‘Race’ – what are we talking about? (Part 1). # 178. 29/10/2024
Out of Many, One People
Welcome. After three weeks on the hot political potato of reparations with very divergent views being expressed, sometimes unexpectedly, by people of divergent backgrounds, attention this week is turned to a more theoretical debate about what ‘race’ is about.
‘Race’ – what are we talking about? (Part 1).
It is now the fourth anniversary of this blog. When I started I thought that within a year or so I would have run out of topics to discuss. Instead topics related to church and race come in faster than ever. Over this past week or so the national headlines have featured the slow-burning issue of Reparations coming to the boil, and there has been controversy over the acquittal of the police marksman who shot Chris Kaba, along with the much more subdued issue of Policy Exchange’s report ‘A Portrait of Modern Britain: Ethnicity and Religion’ (review to follow).
So this is an appropriate time to step back and think through what it is that we are talking about when we talk about ‘race’ and racism, ethnicity and culture. A classic formulation that I find very helpful is:
“Every human being is in certain respects:
1. like all others
2 like some others
3 like no other.”
(Quoted in Emmanuel Lartey ‘In Living Colour’, p 21; originally by Clyde Kuckholm, in Kluckholm and Murray, Personality in Nature, Society and Culture, New York, 1948)
Our immediate topic is the second assertion – race and ethnicity speak of the ways in which we are ‘like some others’, and so by implication also different from others. However the surrounding first and third assertions also need to be considered as helping define the significance of ‘like some others’. It is important too to notice that the ‘thickness’, the importance, of each layer varies from culture to culture which is why the scope of each layer also needs considering.
1. Like all others.
How are we ‘like all others’? There are obvious ways – we are born of mothers; we need food and shelter, we relate, we die. Kwame Anthony Appiah summarises: ‘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’, p 96). Christians will be eager to go beyond such a bare minimum by asserting that in our shared humanity we all are made in the image of one God, and are all loved by Him - the bedrock of our understanding of what it means to be human. The consequence should be a vigorous defence of the dignity of all people, a hatred for any expression of contempt for other groups of people, a steady commitment to relate to and understand all those with whom we share a common humanity.
That commonality extends beyond our created dignity, to recognising our common falleness and sin, and our need of forgiveness and redemption. In the late eighteenth century debate about slavery, when the views of black inferiority by philosophers such as Hume and Kant gave support to apologists for slavery, the evangelical poet William Cowper succinctly applied the themes of creation, fall and redemption to all people:
‘That souls have no discriminating hue
Alike important in their maker’s view;
That none are free from blemish since the fall,
And love divine has paid one price for all”.
William Cowper, ‘Charity’, 1782.
Holding on to all those emphases at this time, to ‘blemish’ as well as to creation and redemption, is important. The ways and extent in which rebellion against God is expressed may vary between cultures, but its depth is universal. To seek to minimise the extent of sin in any culture is to reduce its humanness, not to show prejudice. Often it is to imply that other cultures are less developed, therefore less culpable than our own. We do, of course, usually have sharper eyes for the failings of other cultures rather than our own (as for other individuals rather than ourselves). Therefore we need to make judgements with caution, but a backlash against racist judgementalism can lead to lowered and therefore demeaning lack of expectation of others. Psalm 33:13-15 expresses God’s caring but discerning awareness of all peoples in all places at all times: “The Lord looks down from heaven; he sees all humankind. From where he sits enthroned he watches all the inhabitants of the earth – he who fashions the hearts of them all, and observes all their deeds.”
Asserting our likeness to all others has not been accepted at all times by all cultures. When Paul preached to the Athenians that “From one ancestor he (God) made all nations to inhabit the whole earth” (Acts 17:26) he was making a politically charged statement that contradicted the exclusive Athenian claim to have sprung uniquely from the soil of Attica. It was not an unexceptional platitude but a counter-cultural challenge to Athenian pride. The sense of common humanity has been thin in racist societies, thus Gonville ffrench-Beytagh, who was Dean of Johannesburg in the 1960s and imprisoned for his opposition to apartheid, recalls how his prison guards would dismiss black Africans in casual conversation by saying ‘They are not men’.
