Comments on the Archbishops' Commission on Racial Justice Report. # 82. 07/07/2022
Out of Many, One People.
Welcome. More church business - thoughts on a Report by Commission responding to a Report, raising important issues about the direction the church should be moving in. (By the way the initial From Lament to Action report had a serious typo - ‘biography’ when they surely ‘bibliography’, but the mistake carried through into this present document. Am I the only person who actually reads this stuff?)
Report of the Archbishops’ Commission for Racial Justice.
This is the first biannual report of the Commission, chaired by Lord Paul Boateng, and which grew out of the ‘From Lament to Action’ (FLA) report on the Church of England’s response to racial injustices. The first comment to make is that the Commission’s twelve members have been remarkably assiduous in carrying out their duties and deserve a vote of thanks from the whole church. The opening pages spell out how widely they have travelled and how many decision makers in the organisation and life of the church they have met in the course of the still health-disrupted past six months.
In this article I want to identify some of the issues that come from the Commission’s seven working groups which form the bulk of the Report; and then reflect, as the Report does, on progress with the forty-seven recommendations that came out of ‘From Lament to Action’. Here I want to develop the case that whilst FLA made several helpful recommendations, its overall orientation (and therefore that of the Church of England) is skewed in a way that means the overall and long-term impact of FLA, like that of its predecessors, will quite possibly be disappointing.
Report of the Commission’s Working Parties.
I won’t comment on all seven sections, but highlight several that I found significant.
Theology.
The working party speaks of being ‘able to draw on a wide range of critical discussions that have traced the theological roots of racist attitudes, behaviours, practices, cultures and structures’, including how these work out in the formation of ministers. Whilst not specific, I presume this means particularly looking at theologies that have come from outside the western European tradition as criticisms and correctives, including how theology handles our corporate identity, or the role of emotional expressiveness. Hopefully it will press theologies to closer engagement with both the social and experiential roots of popular faith.
Slavery.
This was, rightly I believe, the longest report of the seven, noting that ‘Our country does not give this fact [of the atrocity of enslavement] sufficient attention’; and that ‘it is right to do our best to mitigate its continuing effect on our communities’. Whilst it properly acknowledges ‘The harm done to the psychology of generations and to the moral underpinning of the Church as an institution is not readily quantified and is in some ways beyond measure’, nonetheless it gives a long section on how contentious memorials are responded to, specifically the monument to Tobias Rustat in Jesus College chapel, Cambridge. Since this is a complex issue I plan to do a separate blog on it in the near future.
Here the Report got its biggest publicity hit through Lord Boateng’s proposal that the Church pays £4 million to a national memorial of victims of the slave trade, though it doesn’t actually come in the Report. (I responded to a conservative push-back that there ought to be a monument to acts of altruism such as the Royal Navy’s nineteenth century patrols to stop slave trading and wrote a letter to The Times, included as an appendix below).
History and Memory.
Covers ground close to the above, and seeks to start to unpick the entangled issue of the inevitably historic entanglement of identities between being English, being at the centre of the British Empire, and being in the Church of England. The delicate issue of how people who properly have a strong and localised sense of being ‘English’ can also genuinely welcome ethnic inclusiveness needs serious consideration, which avoids patronising anti-English stereotypes. The workstream’s intention to ‘avoid further polarisation and look for ways to bring about reconciliation’ is to be applauded and sets itself a subtle and challenging task.
The Report and a disabling context.
As I said in the introduction to this blog, the Report is having to work with an understanding of its context in multi-ethnic England which I believe is unhelpful and misleading. It is as though someone has turned up the ‘Contrast’ dial so strongly that everything is seen in heightened tones of black and white which rules out any awareness of nuance and context. It is always an occupational hazard to think that any area that one is particularly focussed on is of all-encompassing and determinative importance. So here, the importance of ‘race’ is so heightened that the overall picture is distorted.
This plays out in two ways:
* the very considerable diversity within Britain’s multi-ethnic population is obliterated;
* the areas of connection between various groups of white and of minority ethnic people are not identified.
The Runnymede Trust’s authoritative Parekh Report on ‘The Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain’ (2000) wisely warned against a ‘95:5’ view of Britain: a ‘two-tone’ perception of two entirely distinct monolithic blocks. ‘From Lament to Action’ too easily accepted an updated ’85:15’ version.
By turning up the ‘contrast’ control to full several errors are generated.
