Welcome. Martin Luther supposedly said that the test of a theologian was how they held together law and grace. Perhaps today in a racially divided world, it is how we hold together unity and diversity. This is the first of three blogs on the topic: firstly on our current dilemma; next week a theological proposal on the topic; and then finally how the two emphases can be expressed in the local church.
Holding Together Unity and Diversity
Part 1. Holding Together Unity and Diversity – Our Dilemma.
As Britain has become aware of itself as a multi-racial society, we have had to come to some understanding of what it means to be united as one people, alongside what it means to belong to different ethnic or cultural groups. That is, to use the title and a recurring theme of these blogs, how can many ethnicities also be one people. How do we give weight to both poles?
a) Emphasising unity.
This was the default position for Britain. Migrants arrived after 1947 precisely because they had that right to be here as members of the Commonwealth, a Commonwealth that stressed that we had an overarching unity under the crown. An expression for such unity was that for the 1953 Coronation identically formatted postage stamps were produced for all the Commonwealth nations.
The normative understanding was that at its heart Britain was a tolerant, welcoming society, in contrast to the United States in the Civil Rights period, where violent racism was seen as an outcrop of the system. Correspondingly Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a dream’ speech on Aug 28, 1963, [hint to church leaders: 60th Anniversary this summer] was seen as an aspiration to what Britain largely possessed: ‘I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character’. Being colour blind is a virtue.
In the first semi-official document on Britain as a multi-racial society - the Institute of Race Relations ‘Colour and Citizenship’ survey (1969) - the emphasis on Britain’s recently emerged racial diversity was on strengthening our commonality. The emphasis in the period was, on the hand, overcoming the ignorance of the host community that led to hostile attitudes towards racial minorities; on the other hand, helping those minorities understand and adjust to the new society that they had entered. Behind both emphases was confidence in the power of education to smooth the transition into being a cohesive society. The aim was integration of the various ethnic groups, which in 1966 the then Home Secretary, Roy Jenkins defined as not ‘meaning the loss, by immigrants, of their own national characteristics and culture.... I define integration, therefore, not a flattening process of assimilation but as equal opportunity, accompanied by cultural diversity, in an atmosphere of mutual tolerance".
Such an aspiration resonates strongly with Christians, thus Archbishop Michael Ramsay chaired the National Council for Commonwealth Immigrants; evidence of the congruence between this tolerant and integrating mindset and the basic Christian emphasis of all people as made in God’s image. The downside of this optimism has been that the church has been slow to adjust to the depth of diversity that we shall go on to discuss, meaning that, for example, both the theology and practice of ministering in a very diverse society had not featured in clergy training.
Unity has continued to emerge in popular slogans such as ‘One Race, the Human Race’. Obama’s election in 2008 promoted the optimistic reading that we now live in a ‘post-racial’ society. It is given intellectual depth by the advocacy of ‘Cosmopolitanism’ by writers such as the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah: ‘Human societies have ended up having many deep things in common. Among them are practices like music, poetry, dance, marriage, funerals; values resembling courtesy, hospitality, sexual modesty, generosity, reciprocity, the resolution of social conflict; concepts such as good and evil, right and wrong, parent and child, past, present and future’ (‘Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers’, p 96).
b) The emphasis on diversity.
Clearly, however, the confident hope of a tolerant, harmonious and integrated society has encountered increasingly heavy weather. An early sign was Chris Mullard’s autobiographical account of growing up black in Britain [Black Briton, 1973, p 169], where he expressed his anger: "Too much nonsense has been talked about the wrong issues: integration, assimilation, acceptance, immigrant problems, language, customs, dress and bridge building, when the white bank towers several hundred feet above the black one".
The reality of both racial discrimination and significant black disadvantage undermined the rosy optimism of a fair and united multi-racial society. In time this led to the clustering of disadvantaged groups, both ethnically with the push to gather all ethnic minorities under the label ‘black’, and more broadly by joining in with a ‘rainbow coalition’ of all groups marginalised by race, ethnicity, sexuality and gender. The French philosopher Gilles Deleuze argued ‘difference is what there is, therefore our politics should value and promote difference’ (quoted in Christopher Watkin ‘Biblical Critical Theory’, p171).
The consequent birth of identity politics reversed the dynamic away from attempts to integrate into the mainstream to rather augmenting the different characteristics of ethnic groups. Such consolidation of ethnic identity was expressed culturally, through music as with firstly reggae, then rap, or in physical appearance through various types of ‘ethnic’ clothing and with dreadlocks. It was this intensification of ethnic identities that also created an abhorrence of ‘appropriation’ – hostile reactions were provoked by white people sporting dreadlocks or wearing various forms of ethnic clothing such as cheong-sams or Mexican hats. One indication of our strange times is that whilst the foundational, chromosomic differences between the sexes are being increasingly discarded, the transient and socially-given differences between ethnic groups are being firmed up. Grayson Perry wears a dress and becomes an CBE and a national treasure; if he wore dreadlocks he would be cancelled into obscurity.
