Opinion | Racism against ‘gweilos’, like prejudice towards Chinese and domestic helpers, is rooted in old ideas

Peter Kammerer says words and stereotypes used to describe Europeans and other Asians usually stem from outdated ideas

Today, most Hongkongers aren’t racist and foreigners embrace the term ‘gweilo’, but sometimes the ugliness behind words seeps out

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Stereotypes (and offensive words) exist for virtually all of Hong Kong’s ethnic minority communities, but their contributions to the city are irreplaceable. Photo: Edward Wong

Published: 2:00pm, 3 Dec 2018Updated: 7:09pm, 3 Dec 2018

A recent comment to one of my columns stopped me short and got me thinking. I’ll have to paraphrase, as it was quickly removed by moderators, but it basically said that, as a white person, I had no right to make value judgments about Hong Kong. The inference is that my skin colour excludes me from saying what I feel is right or wrong about the city I have made my home. But it was not that sentiment that I found jarring; it was the blatant racism behind it.

I’ve no idea where in the world the commenter was from. What I do know, though, is that some places in Asia colloquially use derogatory words for foreigners and Hong Kong is arguably the biggest culprit. Such terms can invite racism. That’s not to excuse that each English-speaking country has a rich vein of insulting words for people from various cultures and religions.

Geneticists tell us that there is no such thing as race; to them, we are all descended from a common pair of ancestors whose offspring, over the millennia, moved to other continents in waves. The colour of skin and eyes, hair texture and physical features are determined by proximity to the equator and environmental conditions.

From a Western perspective, race was concocted by nations starting in the 15th century when Portugal pioneered slavery from Africa, evolving into a system of classifying people into groups to justify positions of power and wealth. Racism sprang from the laws and rules governments made, white people of Anglo-Saxon stock being the drafters and beneficiaries, and skin-colour determining position in society, with those with darker skin being worse-off.

We all know how that worked out for Asia – white spice traders and then imperialist powers who used force and trickery to steal resources and land. They were often rude and demeaning to locals, treating them as inferior. Unsurprisingly, many of the words used colloquially for foreigners in some of these places have a derogatory background, reflecting how poorly Europeans were originally thought of.