Racial animosity fuelled killings

FROM THE LEFT - CHRIS TROTTER

Let's talk about the killings in South Auckland – and let's try to talk about them honestly. They were race killings. Homicides fuelled by the intense feelings of racial animosity that will, almost inevitably, be generated in communities where socio-economic status and function become aligned with radically distinct minority cultures operating in close proximity to an impoverished and envious majority.

Before you start accusing me of all the worst kinds of racism, please give me a chance to explain by citing an historical precedent thousands of miles, and hundreds of years, removed from present-day New Zealand.

I'm going to ask you to consider the Jewish communities living in Europe – especially Eastern Europe – more than half a millennium ago, during the Middle Ages.

A highly literate, culturally rich, and ethnically distinct community found itself hedged in on all sides by every sort of religious and cultural prejudice; Jews were legally debarred from a wide range of occupations and, in some jurisdictions, prohibited from owning land.

What did they do? They became merchants, middle-men and money-lenders: buying cheap and selling dear, especially in communities which, thanks to their low status, had been traditionally poorly served by such enterprise. Made clannish and self-sufficient by years of persecution, the Jews in these largely peasant societies keep very much to themselves, marrying within their faith and relying heavily on their extended family structures for social and economic support.

Adherents of a different faith, prodigiously hard workers, able to read and write when nearly everyone else around was illiterate, unwilling to mix with, or marry into, local families, and – most infuriatingly – collecting interest on money owed to them by those same local families. It is hardly surprising these Jewish communities became targets of extreme anger and jealousy. Indeed, without the protection of local magnates, who prized "their Jews" as a ready source of cash, the intense animosity of the peasantry could all-too-easily erupt into a "pogrom" – or anti- Semitic killing spree. Now, you see where I'm going with this.

South Auckland is an impoverished area, poorly served by the kinds of business and municipal amenities one finds in Auckland's leafier suburbs. Among the dominant Maori and Pasifika communities of "SA" – as many locals call it – the levels of joblessness and illiteracy, and the numbers of single-parent families, are well above the national average. Predictably, the demand for alcohol and drugs is enormous, and the cultural milieu – especially among its youth – is highly derivative of the Black "gangsta" culture of south-central Los Angeles.

Into this mix of pent-up frustration, drug abuse and dysfunctional families we have seen fit to introduce a number of radically distinct religious, cultural and ethnic immigrant groups.

The members of these communities are distinguished from the locals not only by their languages, their traditional costumes, and their non-Christian religious faiths (Christianity, in the form of the large Pasifika churches, is one of the most cohesive forces in South Auckland) but also by their work ethic, love of education, and extremely supportive extended families.

The contrast between these newly arrived Sikh, Hindu, Chinese and Islamic inhabitants of South Auckland, and the less anchored sections of its Maori and Pasifika communities could hardly be more stark.

Owning many rental properties, numerous retail outlets (especially those selling liquor) and many "last resort" money-lending operations, these "foreigners" get accused of wielding a disproportionate degree of influence over their communities.

Perceived as "rich", they've become the targets of everything from purse-snatching and burglary, to aggravated robbery and, all-too-often, murder.

Culturally-distinct, highly- motivated and hard-working, these self-improving immigrant families have become the "Jews" of South Auckland (in much the same way that Pakeha settler prejudice turned the clannish, ferociously diligent immigrant Chinese into the "Jews" of 19th and 20th century New Zealand).

A solution to the violence in South Auckland will not be found in equipping more and more of our police officers with Glock pistols and Bushmaster rifles. Where violence has become the only means of asserting one's racial prowess, weapons are not the answer.

Only when South Auckland's Maori and Pasifika youth understand that aspiration and effort have always paid higher dividends than resentment and envy, will its racially-motivated crime- wave come to an end.

- © Fairfax NZ News