“You rape our women and you’re taking over our country”. With those words Dylan Roof opened fire on African American worshippers in a historic black church in Charleston. Seven lives were lost and many more were damaged forever.
Roof’s bigoted views were not formed overnight. The hate he harbored for the blacks was there even before he was born. It was lurking in the dark shadows of history waiting for lost souls, like Roof, to find it so that it could fill their empty lives with anger and hate.
Brit Bennett, in her important piece for the New York Times Magazine, reminds us that members of Ku Klux Klan used the same fears of black men raping white women and of black people taking over the country, in order to justify the use of violence and intimidation towards communities of freed blacks.
Regular negative representation of black men in some of America’s media, like Fox News, reinforces stereotypical views of blacks and strengthens the historical residue of racism.
Further afield in Myanmar, extremist Buddhist monk, Wirathu, has been responsible for inciting violence and murder by spreading fears of Rohingya Muslims whom he says rape Buddhist women and plan to take over his country.
Presidential candidate Donald Trump referred to Mexicans crossing illegally to America as “rapists” too.
Bigotry, it seems, speaks in an unsurprisingly familiar form.
In 2013, a NZ First MP, Richard Prosser, penned a blatantly racist article for “Investigate” magazine in which he advocated for young Muslim men to be banned from Western airlines. He wrote: “the only virgins of any interest to me are my babies (his two young daughters), who I will protect until death, so that they may grow up to be the confident, powerful, equal citizens that their Norse and Celtic lineage, and New Zealand’s egalitarian laws, have destined them to be”.
Did Prosser think that Muslim men from “Wagistan” posed a threat to his daughters?
Unbelievably, Richard Prosser was not sacked from the party and remains an MP to this day.
Dr. Bryce Edwards’ recent piece for The NZ Herald generated racist and xenophobic comments from some New Zealanders who fear, not only the economic consequences, but also the cultural and social consequences of more refugees arriving in their country. The reality is that the economic impact of any possible increase in the numbers of refugees will be negligible and the cultural and social consequences are likely, in the long run, to be positive.
But where do these negative perceptions come from and what are the driving factors that shape our attitudes towards, and fears of others?
It was only few months ago when the Islamophobic abuse of two Middle-Eastern looking men travelling on a Wellington bus was widely reported in the media.
Noor, the Iraqi Muslim woman who recorded the incident on her phone said she was terrified because her hijab made her easily identifiable as a Muslim.
Noor said: “I think if he saw me filming him he would have come and punched me in the face.”
The racist rants of the 66-year-old Lower Hutt man are easy to dismiss because they are crass and direct: “Islam c***s”, “shooting innocent people”, “go back to your own country”, etc.
But covert racism and demonization of minorities, be they poor Maoris on benefits or hijab-wearing Muslims, are not as easy to dismiss especially when they are given a veneer of pseudo-intellectualism by MPs, senior columnists, like Martin van Beynen, or popular TV presenters like Mike Hosking and Paul Henry.
Social cohesion and pluralism require us to look back at history with honesty and move forward without fear. What we say and how we say it matters.
We must stay vigilant and stand up to those whose ignorance and poverty of spirit pollute the public imagination and perception of minorities.
Demonization of minorities is never without consequences; it leads to social tensions and ultimately to crime and violence.
America may consider itself as the greatest nation on earth but I think the best thing we can learn from America is how, in some ways, not to end up like them.
Donna Miles is a British-born, Iranian-bred, New Zealand citizen with a strong interest in human rights, justice and equality issues. Mojab worked as a senior mathematics lecturer in the United Kingdom for 10 years before migrating to New Zealand as a new mother and setting up a small business in Christchurch. She is a prolific letter writer to The Press and an active member of Christchurch’s Canterbury for Justice in Palestine.
Donna, your article is interesting, but incomplete. You talk of Roof’s bigoted views and his hatred existing before he was born, lurking in the dark shadows of history, waiting for lost souls like Roof. By saying this you quite rightly point out that the hatred is an idea that exists on its own, and that individuals choose (for whatever reason) to adopt it. Not everyone adopts the idea and many denounce it.
Your article would have been complete had you denounced the idea that non-believers and apostates should be killed. This, to my mind, is just as bad an idea as the hatred for people of a certain race that Roof adopted as his raison d’etre.
Comments are closed.