For Christians then it is a conviction that needs to be defended politically and legally, and celebrated in our attitudes, relationships and worship. A sense of humanity’s unity is not a forlorn hope, but a joyful conviction that every church needs to find ways of expressing, locally, nationally and internationally.
Significant ‘boundary’ issues arise however between affirming the ‘likeness’ of all people, as against asserting that there are ways in which some groups of people legitimately differ. In recent years a raft of moral issues have come to the fore over whether certain practices are wrong for all people or should be accepted as being valid within particular cultures, with an increasingly confident universalising of originally western liberal values over the past decade. Thus forced marriages, female genital circumcision, abortion of female foetuses, and the criminalisation of homosexuality have all come under growing pressure from the western mind-set as ‘all’ has taken precedence over the ‘some’. In church life too the appropriateness of provision for specific ethnic groups is a question for debate – over whether working with some degree of diversity compromises our unity too seriously? In questions of ethnicity we are never far from facing the competing demands of unity and diversity.
2. Like no other.
At the opposite end of the scale is the assertion that I am unique – there will never be another me. Particularly in the west we treasure our uniqueness, and feel irritated if people make wrong assumptions about us on the basis of our ethnicity, age, gender or social class. Not many English people now would feel flattered to be called a ‘typical English person’.
Such individualism has powerful resonances in the Christian faith. We are unique creations of God; personally known to him, with every hair of our head numbered; with a particular sense of calling and vocation. The Christian emphases on being personally called by God, on testimony, on self-examination and repentance, on learning to take steps of faith all build a heightened sense of individuality, which scholars such as Larry Siedentop, David Bentley Hart and Tom Holland have asserted lies at the heart of western uniqueness. However, this does not come without risks – of a fracturing of communities, of unhealthy introspection, of spiritual arrogance.
The ‘thickness’ of this layer, also, can vary widely. In tribal societies it can be quite thin, as seen for example in Vincent Donovan’s classic ‘Christianity Rediscovered’, a Roman Catholic missionary’s learning experience amongst the Masai in East Africa. By contrast those of us living in the west live in a culture where the assertion ‘I am like no other’ has got thicker with each generation, having now grown to unparalleled thickness, as in the assertion that I am free to select which (of several) genders I belong to.
Partly this is brought on us by the process of economic change. The loss of a sense of work being handed on from one generation to another has been a major loss in many communities, even if in others the right to choose what job you do is incontrovertible. It is unlikely that as a boy Jesus had to give thought to what job he would do when he grew up. Nowadays in Britain it is rare for jobs to be passed down through generations, and we disapprove of pressure being exerted to make it happen. Meanwhile rapid social change and urbanisation have gone in tandem with intellectual and cultural movements that have weakened traditional sources of religious, political and communal authority.
Therefore the growing assumption – highly disruptive in a society where people come from very different types of cultural background - that how people behave, most notably as regards family, marriage and sexual behaviour, are quite simply personal choices in which we are not accountable to what others think or do. This is so taken for granted by western liberal opinion, that it is not easy to recognise that it was not the case in the west until three centuries ago, and still isn't in the majority of world cultures today.
In multi-ethnic societies the ‘thickness’ of the layer of individual choice is controversial. Arranged marriages are an obvious tension. Does a young person’s inalienable ‘me-ness’ give them the right to choose their own marriage partner or ought the wisdom of their elders and support of their community be determinative. Similarly, the conflict in the Anglican Communion over homosexuality needs to be seen as a clash of assumptions over whether sexual behaviour is the concern of only the individuals themselves, or whether it is of concern to the whole community. Martyn Percy writes “I suspect that we shall see that sexuality and gender are mere symptoms of disease and not causes. Indeed, we may be surprised at the root and branch problem: perhaps it will be the assumptions we make about choice, individualism and the nature of institutions – all of which have eroded our sense of catholicity and moral responsibility for the parts of Christ’s body we seldom see or know”. (‘Context and Catholicity’, in Mark J Cartledge and David Cheetham ‘Intercultural Theology’, p127). It is also worth bearing in mind the warning that Philip Jenkins made in 2002: “As Christianity becomes ever more distinctly associated with Africa and the African diaspora, the religion as a whole may come to be dismissed as only what we might expect from the Heart of Darkness” (‘The Next Christendom – the Coming of Global Christianity’, p 161).
