Immigration Trapdoor: Is Whiteness the Key to Assimilation?
Words by Janaye Kirtikar (she/her)
My dad moved to Aotearoa in 1990 and has been a citizen since 1991. It’s the only citizenship he holds and he’s spent half his life here. But this doesn’t matter to the people who yell “Gandhi!” at him on the street or speak down to him because of his accent. His foreignness is imprinted on his brown skin, and in their eyes he can never assimilate enough to count as a “New Zealander.”
Immigrants of colour (and their children) are constantly faced with, as the critic Wesley Morris puts it, the “trapdoor of racism.” In her essay, Whites: OnThe Race and Other Falsehoods, journalist Otegha Uwagba describes the experience of when “the trapdoor opens […] [and] your stomach lurches the way it does when you’re on a roller coaster that has just begun its descent”.
Recently, the trapdoor opened under my dad during a dispute with a long-term business partner and friend. John, a white British immigrant, told my dad that he “was warned not to get into a business relationship with people of [a] certain ethnic profile by family and friends.” Although the unabashed racism was surprising, what was most bizarre in this email exchange was later when John said, “It may happen in some tiers of Indian society where threatening people with a knife and disembowelment, metaphorically or literally, is the modus operandi, but certainly not in any civilised society such as New Zealand.”
It goes without saying that my dad has never threatened anyone—with a knife or anything else—but I found John’s comments on so-called “civilised society” incredibly disturbing. What makes India inherently less civilised than Aotearoa? And why is this man, an immigrant himself, the arbiter of Aotearoa society?
The reason for this lies in John’s proximity to the dominant Pākehā culture. John might be an immigrant with an obvious accent and foreign citizenship but, above all else, he is white, and that affords him instant assimilation and authority in Aotearoa.
While all immigrants may experience some level of prejudice, the scale and longevity of this is much more severe for immigrants of colour. A white friend of mine moved here from England about fifteen years ago and clearly remembers being bullied in primary school for being ‘different.’ Yet as she got older this happened less frequently and it has not occurred at all in her teenage years or adult life. In retrospect, her bullies appeared to care less about her being foreign than they did about her being different, and as she integrated into Aotearoa culture this difference became less obvious. Despite being an immigrant, my friend will never experience the stomach lurch of the trapdoor opening.
It doesn’t matter whether we’ve been here for three years or thirty, immigrants of colour are never fully allowed access to the ‘Kiwi’ identity. All it takes is a little scratch to the surface—a disagreement, a business dispute—for a white person to show their true self and remind us of our inferior ethnic profile. Thirty years ago, my dad received his citizenship certificate with an invisible asterisk—Note: citizenship does not equal belonging, only whiteness does.
Name has been changed.