This week, we’ve been looking at the ways people in New Zealand relate to New Zealand as “home”. A lot of them talked about incidents of casual racism that they face regularly. The internet has termed those incidents "microaggressions".
Statistics New Zealand released more findings from the 2013 census this week, showing that the country has “more ethnicities than the world has countries”.
New Zealand is clearly becoming a more diverse place, and yet, writing for the New Zealand Herald, Philip Burdon points out the term "New Zealander" is not exclusive to people of Maori or European heritage. “Census data shows that of the 307,000 Asian people living in Auckland, more than 64,000 were born in New Zealand. And tens of thousands of Asia-born Aucklanders have been living in New Zealand for 10 years or more.”
Buzzfeed has a list of “21 racial microaggressions you hear on a daily basis”. In the Guardian, Bim Adewunmi writes about her experience living as a black woman in Germany:
Perhaps tellingly, all the people who told me about the city's international feel were white – they didn't have to think about being foreign in addition to being in possession of a brown body. In Berlin, where they have had a very large and visible Turkish population for a long time, I am a different type of foreigner – the type that speaks English and Yoruba and has an afro.
