Welcome. After a flurry of reports and debate this blog steps back a little to try to clarify the underlying issues. Please comment, dissent, commend to others, and subscribe
So, what is ‘Race’?
It helps to know what you are talking about, so after producing over thirty blogs focusing on the church in a multi-racial society it is high time to attempt some definition of what the word ‘race’ is referring to. Emmanuel Lartey, a Ghanaian background pastoral theologian, once based in Birmingham but now in the USA, quotes a simple formulation drawn up back in 1948 that I find provides a helpful basis to work from.
“Every human being is in certain respects:
1. like all others
2. like some others
3. like no other.”
A parallel classification is made by David Livermore in ‘Leading with Cultural Intelligence’ (2010, p 70), who writes of three categories of human behaviour: the universal, the cultural, and the personal.
Terms such as race (as also ethnicity and culture) clearly refer to the middle of that sandwich: the ways in which we may share a sense of belonging and identity, ways of behaving, thinking and speaking, which give us some sense of affinity with ‘people like us’ and whuch distinguish us from other groups not sharing those same characteristics in quite such an intense way. However it is worth pointing out that the ‘thickness’ of the ‘like some others’ section varies across different societies. For the modern West, especially the USA, the ‘like no other’ category is very thick and getting thicker, so that my capacity to define myself against all others is vehemently advocated. A poster in the Body Shop window recently proclaimed: “’Rise up with self love. As a queer black woman me existing is defiance.’ Char Ellesse @ Girls will be Boys”.
By contrast for other societies (Vincent O’Donovan’s classic study of the East African Maasai in ‘Jesus Rediscovered’) the ‘like some others’ sense of loyal adherence to the traditional way of life is sufficiently thick to give (from a western point of view) very little scope to personal or private distinctiveness.
The ‘like all others’ category resonates particularly strongly with the Christian emphasis on the unity of humanity, both as created by God in his image, and as fallen in sin, and as offered redemption and participation in new life in Christ. However, to leave the matter there fails to take account of the way human beings do form collective groups, collectivities for which the word ‘race’ is the broadest descriptive term.
Like some others
As regards the middle of the 'sandwich' and the focus of this blog, differing but overlapping terms are used to describe that ‘likeness’. Terms change, and are best understood by common usage rather by abstract definition, but my rough use of the terms imply as follows: by ‘culture’ I refer to those patterns of acting, believing, creating and thinking which characterise people, usually with a common ancestry, which makes it meaningful to distinguish them from other groups. ‘Ethnicity’, which comes from ethne, the New Testament term for peoples or Gentiles, refers to stronger patterns of internal common identity so that it refers to ‘who I am’ not just how I act or think. ‘Race’ is the broadest term and is used here to speak of broad groups who share some physical characteristics which mark them as different from other groups.
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 felt to be 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. 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.
What sort of similarity is it then that makes it possible and useful to talk about ‘races’ or ‘ethnicities’?
‘Race’ as physical appearance.
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, that might yield some sort of hierarchy of races, and which might form a basis for explaining differences of behaviour. Chine McDonald’s recent book ‘God is not a White Man, and Other Revelations’ [review next week] spells out the damaging consequences of attempts to create a physical and hierarchical ordering of humanity
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 of experts 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.”
Genetic differences between ethnic groups are small and peripheral. There are differences. The frequency of all black Olympic sprinting finals as opposed to all white swimming finals can not just be explained by environmental or social factors; but the issue is quite localised differences in gene pools rather than major ‘racial’ classifications. It is largely people with West African origins who are successful sprinters, or footballers, not black people generally; conversely successful long distance runners are characteristically from East Africa. Similarly 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, but, even when environmental factors are accounted for, ‘race’ correlates with the occurrence of other health problems such as prostate cancer or heart disease. Over 30 medicines have been identified as having safety or efficacy profiles that vary between ethnic or racial groups.
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 questionable. 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 switch from seeing skin colour as little more than a marker for other forms of difference, and to recognise that ‘race’ is a social construct, not a physical one.
Race as a social construct, but formed by what?.
Why, then, do ethnic groups act differently in various ways? Two alternative, and often competing explanations have been put forward. One is that ethnicity is essentially about ‘culture’: patterns of thinking, behaving, relating, creating come from growing and living amongst people who are similar; so that an identity is formed that relates to and correlates with the appearance of that group, and which marks them off from those who are different. However the impact of discrimination at various levels or the forming of negative stereotypes that hinder people either being accepted or allowed to fully deploy their gifts indicate that cultural differences alone are not sufficient to explain the different outcomes for racial groups within the one society.
