‘Race’ – what are we talking about? (Part 2). # 180. 12/11/2024.

Out of Many, One People

Welcome, to a delayed Part 2, and which partly touches on the shock, the causes, as well as the deep insecurity and uncertainty generated by Donald Trump’s surprisingly clear victory.

‘Race’ – what are we talking about? (Part 2).

The blog on ‘Race’ – what are we talking about? Part 1’ (# 178) of two weeks ago looked at the schema:

                                  “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).

It looked at the two outer elements of that ‘sandwich’: on the one hand, how everyone shares some aspects of our common humanity, on the other hand of how we are all unique individuals, like no other person who will ever exist. It also made the point that the ‘thickness’ of those elements varies between cultures. In particular, in some cultures our uniqueness is very largely subsumed by people sharing a strong common identity with those around them; in other cultures, notably the modern west, the individual’s sense of uniqueness has acquired historically unique strength. This blog considers the middle section - what sort of similarity it is that makes it possible and useful to talk about people being ‘like some others’, specifically in terms of ‘race’ or ethnicity?

The affinity experienced by being ‘like some others’ can be based on a very wide range of characteristics. Terms such as ‘intersectionality’ and ‘super-diversity’, while stemming largely from an initial focus on ‘race’, serve to indicate that there are several other categories where we share characteristics with some people and not with others. Examples are categories such as gender, social class, sexual orientation, disability (power differences, which are the primary focus of ‘intersectionality’), but also extending further to a wider range of categories such as specific ethnicity, region, religion, occupation and education and migration history (thus ‘super-diversity’).

We prioritise very different ways of being ‘like some others’.

The first question to ask about ‘like some others’ is what do we think are the most important categories of similarity that we should pay attention to? Last week’s blog (# 179) noted that in Kemi Badenoch’s address to be leader of the Conservative Party she made great play of her training and experience as an engineer, but, unlike most politicians and notably Kamala Harris, she made no reference to her gender or racial identity. This in itself, of course, was a strong political point against, arguing against the salience of the identities of race and gender in a modern and forward-looking society.

Referring again to the US Presidential Election, one major and probably decisive surprise was the strong 13% swing of Hispanic voters towards the Republicans – despite the racist jokes made against them at Trump’s final New York rally. One strong possibility is that Hispanic voters prioritised religious identity – specifically Roman Catholic and Pentecostal opposition to abortion – over racial identity. Therefore, there are warnings to politicians on both sides of the Atlantic to beware of continuing to see racial and gender identities as the prevailing expressions of affinity, of being ‘like some others’. Perhaps both Trump’s emphasis on ‘are you worse off than four years ago?’ and the Labour Government’s recent budget show their awareness that social class and the economic concerns of the poor in society rank above the more specific ‘identitarian’ issues of race and gender. Also noting along with the role of religion in the Hispanic swing in the USA is the significance of region for this summer’s riots in the UK.

It is likely that readers of this blog will vary in the weight they give to the various ‘like some others’ categories. For a great many, their Christian identity will prevail over any others, giving greater affinity and likeness of thought and behaviour with fellow believers (‘Be of the same mind, having the same love’ Phil 2:2).

The category ‘like some others’ should only be applied loosely.

Statements in the form of ‘You are  . . . . because you are a. .’ are normally experienced as demeaning or insulting. We don’t like having particular characteristics attached to us because of some aspect of our identity. We bridle when we see people who are English/Jewish/female/northern/gay/wealthy/Indian portrayed in certain ways which seem to offer easy and unfair stereotypes when we know the portrayal simplifies or distorts the qualities of real people we know.

Such attempts to pressure people to fit pre-determined moulds come from various directions. They have served attempts to generate racial hierarchies. In the nineteenth century ‘race science’ sought to determine immutable characteristics of different ethnic groups, and correspondingly ordering them – inevitably with white Europeans at the apex. Apartheid in South Africa assumed the propriety of keeping ‘races’ separate and assigned their own territories, again inevitably ensuring that white people had the best lands and the monopoly of power.

But at the opposite end of the political spectrum, the desire for racial solidarity can lead to similar stereotyping. The recent controversy over certain politician being called ‘coconuts’, of having a ‘white’ inward mind and heart beneath a brown/black exterior, assumes a similar correspondence between racial identity and a very wide range of political, cultural, social attitudes, such that those who fall foul are denigrated as ‘race traitors’ who have succumbed to the lure of accepting a europianised false consciousness. Here cries of ‘unity is strength’ come to the fore. Failure to act in conformity to the supposed interest of your ethnic group has played into the hands of the ‘divide and rule’ policy of the oppressors.

Behind both strategies is the mindset of ‘essentialism’ – that is if you belong to a particular ethnic group then that also carries with it certain essential characteristics which mark all authentic members of that group. The language of race and ethnicity can only carry any value at all if it can be loosely assumed that the word used carries some further descriptive use. It only makes sense to call me ‘English’ if, beyond simply describing the place where my forbears and I have always lived, it says something meaningful about who I am – my values, my emotional texture, my behavioural patterns. Conversely over-reach can destroy the usefulness of the term if too much weight is placed on what it is assumed to predicate about me. One aspect of ‘white privilege’ is that white English people are sufficiently widely known that everyone knows that we are not all alike. People know by experience that we have widely diverging political, cultural, social, religious, leisure affinities beyond certain elusive characteristics that are particularly widespread, notably, according to Kate Fox’s ‘Watching the English’, social awkwardness.

