In this guest blog post, Lorena Gibson, Catherine Trundle, and Tarapuhi Vaeau (lecturers in Cultural Anthropology at Victoria University of Wellington) respond to an article by Dame Anne Salmond (anthropologist, historian, and Professor of Māori Studies at the University of Auckland).
Some of our students have read and are talking about Dame Salmond’s recent article, Was James Cook a white supremacist? In the article, Dame Salmond argues that James Cook was not a white supremacist. Here we discuss why we disagree with this interpretation.
For many, white supremacy equals hardened ideologies of racial hatred, the sort of ‘ethnic cleansing’ and ‘racial pollution’ rhetorics we see among neo Nazis, the KKK, and white nationalists, or in the ideology of ‘lone wolf’ white men who attack mosques and minority groups.
But that is not how many Black and Indigenous experts, leaders and activists use the term (see bell hooks, Erika Hart, Moana Jackson, Ijeoma Oluo). And it’s not how critical race scholars use the term.
Whiteness and white supremacy are systems and structures, built on the idea of race, that exist locally and globally. Whiteness, white privilege, and white supremacy are commonly subconscious, sometimes subtle, and not always easy to see. They can hide behind kind words about ‘inclusion’ and ‘progress’ and ‘diversity’.
White supremacy also includes overt acts of racism and hatred based on racial categories and unequal hierarchies of race. And it includes the institutions in our society that contribute to the systemic disadvantages that are faced disproportionately by Māori, Pacific peoples, Black peoples, Indigenous communities, those from refugee backgrounds, and other communities of colour.
White supremacy is premised on a set of assumptions and actions upon which the era of empire and colonisation was founded, and which still continue into the present. In response to the white supremacist terror attacks in Christchurch early this year, Moana Jackson writes:
… the massacres in Christchurch and the ideologies of racism and white supremacy which underpinned them did not come about in some non-contextual vacuum. They are instead a manifestation of the particular history of colonisation and its founding presumption that the so-called white people in Europe were inherently superior to everyone else. Some of Europe’s greatest thinkers contributed to the development of this presumption, and it eventually encompassed everything from the superiority of their form of government to the greater reason of their minds and even the beauty of their bodies...The consequent dispossession of indigenous peoples was a race-based process that led to the genocide and deaths of millions of innocent men, women and children around the world.
The violence Jackson refers to includes the long term impact of slavery, borders, poverty, land and resource alienation, illness, as well as more overt event assaults such as massacres, war, murder, and maiming.
White supremacy is at its heart about dispossession, or as sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois put it in 1920, “whiteness is the ownership of the earth forever and ever, Amen!” Tina Ngata has discussed how the Doctrine of Discovery – a 15th century legal concept arising from Catholic laws that “gave the monarchies of Britain and Europe the right to conquer and claim lands, and to convert or kill the native inhabitants of those lands” – contributed to “a sense of supreme European entitlement to all non-white, non-Christian lands and resources.”
As Dr Emalani Case said in her guest lecture to our ANTH 315 Anthropology for Liberation course at Victoria University of Wellington last week, James Cook’s voyages were part of this Doctrine of Discovery, which itself is underpinned by white Christian supremacy and the belief that anyone not white or Christian was and is not fully human.
Everyone who participated and participates in that project of dispossession, including Cook, is part of the project of white supremacy. And today white supremacy is, for the most part, evident in the everyday actions, both small and large, through which Pākehā and those who benefit from their proximity to whiteness support a system that ensures their ongoing social privilege, mobility, and advantage (see historical privilege).
Such a definition of white supremacy is useful for how it foregrounds structural factors into which we are all born, the consequences of which we must contend with. Another advantage is that it creates a map of connections, showing how overt racial hatred is just the visible tip of an iceberg of race thinking. And perhaps most importantly, it invites us all to reflect and act to dismantle racism.
When Anne Salmond asks the question, “Was James Cook a white supremacist? Let's examine the evidence,” she unpacks and describes his personal history, the way he wrote about wanting to cultivate friendship and alliance with Māori, and goes into great detail about how Cook and his men sought to avoid bloodshed and build good relations.
We think this is the wrong question to ask. It loses the wood for the trees. And indeed Cook’s intentions, like those of the vast majority of Pākehā, are not the issue at stake. It was his participation, indeed leadership, in a colonial system based on the Doctrine of Discovery that alone warrants the label of white supremacy. In her guest lecture Dr Case reflected on the symbolic power of Cook’s legacy, noting that “the celebration of Cook represents a celebration of colonialism in this country. It is the settler colonial states attempt to celebrate itself and reassert its dominance”.
As well as this, the very real and ongoing hurt resulting from the violence and deaths visited upon Māori communities by Cook’s expedition shouldn’t be overlooked. Anahera Herbert-Graves puts it plainly: “Wherever he went, like most people of the time of imperial expansion, there were murders, there were abductions, there were rapes, and just a lot of bad outcomes for the indigenous people.”
Dame Salmond’s article states that it is “irresponsible to twist the past to whip up hatred and anger ... History itself suggests that this leads to mistrust and violence.” Telling Māori to check their anger, to calm down, to use less radical language exemplifies a particular stereotype of the ‘angry Māori’ often used in the media to police, silence and marginalise protest, and, effectively, sanitise white supremacy.
And as Tina Ngata explains it: "Anything that contributes to the myth of racial harmony delays the important discussions we need to be having about the truth of race relations in Aotearoa."
Our response is that instead of being more frugal with the use of the concept of white supremacy, let’s expand its analytical power for understanding colonisation and coloniality, the part that individuals play in perpetuating that system, the powerful legacies of dispossession that endure into the present, as well as the legacies of resistance and resilience demonstrated by Black and Indigenous peoples for hundreds of years.
