Is New Zealand racist as …?

Thursday, 12 September 2019

​Those Facebook reminders. Normally they pop up and tell you about a birthday or a holiday or some other pleasant event from the past. Remember when? The weather was great and everyone looked so happy. 

Juliet Moses had quite a different one recently. She got a notification from five years ago that revealed a photo taken during the lead-up to the 2014 general election. On a defaced National Party election hoarding, former Prime Minister John Key was given a Hasidic Jewish hat, beard and sidelocks by someone with spray paint. His election slogan, 'Working for New Zealand', was transformed into 'Lying Jew C--------r'. 

It was an overheated election campaign, to be sure. But there was more going on than the targeting of a Prime Minister with some anti-Semitic tropes and insults that most people simply shrugged at. 'Five years ago was, for many in the Jewish community, a real turning point,' Moses says. 'The scab had been ripped off.' 

Moses, an Auckland lawyer, is the spokesperson for the New Zealand Jewish Council, which looks after the interests of the Jewish community in New Zealand. Thinking back to 2014, she remembers there were loud criticisms of Israel's military actions in Gaza. 

But as is often the case, criticism of the state of Israel seemed to slide easily into anti-Jewish sentiment. She remembers a rally down Queen St in Auckland where a swastika was added to the Israeli flag, a sign said 'make Israel history' and a man shouted 'Bash the Jews! Cut their f---ing heads off!'

Yes, Moses believes in free speech and the right to protest but that crossed the line into something much nastier and more threatening. The Jewish Council wrote to the  human rights commissioner and the race relations commissioner, and there were separate complaints to police. The culprit was identified and Moses understands there were discussions about charging him with offensive behaviour, but six months passed and he was given a warning. 

To be fair to the police, they have been more supportive and responsive since, Moses says. But overall, the response to the threat and the wider indifference about such abuse fits a long-term pattern in New Zealand. 

'We haven't had a bad working relationship with the authorities, but I feel there has been a level of complacency or naivety.'

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THE COMPLACENT COUNTRY

Does that sound familiar? Once you start talking about racism in New Zealand before and after March 15, when 51 Muslims were killed in attacks on two mosques in Christchurch, you start encountering words like these. Complacency. Naivety. An apathetic sense that these things happened elsewhere. And for a long time, they did. 

There are two schools of thought about racism in New Zealand and whether it contributed at all to the events of March 15. On one hand, there was a rush to judge. An assessment was made that as Christchurch had long been the semi-mythical hotbed of white supremacy in New Zealand, an attack like this was an almost inevitable end result.

On the other hand, it was clear that the alleged gunman was an Australian based in Dunedin who picked Christchurch because it was an easy target. It really could have happened anywhere, and since March 15 it has, with similarly motivated shooters operating in El Paso, Texas; Poway​, California; and Baerum​, Norway. These lone wolves often inspire and copy each other. Their true geography is online. 

But these two views do not contradict each other. They can both be true. The Christchurch shooting is an anomaly in our recent history that has also forced us to confront the very real possibility that we have not paid enough attention to the insults and threats directed at minorities – New Zealand's Jewish and Muslim communities in particular. 

In 2017, the Human Rights Commission, the Jewish Council and Multicultural New Zealand all called for the government to collect data on the incidence of hate crimes. This followed a request from a decade earlier, when the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination called for the Government to collect statistical data on complaints, prosecutions and sentences for racially motivated crimes.  

'We understand that the Police have the capacity (crime categories) to record complaints of racially motivated violence and abuse and it's just a matter of implementing the system,' Multicultural New Zealand's Executive Director Tayo Agunlejika​ said in a media statement in 2017.'We appreciate the fact that collecting the data will not solve the problem of racially and other hate motivated crime, but it will provide a tool to measure its extent and to take action to reduce it.'

That call came a little over a week after Mehpara Khan posted video of a shocking racist tirade she encountered in Huntly. 'I don't care if you were born here, you don't have the right to be here!' a woman shouted, as she threw beer cans at her. 

'Who said Islamophobia doesn't exist?' Khan asked. 

