Trumps Blatant Racism

“Trump should apologise for racist Obama post.”

Prime Minister Christopher Luxon.

Racism Persists in Aotearoa and the United States

Racism, the reasons for it, takes different shapes in different countries, but the underlying patterns are painfully familiar. Aotearoa New Zealand and the United States are separated by geography, scale, and comforting fiction, yet both nations continue to struggle with the legacies of colonisation and the systems of preference built. Details differ in each country, but the outcomes are destructive for the minority cultures.

New Zealand

In Aotearoa, racism is inseparable from the history of colonisation and the contested promises of Te Tiriti o Waitangi. The Treaty was meant to establish a partnership between Māori and the Crown, but for much of the country’s history, its guarantees were ignored or selectively interpreted. Land loss, forced assimilation, and the sidelining of Māori authority created structures that still shape life today. These legacies show up in disparate policies in health, education, policing, and political representation, patterns that persist not because individuals hold blatant prejudice, but because the systems themselves were built without Māori leadership or consent.

Trump’s United States

Trump’s loud and blatant racist attitude is manifested in his disgusting comment on Truth Social, calling former President Barack Obama and his wife Michelle “apes”. How this weak man is the current president of the United States is beyond the comprehension of people in other democratic nations. Racism forced the displacement of Indigenous peoples, the enslavement of Africans, and the long era of segregation that followed. Even after civil rights legislation dismantled the most explicit forms of discrimination, the architecture of inequality remained. Redlining shaped neighbourhoods for generations. School funding tied to property taxes entrenched educational divides. Policing practices and sentencing patterns produced racial disparities that continue to spark national debate. Trump reinforces racism at every level. He abused presidential pardons by releasing the criminals, all white, racist ‘proud boys’, from the January 6, 2021, insurrection.

Trump

As in Aotearoa, these outcomes are not accidents; they are the predictable results of institutions designed in eras of exclusion. Prime Minister Christopher Luxon has publicly declared “Trump should apologise for racist Obama post.”

Racism a Structural Design

Both countries share a common temptation: to treat racism as a matter of personal morality rather than structural design. “Be kind” and “treat everyone equally” are admirable principles, but they do little to address systems that consistently produce unequal outcomes. A society can be full of well‑meaning people and still be unfair. That’s the uncomfortable truth both nations wrestle with, because acknowledging it requires responsibility, not guilt, but responsibility, to change the conditions that allow inequity to endure.

Confronting Racism

The work of confronting racism looks similar on both sides of the Pacific. It begins with listening to the communities who experience it, not to debate their reality but to understand it. It requires recognising that fairness cannot be achieved by pretending everyone starts from the same place. It demands more than symbolic gestures or national pride in past progress. And it calls for a willingness to examine the institutions that shape daily life, schools, hospitals, courts, housing systems, and political structures, and ask how they can be rebuilt to serve everyone equitably.

Summary

Aotearoa New Zealand and the United States each have their own histories, their own wounds, and their own pathways forward. But they share a central truth: racism is not a chapter that can be closed simply by declaring it over. It is a system that must be confronted, understood, and deliberately dismantled. Both countries still have significant work ahead to minimise the impact of institutional racism let alone changing the attitudes of the general population.  In both nations, it remains a personal choice to do.