Spot the difference between the walkers and the workers

Thursday, 30 April 2020

In the streets of Auckland, the contrast between walkers and workers is stark, writes Melanie Sharma-Barrow.

OPINION: A lawyer friend living in central London recently joked that the UK government ought to clarify that lockdown really means “brown people only can go out to work”. He was making a jibe at the inequality of Covid-19 – namely that brown people are essential. I found it rather amusing.

Covid-19 has made clear that New Zealand, too, is propped up by brown, yellow and a forgotten class of white people. At level 4, my supermarket in Auckland was a sea of working brown faces and foreign accents and hard-working white New Zealanders not too proud to take up the job that has proven so essential to feeding our families.

On the streets I only ever saw brown people working in high-vis overalls. Now we are in level 3, the contrast is even more stark.

In Ponsonby, I see that the white are walking and the brown are working. This is not strictly correct, because I am brown and I walk. But, in just one day of level 3, along Ponsonby Rd, I struggled to find one business that did not have a brown person or a migrant in a service role.

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While Pākehā are out walking, brown-skinned people are at work, says Sharma-Brown.

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They are cooking and serving and managing. They are delivering and handling and driving. They are cleaning and sweeping and packaging.

Level 3 is a reminder of how vibrant and multicultural the population really is, and a testament to migration. It seems brown people and migrants and poor white people can get jobs. Just certain types of them.

Yet things can be better. Six months ago, when I walked my children along Three Lamps, I counted six businesses in a row that had brown people working in them, and not one brown person actually using the service. I wondered what my mixed race kids thought of this. I also wondered what white kids think of this.

It will take time for society and government to think smarter as to how ethnic minorities and migrants and the poor institutionalised white can be helped out of poverty in New Zealand. In the next pandemic, I certainly hope essential workers will be more balanced in colour.

But yesterday the kids and I saw something very sad. A well-dressed white woman was causing a commotion on Jervois Rd. She was yelling at an Indian man who had parked on the pavement, to do his job. He was a courier driver, his head low trying to focus on his job as she yelled at him.

Why else would anyone be out in level 3 of a global pandemic that is crushing the world, in a van, in uniform, unless they were working because a) they have to and b) they need to? She talked to him like he was a servant. As she hissed at him for parking on the pavement, getting in her way, she went on and on at him. The tone was racist, the look was denigratory, the anger was irrational. Yet the young boy with her looked horrified at his mum’s behaviour.

Jacinda Ardern reminded New Zealanders to be kind. We've had only three days at level 3 and I wonder if we have already forgotten this.

Please let's not forget what these essential workers have done for us.

* Melanie Sharma-Barrow works in the not-for-profit sector advising organisations in culture and relationship management. She is a lawyer and graduate of the London School of Economics and Political Science.