“Castes.”

The White Man’S

Pertinent Comment from Polynesia.

Letter to the Editor, The article by a person signing him self “Na Vodre,” in your June issue, interests me because it deals with a subject about which I am exceedingly touchy, and one which is at all times more or less pertinent in most of the Polynesian Islands. I propose, then, with your permission, to discuss it a little in a very candid fashion.

The honesty, as well as the ethno logical accuracy, of the statement that “the Polynesian races are of the same root stock as ourselves,” and that “there exists no gulf between us that cannot be bridged by sympathy, tolerance and love,” appeals to me greatly; for these are points I have repeatedly emphasised in articles on the South Seas. Anyone whose ignorance or stupid racial preju dice questions that position is merely another of the white usurpers in these Islands who have contaminated, de based and exploited the Polynesian race for a hundred years.

In a recent article in the “Auckland Star,” I called attention to the fact that when the white man took over, usually without any consideration of the natives’ desires, the control of the several Pacific Islands groups he entered upon a trust.

That is to say, he became responsible for the welfare of these Islands peoples to whom he was very much in advance materially—but possibly not so much so in the broadest spiritual sense. He assumed a trust, and his first considera tion ought to have been the good of these people, rather than his own com

mercial aggrandisement But that was not his first consideration —and the fact that it was not constitutes one of the worst of all blots on the record of the white man’s contact with “inferior” peoples.

However, it is too late now to remedy that. The mischief is done, and every decent white man is ashamed of it, in his heart. But to keep up this absurd pretence of racial superiority over the Polynesians, as declared in asinine talk about Europeans “going native” when they marry women of Polynesian blood, passes the bounds of patience.

Similarly irritating are the “distinc tions” made in some of the Islands — to which Hawaii, whatever else it may lately have developed into, is happily and creditably an exception—distinc tions based in nine cases out of ten on jealously and nothing more. Everyone understands that the white woman is not at her best in hot countries. And since, even at her best, she is hard put to it to match those of Polynesian blood either in charm, gentle characteristics or —woman’s greatest appeal sheer femininity, she sets up a social barrier in the preposterous thing called “caste.”

The male has no choice but to be guided by it—in public, that is to say; though behind the nearest tree, in a manner of speaking, he defies it.

And thus he turns convention into hypocrisy—nor does that take much turning.

Who endowed the European with his divine right to relegate every other race to “inferiority” and to humiliate them by setting up his castes? I once asked that question in an article in Shang hai, inspired by the sight of a European kicking a well-dressed Chinese student off the footpath in Nanking Road. It is equally applicable in the South Seas.

I am., etc.,

Marc T. Greene.

Suva, July 5, 1933.