The first essay is from a guy here in New Zealand, Haimona Gray, who is of Maori lineage but is being forced to study old wounds in his past because of recent political events here.

The second essay is actually a transcript from a speech by a woman in America, Bari Weiss, who, up until quite recently was regarded as a decent lefty, complete with her Lesbianism and her marriage, among other things. Her wounds are recent.

But there is a common thread to both and that thread is the rise of an especially divisive and toxic new form of Far Left politics that goes far beyond the Marxism of old and which has spread into every aspect of Left-Wing issues: Identity Politics as the new form of oppressor/oppressed and Cancel Kulture (which is closely related to Lenin-Think).

Gray writes of a comfortable, even wealthy childhood but one that had also had some strange shadows because his intimate connection to the politics of Maoridom from an early age due to his parents and other relations, in particular the infamous Harawira clan:

I was also told, at a very young age, an anecdote about a former colleague of my parents, the daughter of Titewhai Harawira who was also a colleague and who shared this sentiment as well, just not so graphically. She explained to my mother that my being of mixed race was a stain on my mother’s Maoridom, and that I should be aborted – violently, down a flight of stairs, if required.
…
Too Maori for some, not Maori enough for others. I knew that old blind before I could read.

As Gray says, given that family’s history of violence there’s no reason to just wave away such claims. But as you can see from that last sentence, this aspect of his life, literal blood-lines, has festered away for his entire life within Maoridom, and that those once-private attitudes are now becoming a public issue, thanks to the approach to politics of Te Pati Maori:

The way Karen Chhour has been treated disgusts me, but it doesn’t surprise me. I can relate to what she’s going through, and what she’s likely gone through her whole life. 
…
I believe this version of Te Pati Maori, on this issue and many others, actively doesn’t mean well. They are picking up the Harawira baton of racial division and are only gassing up people who share this hateful mindset… It won’t get better. Some people, like Rawiri Waititi, are too ingrained in this quite hateful mindset to be able to see the damage they are doing. Some people, like Willie Jackson, are too unintelligent and entitled to know any different.

Bari Weiss doesn’t speak of dealing with racism, although her stance on the Israel-Hamas war has got her there, and she does not describe a lifetime of such as Gray does. Instead she writes of her many Liberal beliefs about feminism versus Islam and the Trans movement, the environment, crime and justice and so forth:

I believe that all people are created equal and created in the image of God, but that all cultures are not equal… I believe that equality of opportunity and not equality of outcome is the true measure of fairness. I am repelled by ideologies that insist that our immutable characteristics are more important than our character.

But she ends up in a similar place to Gray with regards to how “her side” is treating her:

And yet somehow, in our most intellectual and prestigious spaces, many of the ideas I just outlined and others like them, have become provocative or controversial, which is really a polite way of saying unwelcome, beyond the pale. Even bigoted or racist.

Starting with her former workplace, the New York Times. She’d written of this before, but it’s actually a book and an article by her partner, Nellie Bowles, that shows how nasty it got at the NYT:

One early evening I was having drinks with an editor and a group of colleagues. The editor, who I liked a lot, heard I was dating this very bad liberal. And he looked at me straight in the face and said he thought it was pretty messed up.  He wanted to know: How could I do that? “She’s a Nazi. She’s a fucking Nazi, Nellie,” he said. I tried to laugh it off and he kept going. “Like are you serious, Nellie?” He lobbed another she’s a Nazi. My colleagues agreed. He kept going. He couldn’t believe I would do this, like wow. Eventually I got him to change the subject. 

Bowles article also discusses one thing closely connected to all this, in fact an essential weapon to enable it: Cancel Culture. She employed it, until the day came when she couldn’t do it against a target selected by her peers – and then found it employed against her:

She said very nicely that it was suspicious how quiet I was that day. She said, Nellie, you say a lot of things, yet you haven’t said anything about this one, today. She very politely told me that I was a racist. Then she said goodbye.

Unlike Weiss, Gray does not pinpoint the ideology driving all this (perhaps because he’s quite Left?) and instead sticks to the simple racism he sees, as well as providing pragmatic solutions to the Oranga Tamariki mess, which is what has sparked this hate-fest. But Bari Weiss did pinpoint the ideology in an earlier essay from late 2023:

What I saw was a worldview that replaced basic ideas of good and evil with a new rubric: the powerless (good) and the powerful (bad). It replaced lots of things. Color blindness with race obsession. Ideas with identity. Debate with denunciation. Persuasion with public shaming. The rule of law with the fury of the mob.

Whereas Gray admits to his burning anger and hatred of these people, something he acknowledges is not good or healthy but which fuels his fight, Weiss devotes much of her essay to how it all got to this stage, which she thinks is not so much because of the screamers…

Now the convenient answer, of course, is the power of extreme activists…There has always been and always will be a fringe. The difference right now is that the fringe seems to be calling the shots.

If you want to know why things have been turned upside down, why so many people are asking themselves if they’ve gone crazy, or if the world has, as they hear feminist groups justify rape as a tool of resistance; as groups that call themselves anti-racist advocate for a new kind of segregation; as young, highly educated people chant the slogans of jihadi terrorist groups; well, I ultimately don’t think that’s because of a few maniacs that are throwing paint on masterpieces in our museums.

It’s because they have been allowed to do so.

Gray would surely recognise such people, especially in the form of Te Pati Maori, but he doesn’t provide Weiss’s answer, let alone go on to explain as she does, how this happened:

Perhaps, to give the most generous read, it’s because the people shutting things down claim to be doing so in the name of justice, not in the name of nihilism. And because we believe them. Or perhaps it’s because we told ourselves, “It’s just a few nuts, I don’t need to get involved.” Or maybe it’s because people looked at their portfolio and decided that they were doing great by the numbers. And those torched stores? Ah, they probably had insurance anyway. Or because it was a headache. Or because they’re just kids. Or because, why die on that hill?

Or maybe it was because we thought they had a point. That America and the West really were guilty of all of the terrible things that they said, or at least of some of them. And though we wouldn’t have torn down statues or shouted down speakers, we lacked the conviction or the ideas to stop the people doing it. Or because maybe in the end we prized comfort over complexity. I was going to say prized comfort over truth, but the thing is, truth isn’t something you pull out of the ground like gold or diamonds. It is a process sustained by a culture of questioning, including self-questioning. Which is why right now it can look like the absolutists are winning.

And I have this terrible feeling that when Gray says “It won’t get better”, that’s because he offers in his Kiwi way merely practical solutions, while Weiss talks of courage:

My theory is that the reason we have a culture in crisis is because of the cowardice of people that know better. It is because the weakness of the silent, or rather the self-silencing majority. So why have we been silent? Simple. Because it’s easier. Because speaking up is hard, it is embarrassing, it makes you vulnerable.

I’ve yet to see any prominent NZ figure, whether political or not, stand up and call out this whole enterprise as the racist, toxic pile of Far Left ideology that it actually is; not just individual Te Pait Maori MP’s and not even just the party itself, but the countless academics and activists involved in this shit storm of “oppressor/oppressed hate” described by Gray.

And the reasons for that lack of pushback are those supplied by Weiss in her fight in America, except that in New Zealand it’s worse because they’re viewed as virtues. Practical solutions only, thank you.