‘You called me a what?’
New Zealand-born Samoan walks away after painter calls him n-word in parking row
AChristchurch man says he’s “deeply disappointed” rather than angry after a tradesman called him a n***** and made gorilla noises at him. Peter Retimanu is a New Zealandborn Samoan who lives in Shirley, Christchurch.
Yesterday morning he got in an argument with a tradesman who had been painting the neighbour’s house because a worker had parked too close to their driveway.
Retimanu said he asked for the car to be moved to give a clear line of sight for traffic, but they refused. Then, he said, “things got heated” and the painter, a Pakeha, called him the n-word.
Retimanu said he felt “not so much anger but a deep disappointment. I couldn’t believe it. I said, ‘You called me a what?’ I think because you don’t hear that word spoken at all, you go into shock. To compound it, he started making primate, gorilla noises. This was real redneck stuff.
“I thought, of all the coloured people he could have said that to he was very fortunate it was me. I’m pretty sure if he was in Manukau he wouldn’t be able to walk by the time he got out of there,” Retimanu said.
Despite his rage, he walked away. He didn’t get the man’s name, or his company, although he had a “terse” conversation with his neighbour.
“I knew if a fight had ensued I would be the one taken away.” Instead he wrote a letter to the Herald..
“I weighed up all the possible responses but the main response — that took every ounce of restraint I could summon — was mainly of wanting to do violence to this person,” Retimanu wrote.
“Thankfully, though, I weighed up in my mind the consequences and that it would be me that would be taken into custody, charged and invariably incarcerated. You’re only given a split second to go through that process. Was it worth it? No, of course, but what price turning the other cheek? It was like, okay in a white person’s world this is the best thing to do. Write a letter to the editor,” he told the Herald. “I should go out and take a baseball bat and smash his car in but who’s gonna come off second best?”
While Retimanu was stunned by the racial slur, he experiences less overt racism “almost daily”, from being treated with suspicion in shops to bank tellers becoming “adversarial” when he asks questions.
He tries to dress and speak as well as possible to negate any stereotypes from the outset. “The way I look intimidates the other person. So I try to be as gentle as possible to defuse the situation.”
Retimanu, 53, was born and raised in Invercargill with his siblings, including Newstalk ZB newsreader Niva Retimanu. He said Invercargill felt far more liberal than Christchurch and he had rarely felt disrespected there.
Retimanu said he was treated with more tolerance when in the more ethnically diverse Auckland. He works for Mobil Oil and stays at fivestar hotels and uses rental cars.
But when he goes to get valet parking, “more often than not the attendants think I’m a taxi driver”.
HWatch the video at nzherald.co.nz
Retimanu said non-white people had to exercise a high level of tolerance to deal with every day racism, which is “draining”.
“Not one brown person will be surprised” by him being called the n-word, Retimanu said. “But ask any white person, they’ll say that’s shocking.”
Human Rights Commissioner Dame Susan Devoy said when the commission launched its anti-racism campaign last year “many Kiwis didn’t believe racism really happened here, often because they hadn’t heard it from the point of view of everyday Kiwis, people like Peter”.
“Born and brought up in New Zealand and yet he’s faced racism — not just in his past, but just today out front of his own house from a complete stranger.”
More than five million people here and overseas had viewed the video campaign, fronted by Taika Waititi, which urges people to give nothing to racism and call it out when they see it, she said.
“We see racial intolerance and hatred on the rise overseas, we need to do everything we can to make sure we do not see that happening here in Aotearoa.”