There is no body capable of adjudicating how the boundary between my uniqueness and my need to be part of a community ought to be drawn. Western individualists will emphasise the undeniable abuses and tragedies that denying the individual's choice of marriage partner or sexual behaviour can bring. Their critics will have little difficulty showing the heartache, loneliness, and the upshot of distressed and damaged children that are the legacy of western sexual individualism.
It has been well recognised that the growing emphasis on ’rights’ in a secular culture turns debate over competing rights into a power play – victory going to the loudest, richest, and most aggressive of the competitors. As western governments and opinion formers have become increasingly ready to affirm their own views internationally (for example in advocating homosexual rights), it is urgent that the west becomes more realistic and chastened about the pain that the west itself is generating in its own societies through the growth of untrammelled individualism.
In Britain the momentum towards removing all constraints on the individual’s freedom of choice seems irresistible at present – accelerated both by the rise of disposable income with which to express personal choice, and by a libertarian intellectual climate that makes alternatives seem unthinkable to many people. But we should not be blind to the fact that such developments are both morally controversial and culturally freighted.
3. Like some others.
This is the middle of the 'sandwich' and the focus of these blogs. People have always identified with particular groups of people, often in the past by the community they live in or the social group they belong to. Such sense of belonging is a vital part of the joy of being human; its loss insupportable, especially in cultures which give a ‘thick’ sense of corporate identity. Old and New Testaments focus around being ‘the people of God’ and terms like household and body emphasise the richness of having an identity amongst a special people.
But people mostly experience several senses of belonging – not just to a faith, but, amongst many types of belonging, to an age group, a geographical community, or people with a shared background or special interest: a cross-cutting of categories identified by such terms as ‘Intersectionality’ or ‘Super-Diversity’. Our concern here is how people feel an affinity with and loyalty to a particular ethnic group. A multi-cultural society is one that has to negotiate how that loyalty to a particular ethnic group and its patterns of behaviour relate to belonging to the society as a whole. For churches it probes the extent to which a common faith can create a deeply experienced sense of identity with people who have very different ethnic identities and social experiences.
Part 2 next week will discuss what it means for people to be not like all others and not like no others, but rather (in terms of race and ethnicity) ‘like some others.
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Add ons
The acquittal of the police officer responsible for the death of Chris Kaba has re-ignited controversy. I shared my thoughts shortly after his death at blog # 91. The trial and its outcome have not significantly changed them.
The English can’t manage. The appointment of a German, Thomas Tuchel, as England’s football manager has aroused controversy. I don’t want to debate whether the England team should have an English manager (for what it’s worth I strongly think we should), but to highlight the fact – explored in an earlier blog # 90 – that the startling lack of top English managers, with only three in the twenty teams in the English Premier League, needs explaining. (As an incredibly startling contrast, the managers of three of the current top eleven English teams all come from Gipuzkoa in the Basque province of Spain). To take terms used in discussions of disparities in race, is this either ‘systemic prejudice’ (the authorities discriminate against the English) or ‘cultural deficit’ (there’s something wrong with the culture of English football)? Since it is highly unlikely to be the former, it must be the latter – a cultural deficit in the realm of football managers from England. In the above mentioned blog I try to unpack what might be the nature of English football’s cultural deficit. But the important takeaway is that disparities (of either over-representation as with Basque football managers or Jamaican sprinters, or under-representation as with English football managers or black bishops in the Church of England) can not to be automatically chalked up to racism in the system. All ethnic groups thrive or struggle in specific but very different areas.