* The too easy use of the bulked up UKME/GMH (aka BAME) terminology. Thus, its recommendations at various points set 15% goals, on the obviously wrong basis that both the white and the various ethnic minority communities should all have identical profiles and therefore see identical outcomes. This is so obviously wrong in every area of human activity that the desired proportions – both because of under-shoots and over-shoots - are unlikely to emerge anywhere, which can lead to false assumptions of racial injustice. An example in FLA is Action E5 is a call to mitigate outcome of school exclusions for ‘UKME/GMH students’, when it is clear this is chiefly a problem for black Caribbean background students, much less for African background students, and hardly at all for Bangladeshis. The terminology promotes ignorance not understanding.
* The Report at one stage uses the phrase ‘appropriate representational targets’, when it can only be anyone’s guess in any one instance what an appropriate target might be. Behind this is the very extensive and detailed FLA Action P6 about recruitment. But being over-energetic in the search for ‘appropriate representation’ can, indeed has, led to inappropriate appointments to the detriment of both the person appointed and wider regard for the process. The concern for overall minority ethnic appointment targets, rather then being able to observe significant differences within the constituency, can again lead to vital factors being ignored, fuelling inappropriate confidence. The Church now has three middle-class background Indian bishops, but not a single Caribbean background male bishop. A simplistic two-tone view obscures the reality that we are still seriously ineffective in a crucial area.
* Similarly FLA seemed unrealistic in its estimate of the size of the cohort of minority ethnic candidates and the church’s ability to find suitable people, as in shortlists for senior appointments (Action P7). Behind this lies a top-down mentality that rather arrogantly believes the Church of England has the power to generate the people it needs. This ignores the many different trajectories to be found in a situation of superdiversity, not least the desire of many minority ethnic people to worship within their own culture. Overall the Report seems blind to the fact that the majority of UKME/GMH Christians choose to worship in ethnic specific traditions, largely for cultural reasons rather than because of perceived racism. This, of course, makes 15% targets especially difficult. Further the earnestness to increase minority ethnic presence in the church structures can simply draw able people away from the more crucial long-term need for effective parish ministry.
* The similarities between black and white working class people and cultures are lost in the largely exclusive emphasis on ‘race’. So the Report does not explore how far the lack of participation of black people in the Church of England simply indicates cultural congruence with the heavily secularised white working class.
* The Report , following FLA, gives far too little attention to the parishes. It is significant that the latter gave a list of strong Action Points on Education, but much less on Culture and Liturgy – the most likely reason being that the Church of England has strong executive powers as regards its schools, very little potency, as Bishops know well, about what goes on in its parishes. Whilst the frontispiece to the Report quotes Martin Luther King: ‘Our goal is to create a beloved community’, yet in the whole Report there is but one paragraph on how we actually create ‘beloved communities’; a paragraph so good it deserves quoting in full:
“As the life and character of worshipping communities which reflect our society develop, we are keen to see the learning experience of specific congregations reflected on and good practice shared - congregations shaped by specific shared language and culture as well as congregations which seek to offer intercultural worship”.
Hopefully the Commission will find ways to shift its emphasis towards the week-in, week-out life of the ‘beloved communities’ and the multiple grass-roots challenges of ‘out of many, one people – of how the whole church can fruitfully express unity in diversity.
The Report also encourages the development of a ‘number of key research projects to be commissioned to help support the racial justice and anti-racism work of the Church of England’. In conclusion may I suggest two (for more detail read my Blog 21 ‘What can the Church of England learn from the Sewell Report’):
* Analyse the intersection of race and class – how far is lack of involvement in the church by minority ethnic people the result of racism, and how far part of our failure to minister effectively to working class people generally.
* Why are some congregations flourishing inclusive multi-ethnic communities and others not? An awareness of ‘good practice’ mentioned in the quote above should then feed into our policies and training.
**************
Appendix: Letter to The Times, 03/07/2022:
‘The letter from Professors Robert Tombs, Nigel Bigger and others (letters, 1st July) for a memorial for those who sought to abolish or prevent trading in slaves is not without merit, but it is wholly inappropriate as a counter to the proposal that the Church of England should support a national memorial marking our shameful involvement in the slave trade and in slave holding.
As an analogy, it is proper that we respect and value those involved in the preventative work of safeguarding, but we rightly give much more attention and concern to the victims of abuse by taking their stories seriously and seeking to do all that is possible to offset the damage that has been done.
The slave trade and slavery destroyed or brutalised millions of lives and its consequences can never be fully ameliorated. It is right that as a nation, and the Church of England as part of that nation, create a memorial that publicly and permanently acknowledges the evil that we have been responsible for.
Yours sincerely
John Root’