The original ‘like some others’ characteristic of ‘colour’.

Initially this was seen as the meaning of race – so phrases were used such as ‘the colour question’ or, when discrimination was involved, ‘the colour bar’. The title of a thoughtful book by the missionary writer, Basil Mathews in 1924, ‘The Clash of Colour: A Study of the Problem of Race’, indicates how the issue was understood. Colour of course was only the most obvious indicator of a range of genetic differences which distinguished the major groupings of humanity. In the nineteenth century considerable energy was expended on measuring such differences, for example, over skull formation, intending to yield some sort of hierarchy of races, and which might form a basis for explaining differences of behaviour.

Such an approach is now recognised as a scientific dead end. A ‘Statement on race and racial prejudice’ produced by UNESCO following a multi-ethnic and multi-disciplinary conference in September 1967 concluded as follows: “Current biological knowledge does not permit us to impute cultural achievements to differences in genetic potential. Differences in the achievements of different peoples should be attributed solely to their cultural history. The peoples of the world today appear to possess equal biological potentialities for achieving any level of civilisation.”

Biologically there are fine-brushed differences in the prevalence of certain diseases amongst specific ethnic groups – sickle cell anaemia amongst Afro-Caribbean people is the most frequently recognised. Even when environmental factors are accounted for, ‘race’ correlates with the occurrence of other health problems such as prostate cancer or heart disease. But the extent to which athletic success is affected by genetic differences between groups is disputed, with Jamaican background writers such as Orlando Patterson and Tony Sewell arguing strongly that the remarkable level of Jamaican success in sprinting comes through nurturing by the society not genetics.

Most controversial is the measurement of IQs, but both the impossibility of pure neutrality in devising means of testing, and the fact that those tested are not tabula rasa but people already affected by their physical and social environment both before and after birth make comparisons unsustainable. Thus, low birth weight, often a consequence of maternal poverty, has a highly damaging effect on subsequent mental ability.

Nonetheless skin colour as a predictor of all sorts of characteristics and capabilities has become so ingrained by racialised thinking that it may need a conscious mental effort for people to move from seeing colour to seeing ethnicity as the focus of similarity.

How ‘race’ can form a ‘like some others’ identity.

If not through ‘colour’, then in what way does ‘race’ form a useful description of likeness? Answers have varied over time and the specific nature of the likeness we are talking about when we talk about ‘racial identity’ is still the subject of dispute and controversy.

At base is debate about what term, if any, is permissible to use that covers all the people in this country who are not white British. The term ‘black’ first came into use to describe the first group of recent large-scale migrants to arrive in Britain in the late 1940s, those from the Caribbean, and was a natural carryover from attention to the focus at that time on the civil rights of black people in the USA. The term also gathered force as an account of the racism and disadvantage that they suffered. As from the 1960s the geographical and cultural range of new migrants, especially from South Asia, widened, ‘black’ continued to be shorthand for this broader racially discriminated against group. However, fissures appeared. South Asians had their own cultural and increasingly significant religious identities, nor were they necessarily poor and down-trodden, especially with the arrival of Asian refugees from East Africa in the early 1970s. ‘Black’ as a catch-all term no longer did the job. Over time, the amended ‘Black Asian Minority Ethnic’ (BAME) term came into being to cover all non-white people, and still with a political tone of describing a fairly cohesive group, alike suffering from serious racism and disadvantage. However, as the range of the term spread its descriptive usefulness waned: the economic outcomes were too disparate and the cultures were too diverse, whilst the rapid influx of white eastern European migrants made the drawing of a compelling white British/migrant dichotomy boundary so simplistic as to be seriously misleading. The widely used substitution of ‘UKME/GMH’ for BAME, often used in the church, has no additional value apart from increasing the number of initials.

If skin colour is not the unifying factor in our account of what ‘race is about, then what is? Here we come to a broad distinction which has been a running theme in discussions of ‘race’ in both society and church and where it is often tacitly assumed that one account or the other is the entire truth. The accounts are seeing ‘race’ as being generated from the outside by a society which ‘racializes’ people and assigns them inferior positions, or generated from the inside by the cultural characteristics of groups which powerfully affect whether they prosper or struggle in a society. The danger then becomes that both sides become so committed to their perspective and believe that to give any quarter to the other is to betray their position. Proponents of the ‘inside’ cultural emphasis can lightly, and perhaps contemptuously dismiss acknowledging the existence of racism as being mere expressions of wokeness or political correctness, which refuse to acknowledge that behavioural choices have consequences. Conversely those holding an ‘outside’ emphasis can accuse opponents of simply refusing to accept the serious harm caused by racism. Albeit in recent debates it has been holders of the outside/society caused understanding of race and racial disparities who have been most dogmatic in refusing credence to opposite views.

These have been a lot of words about one word, but clarity of language is always important. Indisputably over the past decade ‘race’ has become an increasingly important and controversial issue in our society, the church and the whole global context. Seeing it a complex account of affinity and identity, of being ‘like some others’, amongst many forms of belonging together may help us towards a more measured and less polemical and slogan-driven response.