Some people still seemed to, though. The Human Rights Commission has been adamant since 2004 that New Zealand police needed to collect hate crime data. In 2009, the Government agreed with the recommendation but said it was not a priority. A decade later, Chief Commissioner Paul Hunt says that 'until we have got this data, it's really difficult to devise suitable strategies to deal with the phenomenon'. In the absence of that data collection, the commission released what Hunt calls 'a modest contribution', a report titled It Happened Here. 

He wants the contribution 'to remind New Zealanders that March 15 has to be seen in the context of years of hate crime, going back generations. Māori have experienced this for centuries and we need to recognise that'. 

Between the end of Dame Susan Devoy's tenure in 2018 and Meng Foon's​ start in August, Hunt was also acting race relations commissioner. His determination to embed the March 15 event into a New Zealand pattern has seen him roasted by some on the right of politics who prefer the view that the mosque attacks were anomalous. 

'The way I see it is that, if you look across the world, there is a global movement which is neo-fascist, racist and white supremacist,' Hunt says. 'New Zealand is not isolated from global movements.'

Hunt first came to New Zealand in the 1990s and remembered that Massey University academic Paul Spoonley​ was talking and writing then about white supremacy, having diagnosed the issue a decade earlier in his book The Politics of Nostalgia. But after 2001, New Zealand, like much of the west, was focused on terrorism being middle-eastern rather than white. 

Hunt's belief is that the work of Spoonley and others who have tracked white supremacy shows we cannot call March 15 'an imported aberration'. He recalls being at a meeting with Christchurch Mayor Lianne Dalziel a few weeks after the attack and being impressed by her view that we cannot simply blame a lone wolf Australian. Instead, he paraphrases, 'there was something deeper in New Zealand which we have to confront'. 

Data on racism in New Zealand, as experienced by minorities rather than perceived by the wider population, is sporadic and hard to locate. A Ministry for Business, Innovation and Employment survey in 2018 of nearly 400 recent migrants to New Zealand found that 44 per cent had experienced unfair or biased behaviour once or twice, and 12 per cent had experienced it frequently. Some gave examples of discriminatory comments made on the streets or in shops and worried about the bullying of their children at school. 

As for Hunt's modest contribution, It Happened Here is a 14-page summary of race and religious hate crimes in New Zealand between 2004 and 2012. It collects around 100 incidents, ranging from murder and kidnapping and disorderly behaviour to abuse, deliberate damage to property and desecration of sacred sites. 

The first incident involves an attack on Asian students in Christchurch in April 2004, followed a month later by skinheads attacking and taunting a group of Somali youths in Wellington. Letters, including pieces of pork, were sent to Muslim families in Wellington in September 2004. There was desecration of two Jewish cemeteries, also in Wellington, and another in Whanganui that year. There was yet another round of cemetery desecration in Wellington in 2007. 

Auckland, Whangārei, Hamilton, Tauranga, New Plymouth, Palmerston North, Rotorua, Hastings, Masterton, Dunedin, Invercargill, Blenheim, Queenstown, Nelson – no New Zealand city has had a monopoly on racist insults and attacks. The targets were broad too: Indian, Vietnamese, Jewish, Chinese, Thai, Somali, Korean, Taiwanese, Zimbabwean, Māori, Filipino, Japanese, even a group of Danish and English tourists attacked in Christchurch because they 'spoke funny'. 

The persistence of Nazi symbols and language seems especially dismaying. Twenty gravestones in a historic Jewish cemetery in Auckland were vandalised and spray painted with Nazi insignia and slogans in 2012. A year earlier, three-metre wide swastikas were sprayed on a field and buildings at a rugby league park in Whangārei. 

There is something sad and diligent about the Human Rights Commission summary, gathered from years of annual reports by race relations commissioners. This is as close as we get to an official hate crimes register. 

'I have British colleagues who are a bit gobsmacked that this data is not collected here,' Hunt says. 

And while Justice Minister Andrew Little has talked of reviewing hate crimes law, there is still no clear sense about whether the monitoring of hate crime incidents would be part of that. 

'I'm not aware of any firm commitment,' Hunt says cautiously. 'I think there is a recognition that this does demand action but I don't want to put words in their mouth. I don't want to overstate it.' 

'RACIST AS F---?' 

Speaking of things that went under the radar before March 15 that would not be overlooked now, Hunt would like to draw people's attention to a speech by Little, delivered to the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, Switzerland, in January. 

