Whose Racism Gets a Resignation
Do I get to call out a Māori man for racism?
Dear Curious Minds,
I have lots of really sparkly, joyous things to say. But less whimsical things kept my brain busy. Warning, today is going to be a loooooong one. I apologise. I feel this one has been brewing for decades. So if you need to come back to it, or abandon ship because your brain says no, I won’t take offence. But please do try and digest where I’ve tried to unpack my most difficult thoughts on racism and fear of rejection. Thank you for being here, I appreciate you.
The habitual rodeo rider Winston Peters told Lawrence Xu-Nan to go back to his own country after Lawrence asked Winston about a completely unrelated question in parliament. Lawrence has lived here since 1994. Definitely longer than “five minutes” unlike Winston suggests.
I know Lawrence. Not as a headline but as a person to have had real conversations about life over coffee. He carries a humility toward Aotearoa, a country for both of us by choice, and its communities. I say it’s empathy and humility that our Foreign Minister could stand to borrow. He has stood by Māori sovereignty and Indigenous rights without needing a photographer in the room. But his Kiwiness gets questioned anyway, because he speaks more than one language.
I know that feeling in my body. I know it so physically in my bones.
That change in air pressure when I open my mouth in a corporate room that didn’t expect me to know a subject better than the people who booked the meeting. I know it as the patronising little smile of someone telling me my English is very good and waiting for me to be grateful. Asian New Zealanders who have been here long enough to call this land home do not need rescuing from this situation, though. We know this dance. We’ve learnt it for generations.
It took me longer than I want to write this piece. Perhaps it took me three decades, not a week. It’s never the hypocritical colonisers that stop me in my tracks. You know the ones who can’t hear their own irony, who tell us to go home and then go to yum cha afterwards. I get bored with them. What I’ve found hard, and slow to sit with, is watching Māori be racist toward migrants. Do I think it’s worse? No, but it costs me more to hold and working out why meant admitting the harder thing. I was that coloniser too.
We, especially Asian migrants and women of colour, know exactly how conditional it is. Belonging here has always been priced by usefulness. Win a sports medal, and there’s an uncontested likeability in it. Stay grateful, keep your public engagement to the aesthetic tier, the “planet is dying” kind that photographs well and threatens no one. We’re welcome, right up until you say something that costs a comfortable person their comfort. None of which means Lawrence should face Winston alone, or that a slur stops mattering once you’ve heard enough of them. The shrug is the evidence. That’s the whole point.
The obvious racism I clocked in a heartbeat. What took me longer was everything underneath it, including my own part in it. I work in and around the sustainability and business sector. I watched most of it stay silent this week, and I sat in that silence a while before I understood why.
Where is the comparable outrage?
A couple of weeks ago, Stuart Nash sent a text sneering that a new mother was lazy for taking parental leave. The rightful condemnation was immediate, and it crossed the aisle. I wonder if it surprised everyone to have a senior National minister like Chris Bishop jump in and call him a sexist dickhead in public. Mums from both major parties passed a baby bouncer between them like a relay baton. Nash was only a candidate at the time, not even an MP, and within a day he was gone.
Winston Peters is the sitting Minister of Foreign Affairs and shared the deputy PM role. He told a colleague to go back to his own country, on the record, in the House, and then spent days defending it. The Speaker did nothing about that. The Prime Minister’s verdict was that this had been “inappropriate attention-seeking.” If a unified outrage existed for a man to lose his candidacy over a text, where is it for a Foreign Minister to warrant him keeping his job over a slur aimed at the diaspora of people who have already had generations of life in Aotearoa?
So I have to say the quiet part out loud. Is the reaction milder because the person on the receiving end isn’t Pākehā? Are we that transparently racist?
Let me offer us more credit than that. Maybe the hesitation isn’t only about Lawrence and him being a Chinese New Zealander. Maybe some of it is about Winston and what he represents, at least until we unpack it with a lot of energy.
He is a Māori man. And there’s a specific discomfort, for those of us who are tauiwi, in calling out a Māori man about racism; a nervousness about looking like the ignorant coloniser who lectures Māori on who gets to stay. I understand the instinct. But I also want to name where it goes wrong. When we hold our tongue because Winston is Māori, we hand him something he doesn’t deserve: the standing to speak for all Māori. We let one man’s remark stand in for a whole people.
I know how that lands, because I’ve watched it done to communities I love. Imagine telling the Māori leaders who’ve given decades to their communities that Brian Tamaki speaks for them — that all Māori who go to church must think just like him. The insult writes itself. Winston is owed the same refusal. Speaking while Māori is not the same as speaking for Māori.
And if I’m going to hold that line for Māori, I owe it to my own. I’ve been saying “we” this whole time (we Asian New Zealanders, we who know the dance) and “we” irons a great many different people into one shape. I can’t speak for all Asian New Zealanders. I can’t speak for all Korean women. I do it anyway, because until the day we’re handed the ordinary of being individuals or even the luxury of being the system default, hypervisible one of us in the room ends up standing in for the rest, and I’d rather carry that than let it drop.
The “we” isn’t clean cut. But Chinese and Koreans sure have shared a heated, complex neighbourhood for a very long time: multiple millennia of closeness and grievance, often in the same breath. The Korean War saw millions die, and my grandparents came out of it unable to hear “China” without hearing “death by communism”, without reliving everything they had lost because of that war. That was their flattening. Dangerous and unfair flattening just like the one my friend refuses every time someone files her in beside Winston and Brian Tamaki, a whole people shrunk to the thing you’re most afraid of.
When I stand up for Lawrence, that has nothing to do with pandering to a “Chinese interest”, and I’ve come to realise it’s more than Asian solidarity closing ranks. It’s plainer, and harder to wriggle out of. You do not let the floor of Parliament or any workplace drop to open racism. The floor is the floor.
