42 Maranga Mai! White supremacy is the assumed superiority of whiteness, white culture, and white norms. It is an insidious ideological, political and religious system maintaining institutional control. White supremacy manifests as prejudice and bigotry in everyday life and is evident in extremist white supremacist violence like the March 2019 terrorist attack on masjidain in Christchurch. White supremacy assumes that non-white ways of being are invalid and abnormal. Denying racism Historical amnesia Avoiding the R-Word Historical amnesia is an extension of the myth of best race relations and whitewashes racism by “misremembering” the past (Jackson, 2019, 2016). Historical amnesia diminishes the violence and racism of the past (MacDonald, 2018, p. v) through deliberate forgetfulness and romanticisation of healthy race relations: New Zealand has an historical tendency to avoid talking about racism deferring instead to euphemistic discussions about unconscious bias and ‘casual racism’ (Azarmandi, 2017). This avoids addressing the impacts of racism, colonisation and white supremacy in society today: “If we don’t talk about racism then it follows that we cannot be racist” (Cooper and Davis, 2013): To ignore racism is to demonstrate an historical amnesia, and a blindness to the ongoing legacies of colonialism, the premise of which is white racial superiority; that is, racism (Cooper, 2016). The fallacy of the ‘best race relations’ in the world The myth that Aotearoa has had the ‘best race relations’ in the world is another way of denying racism (Sinclair, 1971). In the late nineteenth century, for example, it was not uncommon to hear “never had a civilised power treated a native race as kindly as they had treated the Maori” (Wanganui Herald, 1894). While this fiction has waned more recently (O’Malley, 2021), Pākehā once universally believed “no social colour bar, no segregation in public transport or living areas ever existed in New Zealand”. Without talking to Māori, Pākehā believed there was “relatively little social prejudice against Maoris” (Sinclair, 1971, p. 121). The purpose of perpetuating an illusion of good race relations is to whitewash systemic racism. The myth of healthy race relations has obscured the reality of what colonisation was and is. It has replaced the harsh reality of its racist violence and its illegitimate usurpation of power with a feel good rhetoric of Treaty-based good faith and Crown honour (Jackson, 2019). In places like mid-twentieth century Taranaki, a colour bar existed in all but name: Māori were not welcome in any Pākehā social institutions. Māori women were discouraged from entering the only public restroom; the community centre was regarded as a facility for Europeans only (Ballara, 1986, pp. 61, 99). In South Auckland between the 1920s and 1960s, barbers refused to cut hair for Māori, theatres had partitioned areas for Pākehā and Māori, by-laws prevented landlords from renting a house to Māori, schools had separate toilets for Māori students, and Māori children swam in the afternoons so they would not pollute the water before white kids swam (Bartholomew in Te Karere, 2020; Bartholomew, 2021, 2020). Of course, there were exceptions, but this practice was widespread in Aotearoa.