As racial tensions flare in the US in the wake of another African-American man's death at the hands of a white police officer, it can be easy to look at New Zealand as the model of a multicultural paradise.
But all is not well in Aotearoa.
A meme, made up of four images of racist incidents in New Zealand spanning nearly a century, is being shared widely on social media to illustrate this point.
It urges Kiwis to not "get on too high a horse" as we observe the Black Lives Matter protests and the backlash to them in the US, reminding us "we have work to do" to combat racism here too.
The first photo is from a University of Auckland capping parade, at which students dressed in Ku Klux Klan (KKK) regalia rode on horseback down Auckland's Karangahape Rd in 1923.
The students were promoting a production based on the KKK, but "other Aucklanders wore the white hood in earnest", according to historian Scott Hamilton. Just a few months later, newspaper records show the KKK would claim responsibility for burning down four shops in the nearby suburb of Mt Eden.
A second image shows a hooded KKK member walking down a main road in Gisborne in the 1950s, while a third shows activist Hilda Halkyard-Harawira confronting Auckland University engineering students who'd worn blackface to mock Māori in 1974.
She and the He Taua action group eventually stopped those students from performing an insulting parody of the 'Ka Mate' haka - a performance that had been an annual tradition.
The fourth image, from 2018, shows the now-infamous Hawera Mt View Lion's Club float at the town's A&P parade. Six members of the float are adorned in blackface - but rather than condemning them, the Mayor of South Taranaki awarded them second place and a cash prize of $300.
These are not isolated incidents. Digital records also show students wearing KKK outfits to their capping ceremonies in Wellington in 1960 and Dunedin in 1926.
The images paint a shameful picture, but represent just a tiny fraction of the racism that exists in Aotearoa.
In a blog post written in the wake of the 2019 Christchurch terror attack, YourNZ founder Pete George challenged political commentator Chris Trotter's assertion that the term 'white supremacy' was misused in New Zealand.
The blog points to evidence that Māori children were forced to speak English at school, that Māori were not allowed on juries for cases involving Pākehā (despite whites being allowed to judge Māori), and that ethnic segregation of rest rooms was widespread - just as it was in the US and South Africa.
Indian and Chinese immigrants also suffered, newspaper articles from the early 1900s suggest, and in Hamilton they were banned from pubs, barbers and swimming pools.
Even now, in 2020, racial inequality exists. The most notable example lies in our prisons, where Māori make up more than half of all inmates - despite representing just 16.5 percent of the population.
