Hello. It is good to be back. Once again, a personal take on life in Britain, and an attempt to distill many stories into one main story. Please supplement it with your stories, and forward to others you think might connect with it. I have just reached 300 subscribers, please help to get more, especially outside London.
A Bad Story or a Good Story? Multi-Ethnic Britain.
On Saturday evening I let go of a lifetime’s prejudice against tennis and watched, enthralled, Emma Raducanu’s stunning achievement. Her multi-ethnic background has been widely noticed - child of Rumanian and Chinese parents, born in Canada; noticed too the breadth of her achievements – A* & A at A-Level, fluent in Mandarin Chinese. And she is pretty. All in all, both a poster-girl for ethnically diverse Britain, and the fruit of what the Sewell Report termed as ‘immigrant optimism’. Yet she is at the same time elusively, quintessentially a normal, suburban English young woman.
A few nights before, when England drew 1-1 with Poland, the BBC audience ratings of the players once again placed Raheem Sterling worst, a bleak re-run of the consistent viewer de-valuation of him during the 2018 World Cup. (I didn’t see the game to judge, but I have my suspicions of racism at work).
Both Raducanu and Sterling came to this country as small children, both are now astronomically wealthy, but otherwise it would be difficult to find two more contrasting stories: the daughter of wealthy, cosmopolitan, financial sector parents in a large house, who attended a selective grammar school, and who has received world-wide adulation. Contrasted with the son of a struggling unsupported mother, and a father who was murdered in Jamaica, growing up in council accommodation and being sent to a special school, and who received racist abuse from the citizens of the country he represented. If Raducanu had never picked up a tennis racket most likely life would still have gone well for her. If Sterling had never kicked a football he most probably would have felt the roughest edges of hopelessness and despair.
A good story, and (in the wider context) a bad story: both of them depict life in multi-ethnic Britain. Clearly the overall picture is extraordinarily complex. There are cross-currents, eddies and whirl-pools that make it very difficult be clear about what is going on around us, and it is right to try to hold in our minds the very different stories than can be told about multi-ethnic Britain today, yet I believe we also need to step back, perhaps to identify what we feel about Britain. As we look around, do we feel that at base it is a good story or a bad story?
I ask the question even though I know it can be dismissed as futile, since the answer we give depends upon so many variables:
* are you basically an optimist or a pessimist? I am an optimist, at times irresponsibly so, and I tend to be inclined to believe that things will turn out well.
* has life been good to you? I grew up in a secure home, received a free world-class education, have always had excellent health care for only rare serious illnesses, have been well-treated by my virtually lifelong employer, the Church of England.
* are you black or white? The obvious question. I have never felt my skin-colour may have lost me an opportunity; rarely thought that people would take against me because of my appearance; basically always felt at home (except occasional places in Cambridge).
So, yes, my answer to the question can’t lay claim to any high standard of objectivity, but I still think it worth asking because it sets the basic direction of our approach, not just to the overall situation in our society or church, but to our expectations of personal, individual encounters. There are dangers either way. Our media tend to love bad stories and we can too easily talk ourselves into a downward spiral of depression. Or we can blandly focus on the good, and let injustice and evil thrive unchecked.
The bad story, or the glass is half-empty.
There is plenty of evidence to suggest there is. Statistics of discrimination in employment and recruitment give evidence that the overall story for black people is bad rather than good. The frequently reported experiences of micro-aggressions signalling lack of respect or understanding intensify alienation and isolation. Worst of all the Windrush scandal vividly exemplified black people’s longstanding allegation that the very operation of British societies basic structures dehumanised and disregarded them.
But the emptiness of the glass can be over-emphasised. I am bemused by how readily people make reference to the death of George Floyd as being indicative of life in Britain. His death was a harsh and ugly tragedy, but it happened in another country, dissimilar as well as similar to Britain, not least in how armed and aggressive its police are (see Blog 35, ‘Not theUSA’). I am often uncertain as to how heartfelt such references really are. By contrast I still feel intensely furious about the Windrush scandal. Here was my government in my country treating my fellow citizens with cold and shameless contempt. They are people who could well have been members of the Pathfinder group I led fifty years ago. I still find it a story of both institutional and personal racism that beggars belief.
Glass half empty underlines the deep-seated inequality in a world. The Raducanus and the Sterlings represent fairly accurately the winners and the losers in the global economy. They highlight that Britain as a multi-ethnic society has drawn in people from two quite separate streams: those with the background and skills to prosper in an inter-connected, international economy, and those who struggle as their services to that economy are unskilled or under-valued, or are just not needed. In comparing them, then, social class is a much more significant indicator than ethnicity.
Balancing the two stories.
When Rashford, Sancho and Saka were inundated with on-line abuse for missing penalties at the Euro 2020 Final there was rightly distress at the vicious racism piling on to the distress they would have already felt. It was a very bad ending that soured what had hitherto been a good national story of a successful multi-racial team. Twitter removed 1961 racist tweets after the final. Getting one must be depressing, getting that volume must drive you to the edge of despair. Yet, on the other hand, it is also less than 1 in 30,000 people – or just one person in every two large urban parishes. That’s not a national mood. By contrast when Sako came on to play for Arsenal in the first match of the season, he was applauded by Brentford as well as Arsenal supporters. Football grounds are seeing a match between overt racist and anti-racist supporters and to me it looks like anti-racism (at least on the surface) is winning.
