Why George Floyd Matters In Aotearoa

During the first week of lockdown I spent a lot of time walking down the wide empty streets of Central Wellington. Down Cuba Street, across Wakefield, and then back up Tory. These streets have been in my memory so long I give no thought to them anymore. And yet there’s a story to those streets.

William Wakefield is arguably one of the most ruthless examples of colonial exploitation in our history. Wakefield arrived on the shores of Aotearoa with the New Zealand Company. Systematically, Wakefield exploited local Māori for economic gain. Now, he has a street named after him. And Cuba and Tory? They’re named after two of the ships that brought the first immigrants to cultivate the ill-gotten land. 

Over the past weeks, the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis Police has pushed the cause of Black Lives Matter powerfully into the fore of our global consciousness. In the US, statues of slave owners have been torn down, and streets have been renamed to reflect the new America that BLM hope to call forth. And yet I look at the city I grew up in… and there’s still a memorial to William Wakefield right in the middle of the Basin Reserve. 

Co-Dean of Taranaki Cathedral, Jay Ruka, thinks that the protests and marches in the States should be a rallying cry to us here in Aotearoa as well. “African-American enslavement is part of the colonial story of the United States, but that narrative of discovery and civilisation was unfolding all over the globe at the time. This is a moment to undo the centuries-old narrative that white is right. To challenge those baseline assumptions that push Māori again and again to the fringes.”

Jay identifies that while the specific fruit of the US situation differs from our context, it is without doubt from the same root. “There is no doubt racial bias exists in New Zealand policing, you only need to look at the prison statistics.” Jay says that Pākeha New Zealand has been sleeping, and this is a moment for them to awaken. “I think the best way you could describe it is White blindness. Blindness that comes from a racist ignorance that thinks anything European is a-cultural, and everything Māori is other.” 

Black lives matter when Black stories begin to matter. And here, in Aotearoa, Jay has a sense that God is offering us a particular grace to make peace with our past. “Every Christian in Aotearoa has a responsibility to let the story of George Floyd and Black Lives Matter read our own realities of oppression and injustice done to Māori. We have a God-given grace offered to us now to deal with our history.” Jay hopes this will be a moment where we say yes to God’s invitation to reconciliation. 

This is Part One of two pieces we will be releasing on George Floyd and BLM.
Our next piece, by Hannah Chapman, will come out Monday. 

By Scottie Reeve