National Loving Day.
Something to celebrate.
Don’t be panicked by that title. This newsletter has nothing to do with Christopher Luxon, or his desire to increase the population. This is about today, June the 12th, National Loving Day.
More on that shortly, but first let me take you back in time forty years…
When I was a kid there was a dating show on TV called the Love Connection. It was as American as they came. From provincial NZ in the mid 80s it looked like another planet. Wealthy looking people with bright white teeth and absurd levels of confidence enjoying the spotlight and “dating” the heck out of each other. But one thing seemed stranger than everything else.
There was no race mixing. None. Each episode was either all white people, or all black people, and no one said a thing about it. I remember gradually coming to the realisation and it just seemed so odd.
Thinking about it now it shouldn’t have. If you remember the casts of those 80s family shows - Cheers, Family Ties, The Dukes of Hazzard, Happy Days, Mork and Mindy - there weren’t a lot of non white faces. Were there any?
No wonder people got so excited by the Cosby Show. A black family, in prime time! Yet they were not dissimilar from the episodes with African Americans on the Love Connection. There they were living their fabulous lives but in a parallel universe without a lot of crossover with the white world.
We also got a lot of television from Australia. They solved the issue by simply not showing brown people on TV. The most you might get would be a kindly old aboriginal fellow who was very wise and not in the slightest bit bitter.
Now Rotorua 40 years ago wasn’t the most ethnically diverse place. There were a couple of kids in my year that were from Tokelau, and there was one kid from China. But that was about it. Apart from that it was about half pakeha and half Māori. That was just normal it seemed. To the point where I used to find it odd when we went to visit relatives in Christchurch and there didn’t seem to be any Māori people.
