Beware the power of racial slurs to dehumanise

Locusts! This creature of darkness increasingly represents many Hong Kong citizens' disdain for, and discrimination against, a menacing Other. Granted, being a black American perhaps makes me the ultimate outsider, compared to either Hongkongers or mainland Chinese. But considering this emerging epithet's anatomy and evolution leads me to ask the question: are mainland Chinese our new niggers to the East?

This is no insignificant question, coming from a country where some consider "nigger" the nuclear bomb of epithets. For example, we censor and fine football players for using that word (by anyone, under any circumstance). Yet one is free to place a fierce, dark-faced, feathered-hair image on a helmet, call their team the "Redskins" (a slur against indigenous peoples) and make billions.

This contradiction expresses our enduring history that gives "nigger" the unmatched power to offend, threaten and subordinate individuals and groups.

So why cross oceans and continents to connect a centuries-old epithet with one just birthed by comparison? Why liken a slur forged by national friction in a country built by migrants, immigrants and slaves, with one now being fashioned in a city built by migrants and immigrants, who have no historical connection with that brutal institution known as the African slave trade? Why compare "locust" to "nigger"? Make no mistake, the two terms are far from equivalent. But parallels between them demonstrate sufficient cause for concern. Indeed, Hong Kong citizens embracing the term and all it represents are sliding, epithet in hand, down a slippery slope that may end up where nigger began. Consider three connected components that comprise the locust slur.

First, the social distance between Hong Kong residents and its mainland visitors has and continues to significantly expand. In Dr Robert Chung Ting-yiu's polls, citizens increasingly say Hong Kong represents their core identity, rather than China or being Chinese. The more alarming expression of this growing rift is that many Hong Kong residents racialise the difference between themselves and their mainland neighbours. They say the Chinese deface public ruins and defecate in public. They say they are lazy, steal, are uncouth and ignorant.

For these Hongkongers, this is not simply what some Chinese people do, it is who they are. It marks and defines mainlanders' essential nature. Read into the language and tone of public statements made by Hongkongers - in newspapers, on websites, at public protests and on homemade videos - and you find a not-so-subtle mark of inferiority that increasingly separates them (Chinese) from us (Hongkongers).

Hong Kong citizens' growing dissatisfaction with their current standard of living marks the second component. Whether it is about the availability of affordable housing, access to social welfare services, or opportunities for gainful employment, a 2012 Gallup survey showed the vast majority of Hong Kong citizens polled - 77 per cent - said they were either "struggling" or "suffering". In fact, fewer Hong Kong citizens said they were "thriving" than any other developed Asian region surveyed that year.