Beware Trump-style politics
The president-elect seems to have brought racism into the mainstream – where it’s a far scarier prospect.
GROWING up as a little brown kid who watched a lot of TV, the most frightening thing to me was American white supremacists.
Forget Poltergeist, the Texas Chainsaw killer, Freddy Kruger, Halloween’s Jason, Damian in the Omen series or even the masked killer from Scream.
Those horror movie characters had nothing on the dark-skinhaters that featured in the pantheon of American screen stories exploring that country’s racist history.
The 1977 epic mini series Roots was possibly the most epic and frightening. It tells the story of an 18th-century African sold into slavery in the United States and the experiences of his descendants down to modern times. And the whole time, they had to put up with racist a---holes.
For a popular-culture-loving budding writer with an active imagination like me, it presented the United States as the most frightening place in the world.
Then came figures like Muhammad Ali, Michael Jackson, Prince, Michael Jordan, Eddie Murphy and hip-hop – and gradually the scary racist edges of the American psyche became smoothed over. It seemed that the racism in the US was just like the racism all over the world, largely institutional and societal, as opposed to upfront and proud. It doesn’t make it in any way acceptable, just that when it’s mostly underground it is therefore less in your face and frightening.
But Donald Trump’s impending presidency seems to have changed all that.
New Zealand was all aflutter in September with the revelation that former Prime Minister William Massey was a white supremacist, but at least we could say that was nearly 100 years ago when it seemed everyone was racist.
Some of the people Trump is appointing to his future administration have many in his country afraid for their lives and worried that someone who they fear appears to be the grand wizard of all grand wizards is only eight weeks from ruling the US for at least the next four years.
Months of Trump’s divisive campaign rhetoric seems to have enabled racism to a point where it’s threatening to become mainstream again. And it’s hard for his supporters to insist Trump isn’t connected when this week video emerged online of a group of white men – this time without hoods – chanting things like: ‘‘Hail Trump, hail our people, hail victory’’.
This kind of race-based identity politics is on the rise throughout the West. Apart from the anti-immigrant arguments contributing to the Brexit vote, there’s also the rise of radical populists like France’s Marine Le Pen and Geert Wilders in the Netherlands.
Generally we’d like to think that kind of divisive speech wouldn’t provide a path to power in New Zealand. But then there was Don Brash’s ‘‘Nationhood’’ speech to the Orewa Rotary Club in 2004 in which he decried perceived special privileges for Maori.
That outraged many people who claimed that Brash – then leader of the National Party – was playing the race card to win support for his party.
In the 2005 election, National used billboards that claimed it is for Kiwi, while Labour was for Iwi. As a strategy it was quite effective too and the party did REUTERS better than expected.
Brash’s new political thinktank is repeating that theme in rolling out the ‘‘Iwi vs Kiwi’’ campaign which continues that tired old line about Maori getting special treatment.
This feels especially nauseating when, during recent crises, it has been marae that have stepped up to help in ways that the Government couldn’t.
I’m not for one moment suggesting that Brash will be New Zealand’s more polite version of Donald Trump. Just that it would be that type of one-nation type argument that could fuel Trump’s style of politics here.
While the majority of North Americans who didn’t vote for Trump nervously wait for what will unfold in their country over the next four years, we need to be vigilant that such racial based politics cannot take root here in Aotearoa.
‘ Months of divisive rhetoric has enabled racism to a point where it’s threatening to become mainstream again.’