What of the Church of England? Without doubt the Church of England needs calling out for its bad story as regards racism. I wrote as much in a widely ignored article on ‘Racism in the Church of England’ in Anvil, No 9, Vol 1, 1992. Several of my blogs over the past year have taken up the same theme (see for 14 & 22 Jan). It has been widely recognised, from the Archbishop of Canterbury down. Yet I believe that if this is the only story we tell then we are selling not only the Church of England, but implicitly the power of the gospel itself short. It may partly be my contrarian nature (and possibly old age), but I think it is now worth counter-emphasising that Anglican congregations in multi-ethnic areas are invariably multi-ethnic, and many of them thriving in being so. Even if the ordained leadership is very largely white, there is much greater diversity at other levels, and - most significantly – people of different ethnicities relate to each other as friends and fellow believers. We should not lightly disregard that contribution that we make to the social capital of our society. A local councillor once told me we were the only voluntary organisation that drew together the three main broad ethnic categories in the area.
The good story, or the glass is half full.
In the ‘video of the week’, which I mention below, the black American conservative-minded economist and sociologist Glenn Loury uses the phrase ‘glass half full’ when, in contradistinction to the negative story usually told about race in the USA, Loury underlines the progress made in the last century and a half from black chattel slavery to a black President, which in the wide context of global history he identified as a significant achievement. I think Loury is partly making a strategic move here, as of course did the Sewell Report in this country, with the intention that by framing the story positively momentum is built up to drive good developments forward, and is in opposition to the dispiriting negativity which is the dominant story in both the recent Runnymede Report in this country as well as amongst progressives in the USA.
A glass half full celebrates black achievement and progress, and redirects energy from merely ‘demanding’ (which given the power structures can never be more than ‘asking’) for change. Similarly a scenario which focusses on ramping up guilt for white privilege inhibits mutuality in relationships, and the energy, indeed joy, which comes from working in ethnically collaborative relationships.
It may be guessed from my introductory comments that – in large part because of who I am – I am inclined to tell the glass-half-full ‘good story’, largely because in terms of how we feel about our society glass half full encourages us to rejoice in the progress we see, and then grieve over and work to remove all that hinders the glass from being full. By contrast the glass-half-empty ‘bad story’ invites us to focus on all that is wrong, and then give only grudging acknowledgement to that which should be celebrated.
Exodus: telling the same story two different ways.
“I remember the devotion of your youth, your love as a bride, how you followed me in the wilderness, in a land not sown. Israel was holy to the Lord, the first fruits of the harvest” (Jeremiah 2:2,3a).
“Their heart was not steadfast towards him,
They were not true to his covenant” (Psalm 78:37).
Both the good story and the bad story of the Exodus that are recalled above have the same intention. Jeremiah’s celebration of the joy of the covenant relationship with God, was merely to underline their subsequent failure to keep it. That failure was the persistent them of Psalm 78’s re-telling. But for both the final reality is God’s covenant faithfulness that eventually saw them through to safety in the promised land.
The myriad of stories that constitute life in multi-ethnic Britain can give birth to big pictures that are very different. None is the final, incontrovertible picture. As with the Exodus story, there is much to rebuke and to repent of, and there are continuing injustices that should not be ignored or glossed over. But there have also been good things and real progress. The good story gives no room for complacency or pride, but it does strengthen confidence that God is present in the story and that the good can be built up into the better.
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Video of the Week
Conversations with Cornel West | Glenn Loury, Cornel West & Teodros Kiros | The GlennShow, on Blogging.tv.
Glenn Loury is professor of economics at Brown University, and a leading black conservative thinker; Cornel West is a firebrand radical philosopher and theologian, latterly of Harvard. The meeting of opposing minds is commendably courteous, and intellectually heavy duty – it caused me to listen to John Coltrane’s ‘A Love Supreme’, wish I had read far more Russian novels, and grind my teeth at West’s cavalier theology. Oz Guinness also gets a name check. It is the type of conversation that is desperately needed.
Coming Events
Healing the Wounds of Racism: Making a difference in a divided World, with Rev Dr Jason Roach, Pastor of The Bridge, Battersea (London). Friday 17th of September at 8 pm. From L’Abri Fellowship. Access at https://zoom.us/j/99712458019, password ‘Lecture’.
“More than a year on from the murder of George Floyd many in the UK church are still grappling with how to make progress in the area of racial reconciliation. Jason Roach will reflect on a biblical perspective in the light of his personal experience as pastor of a multi-ethnic church on an estate in West London and co-chair of the Racial Justice Priority Group in the Diocese of London.”
‘Christianity, Climate and Race’ led by Rev Dr Israel Olofinjana, on Thursday 7th October 7.30-9.30pm; to be found at ‘eauk.it/climate-justice’.
The impact of climate change is by far the most serious form of racism in our world today, so it is good that Evangelical Alliance & Tear Fund are setting up this on-line event.
Thanks John.... Broadly I think we are on the same page... but up north (and probably elsewhere) the picture is complicated, and I fear still more than half empty, by the Islamophobia dimension, and the social segregation of communities.. That doesn't prevent some friendships, good neighbourly relationships and some multi-faith working together, but there is still discrimination, unequal opportuinties, and prejudice from both sides.