The recent rise in anti-Indian racism across Aotearoa is not new, patterns of racism tend to cycle through different non-white migrants every few years, one year targeting Chinese communities, the next Indian, the next from the African continent. Consistently throughout that time, Māori are also targeted, often along the same lines but with subtle differences. And every time, there are large portions of the targeted groups who participate in the targeting of others.
This isn’t a new thing. Inter-ethnic discrimination has been observed, and thought about, and commented on for a long time. If we look back to the history of modern racism, we can see that Europeans saw “difference” (like skin colour and beliefs) and coded it as being “lesser than”. Their construction of the “other” (ie non-European, non-Christian groups) was therefore always going to be “lesser than” themselves.
Liberational thinkers like Frantz Fanon wrote at length on the “colonial binary” in which the coloniser represents civilization, humanity, and value, and the colonised represents the opposite. He further noted that when people absorb this idea of a hierarchy where groups have the “right to oppress”, they can often act out their aggression on each other, because punching down, and across is so much easier than punching up. When you attack someone who is also seen as an enemy by the colonial oppressor, you are able to leverage all of that systemic colonial hate against your target. When we understand this dynamic, we can see it for what it truly is: the wound inflicted from the coloniser, discharged sideways towards the mutually colonised. The “sideways” aspect is how it gets its name: Lateral Racism.
While the script and context might vary, this is just as true when we are looking at an Indian politician being racist towards Māori, and is also true when we see Māori being racist towards non-white migrants – particularly those who come from colonised nations.
Stories between the mutually colonised are not often spoken of, for a number of reasons: the coloniser prefers to centre themselves; the coloniser fears solidarity amongst the colonised; and the colonial machine extracts a lot of energy from the colonised – which means the limited energy reserves tend towards uplifting our own or critiquing the coloniser rather than learning about, and building community with the mutually colonised.
But as I wrote about in my previous blog, in spite of many beautiful and inspiring stories of when we have come together in love and solidarity, we also have a long history of standing alongside white supremacists against non-white migrant New Zealanders.
One of the dominant racist narratives is the suggestion that migrants are “taking over” – and interestingly, this reliable racist trope goes back even further than the migrant communities themselves do. The first anti-Chinese league formed in Nelson in 1857, nine years before the first recorded Chinese settlers even arrived (it was really about white miners wanting to block Chinese miners from arriving in the goldfields as they had in Australia); it was swiftly joined by the Anti-Asiatic League and the White Race League. By the time the White New Zealand league started in Pukekohe, European race theory was already well-entrenched in the country, and even though little over 600 Indians were in the country at the time, it was still considered “too many”. Although it was framed in the language of a “takeover”, in Pukekohe in 1926, where the White New Zealand League started, there were only seventeen Indians and thirty Chinese in a population exceeding thirteen thousand.
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In 1898 politician and historian William Pember Reeves wrote:
“The average colonist regards a Mongolian with revulsion, a Negro with contempt, and looks on an Australian black as very near to a wild beast; but he likes the Maoris, and is sorry that they are dying out.”
The White New Zealand League leveraged off these ideas to recruit Māori into their project of a racially pure New Zealand.
The practice of recruiting Indigenous people into white supremacy is not new, or distinct to our history. Throughout history, and around the world, Indigenous peoples have been manipulated by colonisers into adopting their racist viewpoints. In so-called United States, Indigenous peoples were told that if they adopted European agricultural practices – including enslaved African labour – they would be granted the same rights as white settlers (which never eventuated). The Belgians notoriously used divide and rule in Rwanda and Burundi to favour the minority Tutsi community, coding them as akin to Europeans racially superior to the majority Hutu, which eventually led to the Rwandan genocide of 1994. Likewise, Māori were spoken of as the “Aryans of the Pacific” and recruited into solidarity with the “White New Zealand” project.