It garnered almost no coverage back home, but Hunt remembers it as 'a really important speech'. It could even be argued that it set the scene for a year in which racism has been discussed more than in any other year in recent history – not just March 15 and its implications, but the Oranga Tamariki story and the Ihumātao occupation. Both of those stories show how racist structures from the past persist into the present. 

The inequities experienced by Māori, Pacific populations, the disabled, new migrants and the LGBTQI community 'stem from both direct and structural discrimination,' Little told the audience in Geneva. There is racism and bias in the justice, education and health systems, he explained. 

'We are reviewing our criminal justice system, with a focus on the disproportionate representation of Māori, and the role that colonisation, structural discrimination and intergenerational trauma have played in that,' he said. 'We plan to specifically acknowledge gender identity, in addition to sex, as a prohibited ground of discrimination in our law. We are currently exploring ways to reduce violence, abuse and neglect of disabled people.' 

There was work to be done, but a paradise of inclusion and fairness lay ahead. Hunt was impressed by the explicit reference to the impact of colonisation, and how its effects continue to be felt.

'There is a growing, deepening recognition of the problem of racism in Aotearoa/New Zealand,' he says. 'Unless we recognise it, we can't deal with it. So the fact that we are recognising it as a country is really to be welcomed.' 

This is probably true. Who now remembers the uproar when actor and film director Taika Waititi described New Zealand as 'racist as f---' in an interview with another expat artist, musician Ruban Nielson, published in a US magazine in 2018. 

'I think New Zealand is the best place on the planet, but it's a racist place,' Waititi said. 'People just flat-out refuse to pronounce Māori names properly. There's still profiling when it comes to Polynesians.'

That was less than 18 months ago, but it seems like years. Interviewed on breakfast TV, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said we clearly have the same problems as everywhere else. The good thing is that we're open about it. 

Not everyone was as pleased to hear from Waititi. Broadcasters Duncan Garner and Mark Richardson accused him of sabotaging and denigrating New Zealand. 'This guy… he's gone too far, it's too extreme,' Garner argued. 'Lighten up, and change the record.' And if New Zealand is racist, it has not exactly held Waititi back from succeeding, Garner concluded.

Waititi was one of the stars of the Human Rights Commission's Give Nothing to Racism campaign which launched in 2017 and followed the commission's first anti-racism campaign, That's Us, which appeared a year earlier. The commission's 2018 review of Give Nothing to Racism, supplied to Stuff, includes the results of a survey of 2003 New Zealanders aged between 18 and 50, which was the campaign's target. 

Of that group, 87 per cent slightly or strongly agreed racism is unacceptable in New Zealand and only 14 per cent argued there is no racism problem here. But while 86 per cent agreed that New Zealand is racially diverse, a slightly smaller number – 78 per cent – saw that as something to be celebrated.  

The commission perceived the 18 to 50-year-olds it was aiming at to be urban, open-minded and socially conscious. These are not the typical racists, but otherwise good people who let the odd casually racist thought or comment slip out. But good intentions mask a lot of casually racist comments and actions, the commission's research says. 

To avoid confrontation or appearing 'too PC', both of which were seen as contrary to the New Zealand character, the campaign suggested that every racist joke or comment be treated with a blank look, a silent response. This was the idea of giving nothing, a form of passive resistance. 

Is this enough? Some of the research says it might be, or at least is a good start. Kevin Dunn of Western Sydney University's Challenging Racism Project has talked about the role of consensus. People with racist views are emboldened if they think their views are the consensus of the majority, and are more likely to turn their attitude into actions. 

It is the job of bystanders to marginalise those opinions, as Dunn explained to the ABC this month. Leadership is important, but this is also the responsibility of ordinary citizens. 

THE INTERNET – A NEW CAPACITY FOR OFFENSIVENESS

Juliet Moses grew up Jewish in New Zealand and feels grateful, mostly, for the life she has had here. Relative to elsewhere, this is a tolerant country. But we are stupid if we don't realise 'there is clearly white supremacist stuff going on here and racism'. 

The forms have changed. There is a new internationalism to racism, thanks to the internet, as well as a new capacity for offensiveness. 

'Social media has made things that much worse, and out in the open,' Moses says. 'I can't believe the things people say openly.' 

