"Their women"

"Their women"

__________

Some thoughts.

The guy from Eagle Brewing said things that were horrific and disgraceful - and not, apparently, for the first time. He's paying a price for it.

He's said he's sorry, that the comments came from the weight of stuff that he himself carries. She Is Not Your Rehab have reached out to him.

It's not for me to judge the sincerity of his remorse.

But there's one thing I want to call out, because I've heard it so many damn times it makes me weary in my bones.

The guy claimed his attack on Māori men, who he accused of beating their "missis", exploded out of him because he cares so much about domestic violence.

Using the defense of females as a pretext for racism is just about as old, and just about as tired, as racism itself. I once listened to a guy I worked with, ex-military, defending the invasion of Afghanistan because of how disgustingly these people treat "their women". The same guy drunkenly assaulted a much younger female colleague at a work function. She was too ashamed to come into the office the next day.

I had the privilege to recently attend a book reading of "Her Say", by Jackie Clark of The Aunties. It's the real-life stories of women who've lived through abuse, many of them wāhine Māori. Three women took the stage that night, to talk about what it means to go through hell and survive. They were brave, scarred, indomitable; mothers, poets and warriors.

And when they were asked what had helped, what had healed - you won't believe it - not one of them pointed to the racist outbursts of old white guys on Facebook.

Te Whare Tiaki Wāhine, Porirua's Māori women's refuge, were in the audience that night. They stood and told how they scrape by from one meagre grant to the next, work with a skeleton crew rostered 24/7, drive a banger of a car through the night to pick up any woman and her children who might need them. Blustering bigots didn't seem high on their agenda either.

Whatever voiceless things in need of rescue women of colour are supposed to be, well, these wāhine weren't.

You are not a knight in shining armour for your rant about how they treat "their women" - only a pusher of your own barrow. "Their" is a possessive. Women belong to themselves.

And you don't fix violence with racism, because racism is violence. All you do is dress your racism up a little, tell yourself it's respectable, like an ex-military guy mouthing off at work, afraid to look too hard at himself - because when a uniform is shabby and old, it will not hide the smallness of the person beneath.