Does Using BAME Help or Hinder - # 1 - 28/10/20 Out of Many, One People
Welcome. This weekly blog aims to help church leaders develop churches which gather people 'from every nation, tribe, people and language', by means of comments, theology, reviews and news.
Welcome to the first edition. I plan to send out emails weekly. I would be really grateful if you post them on to friends, colleagues, students and anyone for whom this is an important issue. Hopefully we can send the r-factor well above 1. Do feel free to re-publish anything from this blog.
Comment: Does using ‘BAME’ - Help or Hinder?
The acronym ‘BAME’ (Black, Asian, Minority Ethnic) has become standard use in both society and church as an umbrella term to encompass all people who do not belong to the white, English majority. This article explores both its usefulness for the church and its limitations.
People who are not white and English have experienced significant disadvantage in our society, which certainly includes the church. Tariq Modood, professor of Sociology at Bristol University, and probably the best informed writer on ethnicity in this country, has coined the chillingly accurate term ‘ethnic penalty’ to describe the multiple disadvantages in employment, remuneration and promotion that BAME people experience in the workplace, and which underlines the discrimination experienced by people whose colour is not white or names not English. At this level the phrase ‘white privilege’ is a simple statement of the truth. These are not problems that white people face.
As regards the Church of England, as indicated in the February 2020 Synod, or in recent books by Ben Lindsay, A D A France-Williams, or Chine McDonald (forthcoming), it is all too easy to find similar experiences of people being devalued, ignored or discriminated against.
The term ’BAME’ flags up injustices that need recognising and removing. It points to an across-the-board experience of people of very varied backgrounds and capabilities who share a common suffering. Any reservations about how the term is used is not to devalue its prime significance as a marker of serious injustice.
However there are several reasons for being wary of too-easy use of the term.
It is imprecise.
Quite simply, who is BAME? According to the 2011 Census it was anyone who was not white and English. It is not clear that the term is always used in that sense, and often seems reduced to just being ‘not white’. In the 2011 Census the non-white group were 15% of the population; adding the ‘not-English white’ adds another 5%, or increases the size of the group by a third. When the recent Board for Mission statistics said 3.8% of clergy were BAME does that refer to those who are not white, or who are not white and English? I have the privilege of working with a Canadian vicar. I guess she is not usually thought of as ‘BAME’, but in the census categories she is. (As an aside I am struck by what seems an unusually large number of clergy who are white but not English. A few years ago Brent Deanery had more New Zealander clergy than black clergy.)
At a time when proportions and percentages relating to ethnicity are widely deployed there is a serious danger of comparing like-with-unlike, so that mis-comparisons occur between ‘not white, not English’ (BAME?)/ not white (BAME?)/’black’/African-Caribbean. In the 2011 Census the ‘black’ categories combined amounted to 4.5% of the population, thus less than 1 in 20 of the national population and very similar in size to the ‘white other’ group (which, with continued migration from eastern Europe, has probably grown faster since then).
Too often there is confusion over who we are referring to.
2. It obscures significant differences.
Tariq Modood (referred to above) has described the bulking together of all minority ethnic groups as a ‘blunt tool’. Whilst, as noted above, the term BAME highlights very significant similarities, it also obscures the very different trajectories and roles of different ethnic groups. To take some random examples:
The large number of Indians in Boris Johnson’s government (as was also the case with Jews in Margaret Thatcher’s government), underlined by Priti Patel’s spirited assertion that she too shared the injustices of being minority ethnic. One consequence has been to weaken the too-simple binary of white/rich/oppressor set against BAME/poor/ oppressed. The reality is that affinity of interest and outlook can transcend ethnicity, so that upwardly mobile and thriving minorities are attracted to a free market government.
The frequency of petrol stations in London being operated by Sri Lankan Tamils - I have no idea of the statistics but the reality is very observable if you have eyes to notice such things. Why? I assume it stems from the resourceful capacity of migrants to find, fill and at times dominate available niches in the labour market.
The remarkably sudden ascent of English footballers with African parentage over the past five years or less. (List of names on request). Because observers too often see only colour and neglect details of background this has hardly been commented on, but in fact it is very remarkable both how few top footballers emerged from British African backgrounds until less than five years ago, and now how dramatically and numerously they have appeared in national (especially age-specific) teams. Why? One speculative explanation is that it often takes more than a generation for diasporic groups to start to approximate to national norms and show up in significant roles..
