Thanks to Year 12 student John Hopcroft, who has shared the text of his third-place speech from the recent Manawatu/Whanganui round of the national Race Unity Speech Awards competition:
“No one is born hating another person because of the colour of their skin, or their background, or their religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love…” Nelson Mandela, a leader who brought South Africa to abolish Apartheid.
What happened to our childhood innocence? We are born into this world knowing nothing, yet as we grow up we are burdened with the knowledge of things such as hate, misunderstanding, and prejudice until we become the people we know today. This is the reality we live in, but we must ask ourselves, why is this the case? How have we not learnt that burdens such as racism are, in fact, burdens? Wars have been started by it, cultures have been destroyed by it; it is a plague that seizes the co-operation between our fellow man yet we still allow it to not only exist, but thrive. How do we, the people of Aotearoa, unite with one other tomorrow against something which causes division between us today? Well, “E kore te patiki e hoki ki tona puehu”- The flounder (fish) does not return to his dust. If we wish to be successful in eradicating the plague which is racism we must first learn from the mistakes of the past.
But that poses the question, what caused this plague of racism in the first place? Quite simply put, racism is a by-product of humanity’s obsession around social hierarchy because at its very core, racism is merely a pathetic justification for why you deserve to be better than someone else. Records of it go all the way back to ancient Greece, where Aristotle, the inventor of formal logic, said that non-greeks are slaves by nature, whereas greeks are free by nature. The thing is, if you wanted a war, a reason to kill your fellow man, you’re going to need to disguise the fact you are killing your fellow man. And once it’s all said and done, you're going to need a scapegoat, a reason for why sorrow fills the streets, and race is the easiest option, because, at the most basic level, the differences are the easiest to spot. Their skin is a different colour, they speak a different language, they believe in a different god, they are to blame, and since they lost, they are inferior. And once that hate is focused, and that social hierarchy developed, that hate becomes the norm. It becomes embedded in our society, causing our innocence to slowly infect with hate. In the words of Jean-Jacques Rousseau "Man is born free but everywhere he is in chains."
And in many ways, racism is as much a plague of the mind, as a virus is a plague to the body, the kind of virus going around at the moment. It numbs your judgement, inflames your hatred and it compromises your empathy. And when it spreads, it starts off as something small, seemingly irrelevant and obscure, easy to ignore on a day to day basis. But the thing is, it starts going from person to person and border to border until it is not so small and irrelevant, you begin to hear of this virus on your day to day basis, and all those affected by it have a serious problem on their hands, a life-changing, life-threatening problem.
But the main difference between the two is how we try to cure them. With a plague, we try to control it, restrict it, and stop the spread of it as much as possible whether it is intentional or not. And eventually, we find the magic bullet in the form of a vaccine which eradicates it from our lands.
But with racism, Aotearoa is flatlining. Even though it has been proven to be just as deadly due to its impact as colonisation in the ways the Europeans justified the abuse of local populations such as the maori. We let it thrive in Aotearoa for decades. It was only until milestones such as the Maori land march and protest movement beginning in the 1970’s where we began to try and take control of this plague and even then, we did not eradicate it from our lands. With any other virus, if you give it the opportunity to manifest for over 130 years, it is going to be near impossible to defeat since there will be barely anyone left to fight it. And when we did fight this mental plague, but didn’t completely eradicate it from our lands, it’s only a matter of time until it begins to reinfect the minds of Aotearoa once more by hiding in the actions of our everyday lives.
It is almost as if we were expecting to find a magic bullet for racism, But the one other difference between this plague of the mind, and a plague of the body is that there is no vaccine for racism. And that puts us in an awkward situation, because if there is no cure, how do we fight it? Well, in the words of a man who was once confronted by this calamity “No one is born hating another person because of the colour of their skin, or their background, or their religion”. If we learn from the words and actions of Mandela and local icons such as te Whiti o Rongomai, one of the first leaders to use non violent resistance in order to protest the land grabbing by Pakeha , we will realise that these racist motives continue to exist in this country simply because we allow it to spread from person to person, generation to generation, hidden under layers of Societal norms. If we are all born innocent, with no prejudice or knowledge of the hate that fills this world; Our next generation inherits the society we give to them. And if we can make the shift now our approach to tackling racism, one which exposes the hate that hides in our everyday lives and removing that from our society, we will no longer be infecting our next generation with the racism which was so rampant in ours. We will be forcing an end to this racial pandemic, as our next generation, the ones who will lead the next 20 years, will live in a society where their foundation is one of love, understanding and compassion.
They will no longer be divided by race today giving Aotearoa the opportunity to unite tomorrow because, at our very core, we are homo sapiens, homo, the same.
John Hopcroft
