Is Prince Harry right about 'Race'.
Out of Many, OnePeople - # 2 - 05/11/20
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Comment: Is Prince Harry right about ‘Race’?
It is hard for Harry to be heard. To the left he is a ‘royal’; to the right he is ‘woke’. But I believe his comments at the start of Black History Month, and his experience of having a minority ethnic wife deserve hearing, especially as he is an ‘ordinary’ (!?) white man who wants to do the right thing. So, two cheers for Harry.
Cheer 1: Listen to People’s Stories.
Rightly he has paid attention to Meghan’s experiences, and, I would guess those of other black people that have filtered through to him. He has, he has said, ‘stood in her shoes’. This is not the place to try to unpick how far negative public attitudes to Meghan stem from racism, or how far from other factors. (But it is worth bearing in mind that the oft made claim that black people have to do twice as well as white people in order to achieve can also be reversed: blacks only have to do half as badly as whites to be vilified).
Testimony/story/narrative has always been an important resource for Christian faith, and it should give us an inbuilt inclination to listen to the stories people tell, not least the painful ones. The church has been understandably dismayed and horrified by the too often rejected narratives of sexual abuse that have surfaced recently. Similarly black people’s accounts of the rejections which were experienced on first attending Anglican churches have come increasingly to the fore. More recent stories are rarely as blatant, but are still real and painful.
The present landscape of race and ethnicity in Britain can’t be understood without hearing people’s stories. To take but one example, Ian Watmore of the English Cricket Board on investigating racism in cricket has spoken about his shock on hearing distressing ‘lived experiences’ of discrimination that were ‘very emotional for those involved’.
I preached on Black Lives Matter when it became a national focus last spring, and told the story of a church member who, during a space for silent prayer during her ministry training, recalled an incident from her early years in Britain. At a meeting with other supervisors she had made suggestions for improving work-place procedures, which fell like a lead balloon. Shortly afterwards a white colleague made a proposal that was very similar, which was enthusiastically and successfully implemented. In the silent prayer, my friend recognised how this early rebuff meant that through life she just didn’t put herself forward amongst white people to avoid the pain of rejection. After preaching (on-line) I was struck by how much people responded to this one simple narrative in the sermon.
Stories like that (which individually can all have caveats around them) together accumulate to build a general picture of hurt, wasted potential and separation, which carry on to shape the expectations and attitudes of following generations. An important aspect of a church’s ministry is to share the ‘race stories’ – good and bad – of its members.
Stories can not be the final word. They need close scrutiny and testing, but in a world of relationships, our feelings matter, and we need to allow the power of stories to touch our hearts, as also with music, films, poetry and novels.
Cheer 2: Thinking again.
Harry has spoken about his ‘awakening’ to the nature of racism, coming out of the need to understand more about life for those ‘of a different coloured skin’.
Again we have a word with Christian resonance – being ‘awakened’ to the discovery that we are not who we thought we were, that we need a humbled re-assessment of ourselves and our need of change.
Popular understanding of racism has hindered such awakening; as in “Racism is really bad. Either you are or you are not. Of course, I’m not.” Superficiality is the inevitable consequence. Racism is not like a set of clothes that you choose to put on; it is like an odour that we can carry around unaware and can acquire without realising it. Awakening to it requires both self-interrogation, and attentiveness to the signs that we get from other people, not least those who experience its offensiveness most sharply.
Listening leads us out of this unreal either/or, yes/no understanding of racism to recognise the subtlety and diversity of the ways it can influence our understanding and attitudes; and to begin to identify areas of ourselves that need correction.
No white person can ever understand what it is like to be black in a very largely white society. Listening underlines that for us, and leads to a much subtler, humbler and more alert assessment of our place in a world where people of different colour can experience life in quite different ways.
Cheer 3 withheld: ‘structural racism’?
‘Structural racism’ is a tricky phrase. It implies (as does the even stronger term ‘systemic racism’) that racism is built into the structure of how a society operates. The roots of the phrase lie deep in French post-modern philosophy (of which more – possibly – in a future blog), especially in the claim that language is the fundamental reality behind all society, and that through the very patterns of language itself, racism is structured into the warp and woof of our society. Thus Harry’s usage, according to Trevor Phillips, indicates it is a term “he doesn’t appear to understand and which makes him sound like a 1980s polytechnic lecturer”. (Declaration of interest: I was once a part-time 1970s polytechnic lecturer.)
So is Britain structurally racist? There is clear evidence of institutional racism – indicated when the way an institution runs results in disadvantage to non-white people. ‘Newsnight’ recently ran an expose´ of the Metropolitan Police’s lax and disinterested response to the brutal beating of three Somali young women in Kilburn by a gang of seven white men; as though nothing had been learned from the McPherson Commission’s Report on the institutional racism shown in their mis-handling of the murder of Stephen Lawrence. The appalling Home Office mistreatment of African Caribbean people in the so-called ‘Windrush Scandal’ indicates how easily it can operate at the highest levels of government. All institutions – not least the Church of England – need close, attentive scrutiny for evidences of racist outcomes in the way they operate.
But the term ‘structural racism’ indicates a significant upgrade in terminology, suggesting that racism is so ingrained into society that non-whites can not but be disadvantaged. Harry writes “The world we know has been created by white people for white people”. But if so, then how is it that in several areas – including educational success or politics – non-white groups are out-performing whites. By using the term, white people both over-estimate their own significance and under-play the agency of ethnic minorities.
Ironically there is a sense that Harry and Meghan play into this with their list of twenty black trailblazers. They are overwhelmingly people, like them, who have a certain faint whiff of ‘glamour’ about them – in arts and entertainment, in sport, as opinion formers, and so on; not that dissimilar from the group that featured some time ago on Meghan’s Vogue cover. It is quite a constricting picture of what expectations society has of black people. I think of someone whose supervisor for an Oxford MSc in computer science was African Caribbean. Rather than ‘celebrities’, we need to be focussing on such black people who really are blazing new trails in science or business.
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Quote of the Week: “Accessibility is being able to get into the building; Diversity is getting invited to the table; Inclusiveness is having a voice at the table; Belonging is being heard at the table”. Augustine Tanner-Ihm - Theology Slam Winner 25'/08/20.
Bored during Lockdown?: Then why not buy a copy of my re-issued Building Multi-Racial Churches published by Anglican Foundations at The Latimer Trust, price £4.50. The original was written twenty-six years ago, but as one reader has said it is alarming that it still applies very largely to today. It aims to help people do what it says on the tin.