‘They Are Us’ but White People Are ‘Other’

Racism towards non-brown people is insidious. We are told that racism towards the majority is not racism because non-white people have no power (a highly racist statement in itself).

When our prime minister declared that “they are us” after the terror attack in Christchurch, the world melted at the inclusive language and the sense of kinship with our fellow New Zealanders.

The language that we use is powerful as it can include or exclude. In a Stuff article this week, BFD readers commented on the strange labelling of non-brown people as “other” in a graph that showed New Zealand’s suicide statistics.

This othering of non-brown people is yet another example of how media use language to marginalise and downplay the importance of non-brown people. Non-brown people are the majority in New Zealand, so for them to be labelled as “other” on a graph is very strange indeed as “other” is normally used for the smallest group.

Looking at the graph it is clear that, apart from Maori, non-brown people have the second-highest number of suicides yet Stuff deliberately chose to “other” them rather than call them Pakeha or European. This makes me feel very uncomfortable when you pair it with the hostility inside our universities towards Western culture and the claims from racist activists that white people have no culture.