The second explanation, seeing race as 'power', is a rather more sophisticated concept - the focus is on the way an ethnic group is treated by others, and especially the way power is used against them. 'Race' then is essentially an account of oppression. The issue is no longer about relationships between groups in the abstract, but about concrete situations where one group of people has had considerable power over another and has been able to use that power to exploit and subjugate. The weakness of this emphasis is that it tends to ascribe differences of outcome for different ethnic groups as entirely due to the ways in which those in power operate, and disregard both the potency of ethnic groups to affect their own destinies, and the impact of culture on those outcomes. Over the past couple of decades it has become virtually axiomatic that all disparities of outcome are the consequence of racism in society. Yet such an axiom requires us to argue that the ‘differences between different cultures don’t make any difference’; as though, say, the cultural differences between the weight that parents of different cultures give to their children doing their homework makes no difference to their eventual success..
The relative weight of the two factors has shifted over the decades and the existence of two broadly different explanations about what 'race' means has frequently caused confusion and misunderstanding. Being unaware that talk about 'race' can proceed solely from either the ‘culture’ emphasis or the ‘power’ emphasis means that debaters are frequently at cross purposes through each assuming that their type of approach provides a complete explanation. More seriously people can refuse the other explanatory emphasis because they fear it will be thought to nullify their own, so that alternative explanations are seen as trivialising evasions of what is held to be the real issue. Thus people who believe that an ethnic group is disadvantaged because of its own characteristics (superstition, laziness, promiscuity and the like) can be unwilling to have their point weakened by reference to how society works to disadvantage that group (for example the widespread evidence of discrimation against people with non-English sounding names in employment). Conversely those who believe that ethnic groups are disadvantaged purely because of the oppressive way that society works against them can refuse to recognise how the ways of life of ethnic groups can cause those groups to either thrive or struggle in society.
Of course situations are easier to understand if they can explained by one simple major factor, but the price of such simplification is distortion and misunderstanding. One reason why, in both society and church, progress to eliminating racial disadvantage has been disappointingly slow is the use of over-simple diagnoses, and consequently ineffective responses. As a result people lose interest (and anti-racism activists often have a short life-span). The results are despair, cynicism and rage. What is required as Richard King writes “is an approach that avoids materialist reductionism (which denies culture) or culturalist reductionism (which denies power)” but rather a recognition of how both emphases work on each other. [Orientalism and Religion: Postcolonial theory, India and the Mystic East', Routledge, London 1999]. This is a more confusing, less clear cut understanding of the significance of ethnicity for us today, and requires careful thought and analysis to unpack why differentials appear in our society, but in my experience it is the only approach to living in a multi ethnic society that has integrity, and which it makes possible to develop small scale, incremental but constructive steps towards justice and equality in a multi-ethnic society.
Add Ons
‘The Repair Shop’, and Institutional Racism.
‘The Repair Shop’ is the favourite tv programme of elderly, middle England – I’m speaking my truth here. It is anchored by a black man from Hackney, Jay Blades, whilst the mother’s heartthrob is a handsome mixed-race guy. I have seen that as evidence of how ethnic diversity is seen as accepted and routine across virtually the whole of our society. But Blades has told Radio Times that the BBC is institutionally racist. Whilst he acknowledes ‘I’m fortunate’ and that he has always been treated respectfully by the BBC, he presented as evidence that there has never been a black person hosting a prime-time games show. The BBC replied that he was incorrect and listed a number of shows that had black presenters. (I have not seen them, but doesn’t the inimitable Ranganation also count?)
So is Jay Blades allegation of institutional racism justified? Or has it just become routine for celebrities to say so? They may well be right, but evidence is often subjective and hard to evaluate. The Sewell report (with which Blades says he ‘totally disagrees’) argued that “If accusations of ‘institutional racism’ are levelled against institutions, these should – like any other serious accusation – be subject to robust assessment and evidence”. Does Blades’ accusation pass that test?
So, What is 'Race'? # 33 08/06/2021
Thanks John.. Helpul... Of course there is a lot more to be said about the social construction of "race" and other identities... I Hope it's Ok to post here a longish (edited) extract from my Temple Tract on Transatlantic Evangelicalism.. where I try to spell out some of my understandings about it. So here goes..
