Skip to main content

Everyday Jealousy, People of Colour Excellence, and the Specter of White Mediocrity

Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke delivering her powerful performance of haka

The radiant leadership of Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke, a young Māori MP, exposes the fragility of whiteness in Aotearoa, as white supremacist frameworks respond with envy to her unapologetic advocacy for tino rangatiratanga. The response of the infrastructure of whiteness to her brilliance also exposes something else, the deep undercurrent of jealousy that forms the ecosystem of white fragility.

Jealousy, that visceral pang of resentment, is a quiet undercurrent in the everyday life of settler colonialism. 

It festers in mundane interactions, in workplaces, academic halls, and social media feeds, often cloaked in civility or passive aggression. Whiteness, the hegemonic values of white culture, propped up as universal, continually deploys jealousy under the performance of civility.

Jealousy works as an everyday tool for the expression of white rage at the excellence of people of color. 

An excellent public speaker of color, just look at the white rage. 

An excellent artist of color, examine the white anger. 

An excellent poet of color, just look at the number of white supremacist responses on social media platforms that express outrage. The outrage is multiplied manifold if the person of color is authentic and confident in their excellence. The outrage is magnified exponentially if the person of color expresses pride in her culture through their performance.

When we peel back its layers, we find this culture of jealousy is entangled with power, privilege, and the unremarkable yet pervasive force of white mediocrity—a phenomenon that thrives not on excellence but on systemic advantage, stoking envy in its wake.

The rage and jealousy of whiteness targeting the excellence of people of color stem from a collision of systemic power dynamics and fragile privilege. Whiteness, as a structure, thrives on the myth of superiority, propped up by historical and institutional advantages that often reward mediocrity among white individuals while demanding exceptionalism from people of color. When people of color achieve excellence—through brilliance, resilience, or sheer defiance of systemic barriers—it disrupts this myth. Their success exposes the unearned nature of white privilege, revealing that the playing field was never level.

This disruption provokes rage because it threatens the status quo. Excellence from people of color challenges the narrative that whiteness inherently equates to merit. 

It forces a confrontation with the reality that many white individuals have coasted on systemic advantages—networks, access, or lowered expectations—rather than superior ability. Jealousy emerges as a defensive response, a way to deflect the discomfort of being outshone by those the system deems "lesser." Instead of introspection, this jealousy often manifests as hostility: microaggressions, gatekeeping, or outright sabotage. 

Particularly salient here is the response of whiteness, and its corollary, white mediocrity, to performance of excellence by people of color. The excellence of people of color challenges the carefully cultivated white networks that create, circulate, and protect white privilege. When people of color excel, the overarching supremacy of whiteness is both disrupted and challenged. When people of color excel, the hold of whiteness to pathways of reward through the everyday performance of mediocrity is challenged.

For example, in academia or workplaces, a person of color’s standout work might be scrutinized excessively or dismissed as "niche," while white mediocrity is normalized as "universal." As noted earlier, this rage is amplified when people of color refuse to assimilate into white norms, asserting their excellence on their own terms. It’s not just their success but their audacity to succeed authentically that stings.

The targeting is also strategic. 

By undermining or attacking the excellence of people of color, whiteness seeks to restore its dominance, to reassert control over who gets to be seen as "excellent." This is why the rage often feels personal yet is deeply structural—it's less about the individual and more about preserving a system that equates whiteness with worth.

At its core, this dynamic reflects a broader colonial logic: whiteness must diminish the Other to maintain its centrality. 

The antidote lies in dismantling these structures—calling out the mediocrity shielded by privilege and amplifying the brilliance of those who succeed despite it.


Popular posts from this blog

The Haka, the Hurt, and the Work We Owe

  The Haka, the Hurt, and the Work We Owe An Indian in Aotearoa reflects on resistance, complicity, and the solidarities we have yet to build Mohan Jyoti Dutta I watched the haka. I watched it several times, in fact. Each time, I tried to sit with what I was feeling before reaching for what I was supposed to think. Let me be honest about who I am in this conversation, because that matters. I am an upper caste, upwardly mobile Indian man. I am a professor at a university in Aotearoa. I carry the accumulated privileges of Brahminical socialisation, of English-medium education, of institutional access that was never designed for the communities I now write about and alongside. I say this not as confession but as orientation — because where you stand shapes what you see, and I have learned, through years of working with communities at the margins, that the refusal to name your own location is itself a colonial habit. The haka directed at Parmjeet Parmar did not offend me. It ...
Read more

Whiteness, NCA, and Distinguished Scholars

In a post made in response to the changes to how my discipline operates made by the Executive Committee of the largest organization of the discipline, the National Communication Association (NCA), one of the editors of a disciplinary journal Rhetoric and Public Affairs (RPA), Professor Martin J. Medhurst, a Distinguished Scholar of the discipline, calls out what he sees as the threat of identity (see below for his full piece published in the journal that he has edited for 20+ years, with 2019 SJR score of 0.27). In what he notes is a threat to the "scholarly merit" of the discipline, Professor Medhurst sets up a caricature of what he calls "identity." In his rhetorical construction of the struggles the NCA has faced over the years to find Distinguished Scholars of colour, he shares with us the facts. So let's look at the facts presented by this rhetor. It turns out, as a member of the Distinguished Scholar community of the NCA, Mr. Medhurst has problems with w...
Read more

The Substack and the Slur: How a Manufactured Crisis Toppled a Wahine Māori Political Editor

  The Substack and the Slur: How a Manufactured Crisis Toppled a Wahine Māori Political Editor On the architecture of the Aotearoa culture-war machine, and the danger it poses to a democracy heading into 2026 There is a particular cadence to the afternoon on which the career of a senior Māori journalist  at TVNZ is finished. It is unhurried. It begins with a tweet — in this case, a single image of a typed statement, posted by Maiki Sherman, the now-former political editor of TVNZ, on the afternoon of Friday, 8 May 2026, announcing that she had parted ways with the broadcaster. The post was terse, dignified, and final. As RNZ later reported , Sherman wrote that the scrutiny of the previous week had placed enormous pressure on her and rendered her role "untenable." The first wahine Māori to lead a major broadcaster's political team was gone. The story that finished her had not, ten days earlier, existed in any newspaper, on any wire, on any website you would consider mai...
Read more