Being asked what I was studying, replying ‘I am the new Senior Lecturer’. Her reply, ‘Pity I’m not desperate’.Īnd on it went. On our third day, a skinhead approached my wife in a supermarket saying: ‘You look pretty, pity you aren’t white’. Months later, a long-serving Māori colleague asked me ‘Guess what happened to me at the Recreation Centre?’ I did. I complained and received a verbal apology, including an explanation that this had never happened before. On the second day, a recreation centre staff member refused to believe I was on the university staff. Without checking the rental list or that I had just picked up the keys, security stormed our house. On my first day at work a neighbour rang the University of Canterbury to report that ‘A large Māori man has just come out of one of your houses on Ilam Road’. My family ran a relief effort in the eastern suburbs.Ĭhristchurch also has a problem with racism. Neighbours dug liquefaction out of each other’s yards.
During the aftermath of the main earthquake, people helped each other. For example, then mayor, Garry Moore, in The Press accused the organisers of staging a ‘forum for extremists’ and a previous mayor, Vicki Buck, said that apart from the odd incident by peripheral groups, she ‘didn’t see any racism’ in Christchurch.Ĭhristchurch is a great city. Canadian Professor Audrey Kobayashi, who analysed debate around the march, concluded that rather than focussing on the needs of the victims, community leaders concentrated instead on minimising the perception that the city harboured racism. In 2004, members of the Christchurch Asian community organised an anti-racism march after skinheads assaulted a student from Vietnam. But the research shows that Mayor Dalziel is wrong, and that the city's violent white supremacist history needs to be addressed in order to both heal the wounds inflicted that day and combat the spread of white supremacist hatred. It’s also true that the tragedy has inspired an overwhelming display of compassion and generosity from the wider Christchurch community toward the Muslim and migrant communities. It’s true that the accused gunman was from Australia and not Christchurch. The evidence shows that Christchurch is not only more racist than other New Zealand cities but is also a primary exporter of white supremacist hatred around New Zealand and overseas.Ĭhristchurch Mayor Lianne Dalziel has said that the shooter was an outsider who imported ‘hatred’ and ‘extremism’ into a city that is neither white supremacist nor Islamophobic. Since the shootings, there has been debate about whether the city of Christchurch is more racist than other parts of New Zealand. Is Christchurch the capital of white racism in New Zealand?Ĭhristchurch has suffered a lot over the past decade with the earthquakes and the white supremacist shooting that killed 51 members of the Muslim community in February of this year.
0 kommentar(er)
