How many black people are there in New Zealand?
Let’s be very clear. Maori people and other Pacific Islanders are not Blacks. They are Polynesians, which are an entirely different race of people. They are not even black-skinned, they generally call themselves brown. Some Maori kids and Pacific Island kids call themselves black because they identify with American Blacks as a minority group living in a White dominated society, but just identifying with American Blacks does not make them Black. As someone said earlier there are not many Blacks in New Zealand because there were never African slaves brought there as they were to America. The other reason New Zealand has few Blacks is that they never had a colonial empire. Britain has a Black population today because they had many colonies in Africa and imported African slaves to their Carribean colonies as well. New Zealand had strict immigration policies until the 1980s which prevented most non-Whites from entering. It was not quite as strict or as overt as the “White Australia” policy