The use of capital letters to indicate distinct histories and life experiences – Black and White, with the former invariably used in a positive sense, the latter in a perjorative sense - indicated a strengthening demarcation of ethnic groups. Just as unity leans towards ‘Cosmopolitanism’, so diversity leans towards ‘Essentialism’ – the assumption that the differences between ethnic groups are sufficiently substantial to mean that their labels are inherently freighted with enduring characteristics. The racist standpoint that these were immutable genetic and intellectual differences is now discredited, but debate continues (a constant in these blogs) as to whether those differences are solely power-generated economic or social differences, or whether culturally formed patterns of values, preferences and behaviour are also significant.
Thus when some years ago Archbishop George Carey told a group of black clergy that he was ‘colour blind’ the result was uproar. Being colour blind is a vice.
The power imbalance between whites and ethnic minorities was enshrined in the most contentious of ‘diverse’ formulations, that of Critical Race Theory, arguing that the power imbalance baked into the hegemonic use of language and knowledge required a radical re-working of the most fundamental structures and institutions of our society. Thus, the idealised ‘I have a dream’ emphasis of Martin Luther King, gave way to the more politicised and polarised views of King in his later years; and for many his star was eclipsed by the more assertively ‘black’ Malcolm X.
In this context the murder of George Floyd in May 2020 was taken as incontestable evidence that not only the USA but all western, capitalist societies were the arenas of gross racial injustice. The already growing focus on disadvantaged minorities went into over-drive. The result was an upsurge of focus on black people, ranging from appointments for senior positions to everyday appearances in tv programmes. Black actors got written into traditionally English Agatha Christie remakes. More broadly, there was a growing desire to fulfil ethnic quotas across a whole range of occupations, including senior clergy. Certainly, in the USA, and to a lesser degree in Britain, the goal began to shift from equality of opportunity over into statistical equity in outcome.
c) Holding Together Unity and Diversity.
Whilst the ‘diversity’ emphasis has been in the ascendant in recent years, everyday experiences of both similarity and difference mean that neither pole can be excluded. It is true that paradoxically both extreme emphases can be developed by opposing political extremes. Both South African apartheid and black radicalism have in different ways argued for clear separation of ethnic trajectories; both pragmatic ‘one nation’ conservatives and ideologically pure Marxists have seen ‘race’ as an irritating distraction from their ethnically unified agendas. But for most people the challenge is to negotiate a path that positively recognises our similarities without wanting to do violence to the fact of people’s difference from us, their ‘Otherness’.
The diversity emphasis outlined above can be stultifying when people, notably white people, are being urged to be over-cautious in relating to people of other ethnicities. Christopher Watkin summarises the outcome of the strong emphasis on ‘alterity’, the supposed unknowability of ‘the Other’, in philosophers such as Derrida: ‘I shouldn’t presume to know who you are or what you want or are thinking because that reduces your alterity to my idea of you: I assume that you – indeed that everyone – is just like me’ (p 47). Whilst a proper corrective to facile stereotypes of other ethnicities (‘He’s Scottish; he’s tight-fisted’), it so enhances distance that inter-ethnic relationships are hampered by white over-caution in not imposing assuptions on other ethnicities, and become a ‘performance’.
Giving such great weight to the ‘Otherness’ that comes with emphasising diversity has thus led to pushback. The actor Idris Elba has spoken of his resistance to being regarded as a ‘black’ actor, as though his ethnicity was a key aspect of his capacity. The Equiano Project (see ‘Add On’ below) has called for a new narrative of race which is less concerned to foreground ethnic identity and difference. At the furthest extreme in the USA, in a video discussion with Professors Glenn Loury and John Mcwhorter, Greg Thomas of the Jazz Leadership Project argued that ‘It is Time to Give up on Race’ (on You Tube 30/12/2022).
Whilst that won’t happen it is an indication that how society can hold together both unity and diversity is a vexing problem. David Goodhart’s ‘The Road to Somewhere’ analysed the Brexit conflict between ‘Anywheres’ who had been accustomed to shifts in location, often initially experienced in attending a residential university, and ‘Somewheres’ for whom commitment to a specific locality was central to their identity. This was one manifestation of the tension between a ‘universal’ and a ‘particular’ commitment. The poles of the debate as regards ‘race’ are somewhat different, but both instances point to the problems of giving weight to different emphases.
The problem of holding the two together were highlighted by the black legal academic, Patricia J Williams in her 1997 Reith Lectures (two decades before BLM): ‘Who are we when we are seen but not spotlighted, when we are humble but not invisible, when we matter but not so much that the mattering drives us mad’ (p 28). Too often our present understanding causes people, in Williams words, to 'ricochet between hypervisibility and oblivion'. Thus finding an understanding of ‘race’ which affirms ethnicity without the unwanted burden of hypervisibility, and which affirms unity without casting all particularities into oblivion is an urgent task.
Next week I will explore a solution that Christian theology offers.
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Add On.
What Britain Gets Wrong About Race, with Tomiwa Owolade and Inaya Folarin Iman presented by Intelligence Squared. Online on Tuesday, 1st August at 1pm bst. Details on the Equiano Project website. This is linked to the publication of Tomiwa Owolade’s forthcoming book: ‘This is not America: Why Black Lives Matter in Britain’.