Are we a racist country?

I’m half-Maori and half-Scottish: One half of me wants to get drunk and the other half doesn’t want to pay for it. 

The ten-year-old John Black heard this joke on the Billy T James show circa 1985 and repeated it to everyone he knew. My horrified mother insisted I change Maori to Irish. While being slightly disappointed at this adult censorship, I could see her point, given my actual ancestry and the way Uncle Pat acted at Christmas.

Billy T James

That’s about as bad as it got in our house, racism-wise. So it is with some surprise that I awoke on the day after Christchurch to find all this time I had been living in a country fair riddled with racial animus.

Since that tragedy the entire country has been convulsed with paroxysms of masochistic self-flagellation, swallowing the premise that we are some South Pacific equivalent of the pre-Civil-War American South. Rallies have been held, legislation suggested, accusatory columns and tweets written. Former aerobics instructor Marama Davidson and her comrade, genocidal maniac selfie collector Golriz Ghahraman, have been front and centre, concluding with perfect reasonableness that a single homicidal Australian is a stand-in for all white people in New Zealand.

The atmos, racially speaking, is a little sour.

In fact, as I typed the mildly racist joke that opened this piece I glanced nervously at my door, half expecting it to be broken down by a newly formed Green party RACISM-IS-BAD strike force, with powers to drag me away to a re-education camp where I would be forced to inhale medical marijuana, copy out the lyrics to Kumbaya in te reo and watch Spike Lee movies 24/7.

Actually that doesn’t sound too bad.

What does, is accusing a nation of almost five million people of being racist.

Well are we?

Of course it’s a hopelessly subjective question, with only hopelessly subjective answers. But extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, so if Ms Davidson and Ghahraman want to claim these islands are hotbeds of bigotry they need to provide some objective proof that this is so.

Well luckily, unlike these lazy lefties your loyal columnist has taken some time and attempted to find some.

In 2016 the Finance website Insider Monkey sought to measure national attitudes to race by combining two previous surveys (one by the Washington Post and the other part of the World Values Survey).

Cunningly framed questions such as Would you mind having someone of a different race living next to you were designed to uncover hidden racism.

In all, the studies covered the responses of over 85,000 people from 61 countries.

Here are the top 10 most racist countries according to their findings: India, Lebanon, Bahrain, Libya, Egypt, the Philippines, Kuwait, Palestine, South Africa and South Korea.

Notice anything about these countries? White people, the exemplars of racism according to Davidson and co, are rather thin on the ground.

In fact in the top 25, there is not an Anglosphere country to be seen (with the possible exception of South Africa ). They are all to be found at the other end – Canada, Australia, the UK, the US and New Zealand being among the least racist.

So there you go Marama and Golly Gee, you can send my research fee care of the BFD.

These findings shouldn’t surprise anyone with any knowledge of actual history, not the ideologically drenched subject that passes for it currently in our halls of learning. The US tore itself apart over slavery and civil rights, and the Royal British Navy, to expiate its sins over UK involvement in the slave trade, set its guns against slavers for half a century at a large cost in blood and treasure. It is in Anglosphere countries with their shared heritage of common law freedoms and Christian ethics that minorities have been best protected.

Racism is an original sin of all humanity. The Muslim immigrants who died in Christchurch knew something that Davidson and co refuse to acknowledge  New Zealand is one of the most open and tolerant nations in the world. That’s why they chose to come here.

I’m not a religious man but if I was to believe in Hell, I would hope the design would go something like this:

Outer circles Married at First Sight contestants, Married at First Sight viewers, the 1981 Australian cricket team, people who talk in movies. The Inner most circle the Coward of Christchurch and others who take innocent life. Somewhere in between – people such as Davidson and Ghahraman who co-opt the corpses of the innocent for their nasty, narrow political viewpoints.

God Damn them all.