HOW TO FRIGHTEN A MILLENNIAL
One afternoon in early autumn, my partner and I went to an ecologically sensitive shop where you can buy all manner of products, from lentils to black rice to organic strawberries coated in chocolate.
The shop, in a well-to-do Auckland suburb, is painted white and suffused with gentle sunlight, much like a sunny hospital ward. Here, customers can select carefully curated foodstuffs from rows of jars and bins. You then pop them into brown paper bags to be weighed and priced at the counter.
The staff are attractive, svelte young women, each with the quiet confidence only a comfortable, middle-class upbringing, with its expansive prospects, can provide.
When we took our bundle of small brown paper bags to the counter, after diving repeatedly into the bins for organic muesli and the like, the young Pākehā woman serving us asked cheerfully, as she toted up the damage, if we were locals.
When my partner said we lived at Narrow Neck, she said: “Awesome! It’s a nice beach. Does it get very crowded in weekends?”
“Sometimes in summer,” I said. “Bus-loads of Polynesians come each year. They sit under the trees or in a group in the water. They use the beach quite differently to us whiteys.”
The shop attendant’s face froze. Why would a middle-aged white man make anthropological observations about people of colour? Perhaps this was an example of racism? Perhaps it was an example of racism and elitism? Perhaps it was a deliberate provocation? She didn’t say anything. She looked away, clearly anxious, and opened the till – presumably hoping to cut the conversation short so it wouldn’t continue in an even more unseemly direction.
Fair enough. There were other people in the shop casually filling their bags. Who knows what shaming she might be subject to if news got out she’d reacted in a way that could be construed as endorsing a racist or elitist observation?
On the way back to my car, I was struck by the shop assistant’s obvious anxiety – a reaction I had noticed in other young, middle-class people when conversation veered into what might be seen as politically incorrect territory.
