Of course, later when I got a chance to look at the world with mature eyes, to learn history, to travel and to think things through, I saw how caricaturish, stereotypical and inappropriate all of this was...
I don't know if anyone MEANT all of this to be actively racist... not in New Zealand anyway... I get the feeling that someone in education for example, working out a reading curriculum, saw the readers on the market, thought "how cute, kids will love these" and plowed on without thinking it through... while New Zealanders then were inventive and creative and bright and savvy in many respects, they were, after all, isolated down at the bottom of the world, away - in experience, distance and time - from much of what was fomenting in the US...
My point is that as a young child, I was exposed to, and took in, various disrespectful, RACIST images and messages about people of colour, mostly African and, by extension, African Americans. And this stuff gets hardwired into the brain... it just pops up when a cue is triggered...
In 1990, I went back to school, to get a diploma in broadcast journalism. As part of our coursework, we were required to undertake compulsory cultural sensitivity training. I wrote about that here: White Privilege & Colour Blindness
In truth, while I've had a lot of interaction with people of all skin colours, from many countries, cultures, religions, sexual orientations, gender identifications, I still feel confused and foolish when I am around people "other" than me. I feel ignorant and diffident around them... I am ALWAYS afraid that my ignorance will cause offence in some way... that I will do or say something that is unintentionally hurtful, demeaning, perceived as arrogant, patronising, RACIST...
And then, finally, it all comes full circle, when on a Twitter thread yesterday some person I don't know comments in a discussion on poverty and education (with a sub text that poor black children have it harder than poor white children), that all white people are a plague on the earth...
I guess that might be poetic justice, that a person of colour makes global statements about the white race, just as whites have made global statements about blacks... But is that an improvement, an evolution?
There was a complete unwillingness to acknowledge that oppression happens to all of us, to varying degrees. That I might have more privilege than a black woman, but that I have less than a white man... and that black woman has more privilege than a Native American woman... That we humans have ALWAYS found ways to marginalise each other, to get power over each other, since the dawn of time, within our own families, clans, tribes and in relation to the "other", the "outsider"... We are in many respects, no different to wild pack animals, who have complicated rules around dominance. We pretend we have risen above all that, but we haven't... we're just a lot more subtle - though no less brutal - about how we enforce it...
What is to be done to help us move forward in some kind of state of grace?