’s okay to…

I’ve grumbled about this same thing in the past. I think the thing is, what they’re trying to do is help equalize things a bit. It’s called affirmative action: basically, helping people who in the past did not get equal chances (in this case, basically had their land taken off them and were treated as second class citizens) to get back to an equal place in society as the rest of us. Of course, you could say it’s unfair to many of us today, but as a whole, there are still more, at least by percentage, poor Maori families where neither parent has been to university than there are white families in the same situation, for example. And that is what this is trying to fix. While it’s picking one thing instead of another, it’s doing so because the other thing was picked way too many times in the past, to balance things out. It’s like the “women in engineering” scholarships. Where you have too many of one group in a certain industry or lifestyle, it becomes harder for others to enter it because the group thinks it is the “normal” (and you get extremely sexist engineering clubs for example, or extremely racist upper-class suburbs).

Re specific-race schools. I’m fairly sure they’re specific-culture schools? Correct me if I’m wrong, but immersion schools are for the preservation of a certain culture, and are not judged by exactly what race you are. Just like fundamentalist Christian or Catholic schools are for the preservation of a particular religious culture, living the way they think you should live, and you don’t have to be explicitly going to an approved church to attend and learn the lifestyle. They’d love to have new people interested in adopting and spreading the lifestyle, and as far as I know so would the Maori immersion schools. They want to preserve traditional culture, doesn’t matter who does it.

I’m not happy that affirmative action has to happen at all, but I guess as an Asian migrant myself I can’t feel too unhappy about it. While I miss out on all the fancy race scholarships, I also miss out on all the “must have a relative in the Armed Forces / served in WWII / worked for this company in 1900” legacy scholarships, which most of the time benefit a very specific group of white people.

It sucks, but honestly I’d rather get the open-entry scholarships and do fucking well on my own and not be able to ever have anyone say “oh she only got that because she was female/ queer/ Asian/ mentally ill/whatever”. Because if I felt like I worked my ass off to get to where I was, and people were saying that it wasn’t a big deal because of something I couldn’t change, I would absolutely hate that.