The myth of Māori exceptionalism

Friday, 24 July 2020

Award-winning writer and medical student Emma Espiner is tired of the Pākehā notion that successful Māori are the exception. “The Māori women I know are holding together our world.”

Fed up with the tragic statistics and realities that continue to surround her Māori people, Emma Espiner decided to push for change from within the system. At age 30 she began to retrain as a doctor – her motivation and experience is the inspiration for a new podcast Getting Better launching on RNZ tomorrow.

A woman said to me at a dinner party recently, “Why can’t more Māori women be like you?” I tied myself up in knots for days afterwards trying to rationalise how an interesting conversation over the dessert course ended up there. Was it unconscious bias, the racist baggage of an older generation or just an excess of pinot noir?

I couldn’t understand the premise of the question because the Māori women I know are holding together our world – they’re my whānau, colleagues, the mums at my daughter’s school, the teachers, academics, artists and writers I most admire. On the other side of the dinner table was a stranger who wanted to know about the drugs, the child abuse and the criminals. She couldn’t piece together the component parts of our shared history, so she put her problem on my plate. I considered this woman as I licked raspberry coulis off the dessert fork and wondered if she thought I was a cannibal.

“I felt inspired by media articles about the ‘firsts’ among Māori in medicine until I realised that ‘first’ was another way of saying ‘only’.”

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The myth of Māori exceptionalism says that only a handful of us are worthy, and that we damn our sisters, aunties, mothers and grandmothers to worthlessness with our material success. “If you can do it, why can’t they?” It’s a common, tired argument from people who make no effort to understand our experiences but who, regardless, stand ready to condemn any of us who do not achieve the standards they set. It’s also rigged – when you succeed you are held up as one of the “good’’ ones but when we fail, we fail collectively as Māori.

I was accepted into medical school at the University of Auckland through the Māori and Pacific Admissions Scheme (MAPAS) at the age of 30 after a career in business and a short-lived but instructive period working in politics. I taught myself science from free online lectures through the Khan Academy while my newborn daughter slept. She was my main motivation for retraining as a doctor; I wanted her to be proud of the work that her mother did and I wanted to be part of the transformation of our health system so that it would serve her – a Māori child – as effectively as it serves her non-Māori friends and relatives.

A favourite target of Don Brash et al., MAPAS is the vehicle which, alongside its Otago University equivalent, has slowly built up the numbers of Māori and Pacific doctors so that we now comprise 3.5 per cent and 1.8 per cent of the medical workforce, respectively. This is the work of decades and it’s not nearly enough when you consider proportionality relative to the overall population and the immense need among our people. For a long time as a trainee doctor I felt inspired by media articles about the “firsts” among Māori in medicine until I realised that “first” was another way of saying “only”. I’ve had only two Māori clinical supervisors out of dozens during my clinical training and one of them I had to seek out myself for an elective placement. As a Māori medical student your opportunities to be mentored or supervised on placements by someone who can relate to your experience and the experience of your whānau are still vanishingly rare.

You have to be tough, to go through MAPAS. In the pre-application meeting they tell us that we’ll be questioned about our right to be at medical school and, later, about our right to practise as doctors. That above and beyond the baseline expectations of this gruelling six-year degree, we will face discrimination from our peers, teachers, patients and clinical supervisors. Gathered together in a lecture theatre while the other students study for first-year exams, the Māori and Pasifika students are paired off to practise responses to questions like: “Didn’t you only get into med because you’re brown?” Many of us are “innocently’’ misidentified as hospital cleaners when we’re on clinical placement. Recently I had someone ask if MAPAS students receive all the answers to our exams in advance, such is the persistence of this idea of our “easy’’ entrance into medicine.

Most of us have little time for navel-gazing or feeling sorry for ourselves with respect to this kind of ignorance. We saw family members let down by the health system long before we were taught about it at medical school and our eyes are on a bigger prize – improving the system from within. This isn’t to minimise the hurt and rage that many of us feel, but to explain that we win by becoming alchemists; with the support of our peers and mentors (Māori and Pākehā alike), we take all of this ugliness on board and transmute it into a fierce determination to make things better for those who are coming after us – for our patients, our whānau and the current and future Māori medical students.

We made this podcast because we were angry about the statistics, the endless reports and inquiries into inequity that have barely budged the trailing life expectancy for Māori compared to non-Māori, and the persistently shitty outcomes for our people across every imaginable health indicator. We were angry but we were also bored. Bored by the numbers and the hand-wringing and the inaction. Pushed into frustration by the inertia of restating truths which have not been meaningfully acted upon even when proven beyond reasonable doubt. The urgency with which the Government responded to the Covid-19 pandemic underlines this lack of urgency when it comes to Māori.

Ironically, with this motivation, researching the podcast ended up being a deeply introspective process that hammered home the gains that have been made by my predecessors. You sometimes forget when you’re looking at a graph explaining how much faster your Māori relatives will die compared to your non-Māori relatives, that it’s a point in time: not predictive, not immutable, just a glimpse of right now. When you dig deeper you realise that the things we take for granted were hard fought and won by many of the same teachers/clinicians/researchers who take a new group of medical students through “racism in the health system 101’’ every year. The building blocks for change are still being fashioned by these same hands. Those wins aren’t always flashy nor easily understood and can be as simple as the right to name racism. At her inaugural lecture as the first Māori professor appointed by the University of Auckland to the Faculty of Medical and Health Sciences in 40 years, Professor Papaarangi Reid told the crowd that data does not speak for itself, that we speak for it and (inferred that) we better know what we’re doing.

Our podcast was not made for everyone. Everyone is welcome to it, and to learn something from it, but we’re done with gently educating people who should know better. People who lack the basic respect it takes to do the work to understand why things are the way they are for Māori, their fellow New Zealanders. In 2020 there is no longer any excuse for this, for not knowing about the legacy of colonisation and the harmful impacts of racism. Maybe this will add to the resources already available to people who believe that reconciliation is important for our country and that would be a cool and positive outcome as far as I’m concerned. But first and most importantly the series is a love letter to my peers and colleagues, and to our whānau to whom we are all devoted and for whom we would gladly shoulder all the racism and ignorance in our institutions and health system so that they don’t have to.

Getting Better is produced by Bird of Paradise Productions for RNZ as part of the RNZ/NZOnAir Innovation Fund and is available on podcast platforms and www.rnz.co.nz from July 27.