Understanding how this tactic works requires us to understand the distinctiveness of how colonial racism is directed towards Indigenous people as opposed to migrant groups. Racism is rarely about imposing a racial hierarchy for its own sake, it is more often than not a tool for economic power. Migrants are racialised to restrict economic participation or to keep them at the bottom for the purposes of labour extraction. Indigenous peoples (including Māori) are racialised to absorb, assimilate, or eradicate as a distinct people who pose a standing challenge to the legitimacy of settler-colonial political authority and land-ownership.
Recruiting Māori into white supremacist hierarchies against other racialised groups reinforces the European racial order, indirectly justifying the ongoing acquisition of Māori land on the grounds that we were being improved by contact with European civilisation rather than harmed by it. It also undermined the basis for tino rangatiratanga by treating Māori as individuals capable of private property ownership rather than as collective peoples with territorial rights.
In effect, for over 150 years, Māori have been manipulated into European racism, as a distinct form of colonial assimilation, supporting a project that can only ever result in our own dispossession and eradication.
Of course, at no time is this more obvious than during election years, where the White New Zealand project is again advanced through triggering racist fear:
This year has already seen New Zealand First triggering fear over a “Butter Chicken Tsunami”, and ACT have now released their racist immigration policy, which includes compulsory English language requirements for work visas.
The 2023 elections were run on anti-Māori campaigns, including a New Zealand First candidate labelling Māori a “disease” that the party will “cut out” and framing Māori co-governance as “apartheid”, meanwhile Winston Peters ran on an anti-Māori wards campaign.
The 2020 General elections included a policy to “curb immigration” until Māori housing demand was met, incorrectly inferring that migrants were to blame for the housing crisis (as opposed to speculative housing markets, AirBnB conversions, and the gutting of social housing) and pitting Māori interests against migrant interests.
The 2017 elections involved aggressive anti-immigration campaigns by New Zealand First, positioning migrants as a competing threat to employment, housing, and infrastructure, whilst also attacking Māori as beneficiaries and economic drains.
The 2014 elections saw Winston peters again throwing migrants (this time, Chinese) under the bus as a threat to national identity and housing prices, alongside the regular narratives of Māori as criminal threats.
Looking across the elections, the most consistently racist party has been New Zealand First, of which the two most senior politicians are Māori – which makes lateral racism one of the strongest features of New Zealand electoral politics. It should come as no surprise that they are again relying on racist narratives this electoral year. It works well for them, and we certainly aren’t giving them a reason to stop.
If you want a deeper look at the crystal ball, Dr Harpreet Singh has provided the following table to outline how race-baiting narratives work in relation to migrant groups:
So Māori are recruited into the White New Zealand Project through racist ideas about migrants getting in the way of jobs, houses and access to services.
Meanwhile, migrants are being recruited into the White New Zealand Project through racist ideas about Māori being criminals and violent thugs.
And BOTH groups are being recruited into the White New Zealand Project through the likes of New Zealand First who, like clockwork, frame both migrants and Māori as threats to a White New Zealand national identity.
If there is any light in this tunnel, it is signalled by the fact that we also have a long history of standing in solidarity with each other. Māori in solidarity with Muslim communities after the Christchurch Mosque terrorist attacks; Asians Supporting Tino Rangatiratanga showing up consistently for Māori and te Tiriti over the years; the MultiCultural Society support for Te Tiriti and Matike Mai; intergenerational Māori support for Palestine; Singh support for rural Māori communities in Tairāwhiti and South Aucklanders in need; the Springbok tour protests; Māori, Chinese and Indian solidarity through market garden communities; Māori solidarity with Pacific communities during the Dawn Raids; Māori solidarity with targeted Dalmatian and Chinese migrants going back to the 1800s. There is much to be proud of, and to build upon, but in order for us to reach our fullest potential, and stand in true solidarity with each other, we must remove the weapon of lateral race-baiting from the hands of power, and doing that requires us to face up to it, acknowledge its existence, and understand it.
If we fail to do so, we risk maintaining the project of White New Zealand, even on behalf of our own colonisers. That can never be called tino rangatiratanga.