I spent an afternoon at Te Ngahere, a space for Indigenous connection and creativity, a few days ago, alongside Indigenous leaders and the people who show up with them, all of us working on mental wellbeing and what actually keeps people well. We got to the real questions about system change fast, because we started with stories. We held those stories and each other with grief as much as love, because the people telling them had earned both. Everyone in the room understood the same order of things; Indigenous voices lead, and those of us who are tangata tiriti have a duty to carry those stories well. None of it is a right I’m owed. It’s a relationship I keep turning up for. That afternoon, it felt like a privilege, and honestly a grief-filled kind of joy.
For years I had the othering backwards. I couldn’t quite call this country home. Three generations of my family here, all of them working themselves to the bone to earn it, and still that gap existed. I assumed the gap was something done to me. Othering was external; I was its object. Systemic, institutional racism exist, I’ve spent enough time and academic research to know its weight. But I had the whole picture facing one way.
Groups like Asians Supporting Tino Rangatiratanga, and the tangata tiriti I’ve since found, taught me the part my education left out, and they taught it plainly. Not Eat Pray Love voyeurism or manifest-your-belonging kind. But the less visible mechanics. The thing that drove my grandparents and many migrants and refugees out of their own home, aching for it the whole time they built another (colonisation, capitalist extraction, patriarchy) is the same machine still grinding down Māori here. I moved through school and a career and did alright, did more than alright, with that history entirely absent from the room. Sit with that. A country where a migrant can thrive, can be set up socially and financially, and never once be required to know whose land the success is standing on. That isn’t a gap in my schooling. It’s the intentional system design doing exactly what it was built to do. Who does it serve? Not Māori.
So when Māori grow spiky watching migrants arrive and flourish without ever having to connect, without ever having to know, I can’t pretend I don’t understand it, and I won’t blame them for it. But understanding isn’t where my job ends. It’s where it starts. Being a treaty partner, or an honest attempt at being one, means turning to my own community and saying another quiet, unwelcome thing: proximity to whiteness isn’t going to keep you safe because you are never going to be white enough. If you want to belong here, if you want a safe home for yourself and your kids and everyone who looks remotely like you, the price of entry is learning what was done to Māori and what is still being done, and sitting in that discomfort long past the point it stops feeling good. And then not stopping. Knowing is not the finish line. Don’t collect the understanding like a certificate of proficiency and walk off pleased with yourself with an intellectual arrogance. If you have the safety to say something as I do (because I now work for myself and my visa isn’t tied to an employer), you use it. Learn a bit more than yesterday, then do something that makes you a bit more frightened than yesterday.
I have to be honest about a crack in my own logic, because pretending it isn’t there would be its own dishonesty. A racist remark from a Māori person doesn’t represent most Māori. I know that the way I know the sky is up there. Knowing it doesn’t stop the cut from reaching somewhere a Pākehā insult never gets near. When Winston tells me to go home, he’s confirming something I already expected of him; there was no door there to begin with. When it comes from a Māori mouth, it lands on the one door I’ve spent years trying to be let through. It hurts more because I wanted in more.
I’ve turned that over for a long time, half-ashamed of it, and here’s where I am for now. Māori have every right to be wary of the pull toward whiteness. The way so many people drift toward the colonial default without once asking whether it has to be the default at all. That wariness isn’t aimed at migrants, and it isn’t aimed at Māori. It’s aimed at the drift. Most migrants aren’t choosing it; they land inside a system already tuned to sanitise everything toward one monoculture. European, white, colonial. They get handed a story upon arrival about a bicultural, multicultural home that turns out to be set dressing. The design was here before any of us walked in.
The same wariness that lands on us lands on Winston, harder. There’s no reason he has to turn the coloniser’s tools on his own people and on migrants in one breath, except that proximity to whiteness is evidently the thing he can’t put down. Power must be that addictive. For the life of me, I really can’t understand why a political career must be that addictive. But I guess the colonial structure must be that hard to let go of, for a Māori man to end up insisting the way to be a real New Zealander is to swear an oath of allegiance to the British Crown. I still haven’t sworn it, for the record. The day they offer citizenship without kneeling to a monarchy on the other side of the world, and give people a choice to instead swear an allegiance to tangata whenua, I’ll think about it. Until then, I’ll keep calling racism what it is.
Ah, one more thing when we call this a “gaffe”. Winston isn’t going rogue. He, and people who are repeatedly like this, know exactly what he’s doing, because he’s been doing it for forty years. They know it hurts. They know it lands hardest on the people who care most about getting this right, and he’s counting on them to do what careful people do: go quiet, fold inward, worry about whether calling him out means an Asian is taking up room that belongs to Māori. They build that hesitation for us and then bank it. Every time we swallow the words to be decent, they collect.
Don’t let that math fool you.
Harder Quiet Part to Write
That’s the easy half to see: men who get to be racist out loud and be forgiven for it afterwards. I don’t want to leave it there, though, because the reflex to reach for us when we’re useful is older than this coalition, and it doesn’t sit on one side of the House.
Helen Clark was interviewed on Morning Report and said Peters’ comments looked like he was inviting a sacking. She’s right. She also said the remark sends a chill through migrant communities. Disclosure: I’m a member of the Helen Clark Foundation. I show up to their events, I rate a good deal of what they publish, and I regularly meet its ED so a few of their more recent discussions I mean to challenge another day. Take the respect as read.
But here’s what I’d actually ask Helen, if I get the face time. She’d expect a Foreign Minister to lose his job over this. Would she have sacked Phil Twyford in 2015?
