Abstract:
White supremacy first arrived in Aotearoa, the home of Māori for more than one and a half millennia, in 1769 when a group of Englishmen set foot on a beach at Tūranganui-ā-Kiwa on the East Coast and promptly shot the rangatira (leader) dead. The next day they shot fifteen more tangata whenua (people of the land). For these and many other Europeans, they wrongly believed that their whiteness and their Christianity authorized them to travel the world and exterminate, enslave, and dispossess nonwhite non-Christians (ECOSOC 2010). Whites renamed the country to New Zealand and redefined it for themselves. Two hundred fifty years later, white supremacy is the norm in New Zealand and continues to be used to terrorize Māori and other nonwhites. The victims of this ongoing terrorism were shocked but not surprised at the horrific mass murders that took place in Christchurch on 15 March 2019 (Burton 2019). A white supremacist went to two mosques and shot at hundreds of Muslims while they were at prayer, killing fifty-one and injuring forty-nine (RNZ 2019a; New Zealand Herald 2019a).