My theoretical framework draws on Henri Tajfel's theories of social identities in social psychology and Fredrik Barth's (1969) anthropological work on ethnic groups and boundaries. According to Turner et al. (1979), in-group / out-group relations are shaped by a threefold process of social categorisation, social identification and social comparison. Persons sort other individuals into social categories, using labels and stereotypes available within the culture and then identify the self with a particular category which is considered as “us” or the in-group. They then make comparisons with other categories who are regarded as “them” or out-groups. As people spend more time in social networks with the in-group, they develop an identity, cultures, rituals and boundaries which give some measure of ontological reality to the social group. Barth describes the same phenomenon and gives examples of how particular markers can become salient in defining the boundaries of particular social groupings, determining who will be included or excluded. There is a tendency among any in-group towards “othering” people who are different from themselves by highlighting a boundary marker.
In reality, the picture is complex as identity categories overlap and change over time. In the UK until about 1970 scholarly and popular discourse had seen “race” in terms of skin colour; in the 1970s culture and ethnicity became more useful. By the 1980s as Muslims came to see their belonging to the global ummah as a primary identity, religion gained a new importance and was recognized by governments as a useful additional social category for equalities and security policy and in official statistics. This redefined the conceptual space in which religious identities, including western Christianity and evangelicalism could be discussed as “faith communities” and identity groups in a religiously plural society.
Identities can also look different from an outsider's viewpoint, and can be more or less salient in different contexts. The perspective already discussed above suggests that identity work is the process by which an individual manages various elements to constitute a unique personal identity and engages in social relationships in accordance with them. However, at the same time, people face many externally determined constraints. Wealth or poverty, postcode lotteries, citizenship rules, educational achievement or lack of it, observable skin colour or physical appearance, health or disability or membership of a particular family or local community can prevent people from achieving all that they would wish. Some elements of identity are therefore ascribed by others rather than achieved or constructed ourselves. In this more complete account identities are not so much personal as social constructions, based on a synthesis of structure and agency effects, with feedback loops and the exercise of reflexivity as proposed in Anthony Giddens’ (1984) theory of structuration.
Social categorisation takes place in several different dimensions leading to a nested and hierarchical structure of identity groups in contemporary society. This overlapping of identity elements is referred to by social scientists as “intersectionality” and is increasingly mobilised politically to highlight injustices against minority groups, for example in the multiple levels of discrimination which will impact the life of a black, working class, disabled woman.
Nearly forty years ago I wrote about religious identity formation in terms of ethnic groups and boundaries, alongside religious values, beliefs and customs (Smith, 1983 Christian Ethnics in which I argued from the Bible and sociological literature against the homogeneous unit principle. ). In contemporary faith-community politics, visible markers of clothing, such as the turban, the niqab or the wearing of a crucifix can serve a boundary marking function, either as an assertion of identity on the part of an individual, or as an ascription by outside observers. A wide-ranging theoretical account of religious identity issues can be found in Pnina Werbner’s article (2010). All this leads me to value Tariq Modood's (1998, 2019) arguments against essentialism. We should for example avoid statements such as “all Muslims are X”, and refrain from outsider judgments, such as “the intrinsic nature of Islam is violent”, without appropriate listening to a range of voices from within the Muslim community. These are useful principles we can apply for our consideration of evangelical identities.
Smith (1983) also suggested that practices of bilingualism and linguistic code switching or mixing was an indicator of the fluidity and hybridity of social identity.
More recently, I reviewed the complex issues around racism and ethnic identity in the UK and the position of the Christian churches in relation to it (Smith, 2018a The Revenge of the Racists https://drive.google.com/file/d/14L3MGark4_xwuVxK3XQ8Mj2KQygE7RtX/view?usp=sharing
), while Chris Baker (2016) has written about the hybrid church in the city. There are inevitably other intersectional aspects of identity for evangelical Christians which I do not have space to cover in this paper—the most obvious being gender (Baillie, 2001; Aune, 2006, 2008a, 2008b; Gaddini, 2019). One could argue that evangelicals—with their historic commitment to Biblical truth, precise exposition of particular verses, and systematic theology expressed in statements of doctrine—are wedded to the notion of clear boundary markers defining the community of true believers. If so, they are likely to find the notion of hybridity in the church and blurred encounters with the world intrinsically problematic (Reader, 2016).
The reference to the full piece is Trans-Atlantic Evangelicalism: Toxic, Fragmented or Redeemable? (2020)
Greg Smith
or at https://drive.google.com/file/d/14cJ6XwAiT4TK9DkgVcE7BI6rURBlpx1P/view?usp=sharing