I’m sick and tired of sorry

I’m sick and tired of it. Obviously, not as sick and tired as those suffering, grieving or working to deal with the measles epidemic in Samoa.

As a Samoan who’s made New Zealand home, I’m sick and tired of feeling down every time someone here forgets that Samoans are humans, too. Sick and tired of even having to write out that sentence.

There has been plenty already said and written this week about that appalling cartoon in the Otago Daily Times, as Samoans and New Zealanders reacted with shock and bewilderment. That cartoon that was selected for publishing even after more than 40 babies had already died in the measles outbreak.

I’m baffled at how any human being who knew that had happened, thought it was OK to run that cartoon. Did they think it was making fun of travel agents or people who use them? Pfft, as if.

It’s because it was brown people who were suffering, and the artist as well as the people who made this decision were somehow able to divorce themselves from those people as humans. To see them as ‘‘other’’ rather than ‘‘us’’.

And it seems to happen regularly in New Zealand.

I thought the National Party election campaign ad from 1975 might have been the end of it.

In the more racist 1970s, it worked and got Muldoon into power. But by the time he left power in 1984, New Zealand was growing up as country. It was becoming more diverse, and there were more people from different countries moving here, being born here.

We were becoming less of a British colonial outpost and more of South Pacific nation trying to forge its own identity. That’s what I thought was happening, anyway.

Apparently not, because that wasn’t the end of racist kaka that Pasifika people have to put up with in a country we’ve proudly adopted as our homeland.

To name just a few, there was that time in Parliament when then-Prime Minister Jenny Shipley, in a debate, talked about Pacific Islanders climbing through people’s windows.

A few years ago, there was the front page of The Dominion that for some reason chose to publish an academic’s rantings about what a big problem Pacific people were.

There have been works by this cartoonist that have been published by newspapers that similarly must have thought they were hard-hitting and edgy.

Just this year, there was a broadcaster in Wellington unapologetically calling the Pacific Islands leeches on New Zealand.

And now this. Apparently, the people responsible for the ODT move will be getting antiracism training. Like, what even is that?

If you don’t possess the empathy gene, the one that instinctively tells you that regardless of skin colour, everybody is human, I’m not sure what training is going to do.

I can’t shake the feeling that stuff like this will keep happening. That every now and then there will continue to be racist events like this, that will shock and outrage and then prompt an apology.

So that’s very nice that the ODT editor apologised about the distress his publication caused to ‘‘our Samoan community’’. But I’m also sick and tired of hearing apologies.

When it comes to this racist kaka, we’re just sick and tired of being sick and tired of it.