‘Go back to your land’ — Kiwis tell of painful racist taunts

Racism continues to show its ugly head in New Zealand, according to an outpouring by Herald readers sharing their own painful stories.

The stories came to light in response to Friday’s tale of Henderson resident Serena Sun being told “to go back to China” when she suggested two women obey the signs in a popular Auckland park and stop feeding the birds.

Her experience prompted Avi Jayapuram, a New Zealander of Indian heritage, to tell how he was left shaken after being yelled at to “go back to his country” while in a West Auckland school carpark. He had been in Lincoln Heights Primary School’s carpark with his son when a woman banged her car door into their vehicle.

After Jayapuram asked her to be more gentle, the woman launched into a racist tirade and her partner shaped for a fight.

Jayapuram responded by saying, “This is as much my country as it is yours”, and called police. When they didn’t arrive, he drove off with his family, but the woman’s partner again came up to the family’s car.

“He tried to yank the door open, but it was locked,” Jayapuram said.

“As a family we do a lot for the community, we are very involved with the church, we’ve been here 16 years, my kids have grown up here. We are Kiwi.”

Professor Chris Sibley had been looking at some of these attitudes as part of the University of Auckland’s New Zealand Attitudes and Values Study. He said the study, in its 10th year, indicated Muslim and Asian New Zealanders experienced higher levels of prejudice.

But he said it also found a lot of forms of prejudice, sexism and racism were declining, which was “promising news. They are going down very gradually but they are declining.”

The latest round of study questionnaires were today set to be mailed out to New Zealanders randomly selected from the electoral roll, and Sibley especially urged those from diverse backgrounds to fill them out.

He said perceived competition and a fear of “outsiders” were the two main drivers for prejudice and hoped his study could track the long-term health impacts of prejudice and discrimination.

“We don’t know a lot about that but there is some evidence it has serious health consequences . . . such as leading to chronic stress,” he said.

Along with Jayapuram, many other New Zealanders, whom the Herald chose not to name to protect their privacy, also wrote in to share their experiences.

These included people saying they had been advised to change their name to sound more “Kiwi”, being racially abused on public transport and having no one step in to help, and people acting superior.

One “half Indian, half European” army veteran, who did two tours in Iraq and whose grandfather served in World War II, said he was told to take his medals off at one Anzac Day celebration because “Afghan interpreters didn’t deserve them”.

He was also regularly asked if he owned a dairy, he said.