"The Drama of Inheritance"

Reflections on Ethnic and Racial Categories from Living Abroad

When I lived in Nuremberg I worked as a waiter at a restaurant. One of my fellow waitresses was Turkish. I only found out when the greengrocer from across the street, an elderly lady from Turkey who came in everyday for coffee, asked her. Their conversation piqued my curiosity. I wanted to learn more about my co-worker (and also saw an opportunity to practice my German).

When the grocer left I asked: “Are you from Turkey?” She was visibly irritated. “Doch. I was born here.” So were her parents. My co-worker didn’t speak any Turkish and had never been to Turkey. I didn’t think she looked or sounded especially Turkish: she had no foreign accent and scolded all of my mistakes with the ease and manner of a German.

In what sense was she Turkish? Back home, I would have thought of any permanent resident who had spent a good chunk of their lives there as being a New Zealander, regardless of their ethnicity. It seemed unusual that someone would so strongly refute the idea of being German, even when, to my ignorant eye, they had far more in common with the Germans than with the Turkish grocer across the road.

I left Germany with the impression that the ethnic and national identities of that country are still often associated with one another. For a not insignificant chunk of people, you seem to need to be both to be considered German. For the “native” Germans, local identity (of the city, region, or village) is sometimes more important than the national one. My favourite example is when the manager was showing me the beers on tap. I pointed to one and asked him: “Is this beer German?” He replied: “No, it’s Bavarian.”

How did the Turks fit into this? I learned that they had migrated to Germany (and the Netherlands) in large numbers after World War II. The two countries were experiencing a labour shortage, so they brought in these guest-workers (German Gastarbeiter, Dutch Gastarbeider) under the assumption that they would go home afterwards. Many of them stayed. Not all of them integrated into German society—not all of them were accepted—and that is why my co-worker, several generations later, was not “German”.

She wasn’t the only one in this ethnically ambiguous zone. Another of our co-workers was born in Croatia, but had grown up in Germany. To Germans he was Croatian. To Croatians he was German. To our Serbian line-cook, he was too brown to be entirely Slavic, so he was “a fucking gypsy,” yet he spoke “our language” (as they seem to call it) and therefore shared that sense of belonging, even if he wasn’t the best and purest example of it (Serbian, the line cook assured me).

All the same, no-one really understood what I was. I barely understand myself. “I am Māori and Pākehā” means nothing to a circle of Balkan immigrants in Germany. Neither does “Polynesian” or even “Pacific.” I went broader and broader until I just left it at: “I am from New Zealand”, and hoped they knew what that meant.

Not everyone I met on my travels was satisfied by that answer. While working at a retirement home in Haren (the Netherlands), I told my boss—an elderly lady who spoke Gronings as a first language—that I was from New Zealand. She didn’t believe me. “Where are you actually from?” she asked. Perhaps what she meant was: “You don’t look like a white person. You must have come from somewhere else recently. Where?”

Am I white? In New Zealand, I would consider my skin colour to lie on the white side of the border between white and not-quite-white. Brown people might consider me white; white people might consider me brown. I am non-white in the sense that I have non-white blood and a Polynesian appearance, but to phrase things that way is to orient ethnic identity from the white perspective. On the other side of the coin, Polynesians think I am white because I have white blood and a white appearance.

In the lily-white Netherlands, I definitely looked too foreign to be Northern European, and was usually assumed to be Mediterranean or Middle-Eastern. When people learned I was from New Zealand, they would sometimes behave more nicely to me. One time, on my last day as a cleaner at a vacation park, I told my boss where I was from. “New Zealand!” she exclaimed, as if relieved. “I thought you were a refugee from Iraq.”

There are multiple levels to any person’s sense of identity. I consider myself Māori and Pākehā, and I insist on using both of those particular words to describe it where others would say “Māori” or “part-Māori”. Sometimes I (half-jokingly) call myself a white Māori. But I am also a New Zealander, and have become more attached to that label since living abroad.

My way of describing it feels the most honest and accurate of all the other formulations I’ve heard. It may not entirely capture what I feel I am, but it provokes the fewest misunderstandings, and people tend to accept it.

The prevailing sensitivity is to allow people to identify as whatever they like and accept that at face-value. As a way of navigating differences in society, this is a sound rule. But it has limits. No one is fooled by the Rachel Dolezals and Elizabeth Warrens. Their ethnic identification is disingenuous and illegitimate, even if they honestly believe it. Such examples show us that subjective self-identification doesn’t capture everything about race and ethnicity. The words themselves imply historical communities of people in likeness, not just the pure feeling individual.

The most unusual truth about ethnic groups is that their boundary—and thus membership—is often determined by people outside of them. If the fact that I was Māori had not been reinforced when I was growing up—including by bullies—I may have never developed the sense that I am Māori. I could just as easily have become someone with Māori ancestors, the same way I am a person with Scottish and English ancestors, but am neither Scottish nor English.

If you go back far enough, my tipuna would have never thought of themselves as Māori. They would have only seen a commonality in those who shared whakapapa. The word Māori, which otherwise means “normal” or “pure”, started to be used as an ethnic descriptor to distinguish all of us from the strange white guys in huge boats. The tribes of New Zealand only began to see themselves as a singular people when someone else showed up in the picture. My Māoritanga is not some ancient piece of myself predating and outlasting the influence of Pākehā. It came into existence with the colonial encounter.

Because the words themselves are not fixed, and the people they designate re-constitute over time, race and ethnicity are, as Donna Haraway describes it, “unstable” and “protean.” She describes race as a paradox: a natural quality that is socially constructed, an “inherently dubious notion” which nonetheless governs “the drama of inheritance”:

Like nature, race is the kind of category about which no one is neutral, no one unscathed, no one sure of their ground, if there is a ground. Race is a peculiar kind of object of knowledge and practice. The meanings of the word are unstable and protean; the status of the word’s referent has wobbled – and still wobbles – from being considered real and rooted in the natural, physical body to being considered illusory and utterly socially constructed… An inherently dubious notion, [race is] is about the purity of lineage; the legitimacy of passage; and the drama of the inheritance of bodies, property, and stories.¹

Though Donna Haraway is talking here about race, I think what she says also applies to ethnicity. Ethnicity and race both have subjective and objective senses. They are subjective in that they are experienced in highly personal ways of being or belonging. They are objective in denoting inter-generational communities which share that way of belonging.

At one point or another everyone of mixed heritage must have some doubts about what they are. Turkish or German? Māori or Pākehā? Both?—but if both, then neither. Everyone has some nebulous sense of their own identity. Some never interrogate or question it, but others have no choice. At the crossroads of cultures, people are forced to examine the boundaries of where they came from to figure out whether they still belong to it.

There is a human instinct to draw lines, separating those who belong from those who don’t. At multiple points in history, it has had devastating consequences. It may emerge as the product of bigotry and suspicion and ignorance, but it still affects how other people see us, and thus how we see ourselves. And it continues its vigil over the drama of inheritance—that collective passing of things valuable down the generations—sharpening and sustaining the sense that I belong to something real and greater and longer-lasting than myself.

1. Donna J. Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan©Meets_OncoMouse™: Feminism and Technoscience. New York: Routledge, 1997. p. 213.