The nature of the slurs and insults sometimes shocks her. When she was young, you might hear 'Jewish' as a synonym for stingy. It harked back to some old prejudices. But her sons hear jokes about showers and Hitler at school. 

You might wonder what they and others really know. A Curia Market Research poll, conducted for the Auckland Holocaust Memorial Trust in July, found that only 43 per cent of people over 18 know a reasonable amount or a lot about the Holocaust. The younger subjects, aged between 18 and 30, know significantly less than older people. While only 4 per cent think the Holocaust is a myth or exaggerated, a further 30 per cent say they are not sure. 

'This poll should encourage us to take on a more demanding conversation, which is partly about Holocaust remembrance and partly about how we relate to and teach the past in this country,' Victoria University associate professor in history, Giacomo Lichtner​, wrote this month. 'If we care for a fair, mature, self-aware society that truly makes hate alien, we cannot ignore the history of the Holocaust.' 

IMPLICIT BIAS

At the same time, we are becoming more and more aware of the racism that remains unspoken. Do implicit biases lurk beneath our conscious prejudices? 

Benjamin Reese has been doing diversity work with a focus on race for about 50 years. He explains that for about the past 14 or so years, he has specialised in the theory and application of implicit bias. He offers workshops to 'every imaginable group'. When Stuff phones, he is in Adelaide, South Australia, presenting his ninth workshop in nine days. 

For 23 years he was a vice-president overseeing diversity at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. It's fair to say his world view was shaped by the civil rights struggle of the 1960s. Implicit bias is more subtle, but perhaps just as powerful, as the institutional racism they fought back then. 

There are countless examples and experiments. There was the one about the legal document full of errors, prepared by a young associate. Half of the attorneys who read it were told it was by a white male; the other half were told the author was African-American. More errors were picked up by those who were told the associate was black. 

There are the stories about people with male names getting more jobs and higher salaries than those with female names, and black drivers stopped more often by police than white drivers.

Implicit bias researcher Jennifer Eberhardt​ had some other shockers in her recent book, Biased. Convicted murderers who looked more stereotypically African-American were much more likely to get the death penalty than those who did not. In another case, potential buyers set the value of a house lower if it was being sold by a black family than a white family. Job applicants with 'black-sounding' names were 50 per cent less likely to get callbacks than those with 'white-sounding' names, even if they had good-quality CVs. 

It is easy to spot it when you examine the trends and the data. It's harder to pick implicit bias one on one, which is the point. And none of us are immune, as Reese explains. 

'Implicit bias is really the study of a human process, so it exists in every single person on the planet. I get in an airplane and I look in the cockpit and there is a woman who seems to be young. I say to myself, 'Okay, don't go there. You know she's as well trained as anyone else' and I sit down. Half an hour later, we're in turbulence and I start thinking about her gender and her age. That's how subtle and insidious it can be.' 

But we can all get better at recognising the cues, or noticing the qualities that stimulate a bias. It takes a level of self-awareness. 

Explicit racism seems to be raring its head again, too. But Reese sees the presidency of Donald Trump as a product of growing racism, as much as a cause. Leaders contribute to a tone but there are complex social dynamics at work as well, including economic issues. 

THE WAY FORWARD

So, how might racism be overcome or combated? Or is that an impossible question, given that he said implicit bias is more or less the human condition? 

He laughs: 'You're right. That's an impossible question.'

No, there are things. For one, we need more inclusive conversations. 

'It's hard to problem-solve if nobody or only a few people are talking about the problem. The more you can create the kind of environment where there's dialogue, it's an important prerequisite or corequisite.'

And leaders can set a tone, as he said earlier. It's even better if that flows into meaningful action rather than waffle.

'Leaders can model the values that correlate with inclusivity and respect, and you're fortunate to have an incredible leader who's not only modelling that behaviour but is taking some pretty bold steps. Leadership and dialogue and then changing systems and structures.

'It's one thing to talk about how terrible gun violence is and to have authentic dialogue about that. That's important. But then you have to do something in terms of structures and the systemic issue of gun violence. To change the laws around the possession of guns, that's an important structural change.' 

Americans like Reese can only look over at us with a mix of admiration and envy, despite everything that has happened here. There might be a hope that change and progress is not only possible but is even inevitable.