Out of Many, OnePeople - # 4- 19/11/20
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 fourth edition. 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. And do feel free to comment, criticise, even commend; but certainly further debate.
Slavery, History and the National Trust
Visiting a National Trust house often draws my mind to Jeremiah’s words to King Jehoahaz:
“Woe to him who builds his palace by unrighteousness, his upper rooms by injustice,
making his countrymen work for nothing, not paying them for their labour. . . .
But your eyes and your heart are set only on dishonest gain
on shedding innocent blood and on oppression and extortion”. (22:13 & 17).
Big houses can have bad histories. The National Trust have reckoned that the slave trade and slavery have financed a significant slice of their properties. Their thinking about how to respond has come to a head in this year of Black Lives Matter with proposals to express greater awareness of the evils that financed their properties’ construction. The historian of the Royal Palaces, Lucy Worsley, has spoken of a similar to desire to reappraise and refocus on the shameful aspects of how they were financed. Oxbridge colleges are analysing the extent to which their wealth has come from the profits of slavery.
In response, National Trust memberships have been cancelled. Professor Nigel Biggar has asked whether ‘budding citizens . . . need to have their noses rubbed in the facts of slavery'. This article is saying that not just school children or National Trust visitors but all white people need to identify with Jeremiah’s ‘Woe’, and to face more squarely a history marked by injustice and bloodshed, oppression and extortion. Whilst that is a wider canvas than just the slave trade and the slave operated plantations of the Caribean, slavery is nonetheless the most horrendous skeleton in our national cupboard.
So I believe we need a far more deeply rooted awareness of the role of slavery in our past for the following reasons:
1. A humbled assessment of our national identity.
The transatlantic slave trade, and subsequent enslavement in the Caribbean, where Britain played the major role, was a crime against humanity of major proportions, which ought to lead to a deep sense of national shame. Historians such as James Walvin have long depicted the appalling level of disregard for human life, physical and sexual brutality, and denial of human dignity that Britain was involved in. Just as a mature person is one who is working towards a realistic awareness of both their virtues and their vices, so too mature nations need to be involved in a similar project. Germany’s readiness to look the evil of the holocaust in the face has led to greater national maturity, just as Japan’s or Turkey’s refusal to face their past diminishes them. People who have cancelled their National Trust membership are expressing the pain of facing the reality of Britain’s history. But Christian faith acclimatises us to a cycle of remorse, repentance, forgiveness and reconciliation. So too it should deliver us from a brittle refusal to encounter the guilt threaded through our history, but rather to humble our national pride.
2. A realistic assessment of how we achieved global predominance.
Britain (unlike Germany with the holocaust) drew enormous benefit from slavery. One positive consequence of the Black Lives Matter emphasis this summer (whatever its vagueness and simplifications) is to draw attention to just how thoroughly slavery ran through our national life, provided significant capital to finance the industrial revolution, and was little questioned for most of the two centuries we were involved in it. We could not have become the world’s first industrial nation without the build-up of capital accrued from slavery. Whilst genuine virtues of industriousness, intelligence and boldness in risk-taking were also involved, it was the evil of slavery above all that enabled Britain to forge ahead economically. Whilst white people today can fairly say that they were not personally implicated in the practice of slavery, we have unquestionably benefitted from and enjoy the profits of it today.
3. Slavery entrenched racism
The damaging consequences of slavery are still with us. It was supportable only if the brutality inflicted could be accepted by the victims being seen as belonging to a different order of being. So the Rev Edward Long in his 18th century history of Jamaica doubted the humanity of black people. Such views are no longer given intellectual credence, but can live on in lowered expectations, disregard, or veiled contempt. The recent scandal over the Home Office's treatment of so-called 'Windrush immigrants' reflected an unconcern and disrespect for the descendants of slaves which has by no means gone away.
4. The continuing wound left by slavery.
Slavery in both the United States and the Caribbean perpetrated physical, emotional, sexual and cultural abuse. t is widely recognised that both in the United States and the Caribbean slavery was traumatising and those effects too have not gone away; the violence and contempt that people received less than two centuries ago still carries its mark. Just as individuals can continue to bear the marks of abuse, possibly also can cultures. In a American discussion ‘Black Psychoanalysts Speak’ (accessible on Youtube) Dr Anton Hart observed: “In the field of psychoanalysis it has been minimised how profound the trauma of racism actually is. . . .There is a not so distant link to slavery; there is a not so distant link to both emotional and physical danger and annihilation.” Records such as Bob Marley’s ‘Four hundred years’ or Burning Spear’s ’Slavery Days’ evoke the pain and anger still felt. It is from this backdrop that the emphasis on ‘respect’ takes its force. Any inflection that it is being withheld readily connects with the wound of the past.
The upshot of all this is that our society needs to know not just that slavery happened but just as importantly in our present context to develop an emotional and personal appropriation of its significance for the descendants of both the enslaving nation and the enslaved subjects. The National Trust is right to use one way to focus attention. Beyond this the controversial question needs to be raised of what sort of moral and appropriates reparations might properly be made to those still suffering slavery’s consequences. The legacy is still very much alive.
Add-ons
* Quote of the week: Patricia Williams (black American legal academic and 1997 Reith lecturer): “Who are 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.” (“Seeing a Colour-Blind Future’).
* Having already invented the donor kebab, Turkish Germans have now produced the world’s first Covid vaccine. Thank God for the energy of diasporas.
* ‘Coloured’/’people of colour’. My query as to why the distinction should be significant has had a few replies. Please send in more. My take is that any use of the word ‘colour’ sets up a damaging binary. It means you are either ‘colourless’ (or even worse, ‘vanilla’) and so boring, standard, uninteresting; or you have ‘colour’ and so become different, exceptional and not quite normal. By the same token, the word ‘ethnic’ as applied only to minorities does similar harm, and hinders white people from recognising that they too have ‘ethnicity’.