Coming closer to home, the impressively significant number of Iranian men being ordained in the Church of England. This is the more impressive set against the alarmingly small number of men of African Caribbean background being ordained (more alarming still, I would guess, if we focussed just on Jamaican heritage). Again at present we can only guess at reasons. Is it just that Iranians are more middle-class? Or, intriguingly, do people from Moslem cultures feel greater affinity to ordered, liturgical Anglicanism than do people from several other cultures?
The important point about these very specific examples is that they point to subtle and complex currents in multi-ethnic Britain that the slapdash use of ‘BAME’ obscures and blinds us to. For as long as the Church of England overly uses the ‘blunt tool’ of the ‘BAME’ acronym then for so long we will be doing a bodged job in ministering to multi-ethnic England. Are we aware that we are ordaining many more Afro-Caribbean women than men? Or that most of our senior minority ethnic appointments are still from people whose faith was nurtured in their country of origin? Or that, at the end of the day, we are still ordaining people very largely from middle-class backgrounds? ’BAME’ can blind us from asking questions which need to be answered if we are to minister effectively in multi-ethnic England
3. It hinders personal engagement.
The New Testament is illuminating here. If now we have a ‘white English’/BAME binary, then they had a Jew/Gentile binary. At times the binary did important work. In Ephesians 1 and 2 where Paul is outlining the scope of salvation brought about through Jesus he sets ‘you Gentiles’ (2:11) alongside Jews to underline how Christ ‘might create in himself one new humanity in the place of the two’ (2:15).
But when looking at the church and its mission much more specificity is needed. So he tells the Colossians “there is no longer Greek and Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and free, but Christ is all in all” (3:11). The distinctive of ethnicity, religious background and social class are all identified. A similar passage in Galatians 3:28 also includes gender. Here Grant Macaskill makes the interesting suggestion that you could properly add the indefinite article to the translation, so that “One can imagine Paul saying this in a room filled with a mixture of people (some of whom may be tacitly evaluating and judging others) and pointing at each person: aJew, a Greek, a slave, a free person” (bold type mine).The variety in the church is such that the umbrella label ‘Gentile’, like BAME, loses its traction in the reality of relationships amongst a wide diversity of people.
This is well illustrated when Luke tells what happened when Paul preached at the riverside in Philippi. He might have said the Lord opened the heart of a ‘Gentile’, but his missional perspective leads him to focus on the person’s individuality: “Lydia, a worshipper of God . . .from the city of Thyatira and a dealer in purple cloth” (Acts16:14). In one verse he highlights four vitally significant variables: religious background, gender, social class and area of origin. All these specifics about ourselves matter to us; terms like Gentile or BAME would wipe them out. A church concerned about its mission to people will be attentive to the significance of these variables.
Perhaps the most serious damage that ‘BAME’ does is to distance us from each other, as though putting up a frosted glass screen that allows us to encounter only the vaguest outlines of people. Trevor Philips has said ‘I don’t know what a BAME looks like’. This is particularly damaging to our calling to love one another. BAME is a thin, bureaucratic, ‘othering’ term - people are merely ‘not white, not English’! It has insufficient substance to evoke love. By contrast terms such as Tamil, Polish, black British, Jamaican, white English, Somali - all point to a history, a language, a culture, an identity which can begin to shape a relationship of love.
Amidst the current turbulence in the Church of England over its ministry with and to people of minority ethnic backgrounds, I believe our biggest failure is racism of the heart - not being moved to engage lovingly, closely and in depth with people of other cultures. Initiatives to try and improve our BAME statistical performance - notably over ordinations or senior appointments - will at best be clumsy, remedial (‘bodged’) exercises. Only when we have a heart to love (thence to understand, relate and live closely) with people who are different-yet-similar to ourselves will the enrichment that ethnic diversity brings to our life together and to our witness be seen in our churches.
(Since writing this Tony Sewell, chair of the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities, has argued that the term BAME is ‘increasingly irrelevant’.)
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Add-ons
Quote to end Black History Month: “It is easier to eat Caribbean food than to read the history of English slavery, colonialism and imperialism in the region.” Robert Beckford, ‘Jesus is Dread’, p 36 (1998)