Spelling Black with a capital B? Review of 'God is not a White Man'. # 34 15/06/2021
Spelling Black with a capital B? Review of God is not a White Man, and other Revelations, by Chine McDonald.
This book comes front-loaded with four pages of eleven commendations. It is personal, honest, passionate, wide-ranging, original, stimulating and controversial. It is also, as I shall argue, flawed. It deserves serious debate, not uncritical acclamation.
The author arrived in Britain from Nigeria aged 5, the daughter of a surgeon and educationalist, and the most alive sections are when she describes her own experiences – falling in love and marrying, and having a son whom she clearly adores. She writes attractively of how her adolescent distaste for visits back to Nigeria became replaced by a rich affection and delight in her motherland. She describes her time in Cambridge and aspirations to become a journalist. Her long reflection on multi-ethnic churches (pp 191-204) are wise and thoughtful and deserve wide circulation.
Overall, life in Britain seems to have been good to Chine. She speaks warmly of her loving upbringing, her teachers were uniformly and impressively supportive of a quiet, earnest student who they encouraged to apply for Cambridge. She writes of being ‘embraced by the majority race in school, in the community, in the workplace, in the Church’. And yet? Media portrayals of racist violence, wide-ranging imbalances and injustices predicated on race suggest: ‘I realise now that those instances of complete belonging I felt were perhaps illusions’ (pp 5 & 6). The tension of positive personal experience being over-ridden by external harsh realities is an underlying theme in the book.
A particularly stark example is the chapter ‘Love is not Colour Blind’ where she describes falling in love and enjoyably negotiating the interplay of two different marriage traditions, and concluding by noting that as a mixed couple ‘I’m surprised at just how unremarkable we are’. (As half of a somewhat similar marriage for four decades I concur). Yet rather than celebrate the positive of the frequency of mixed marriages in this country, she pivots to tell negative stories from the United States, notably the racism, bizarre contortions and legalism at the fundamentalist Bob Jones University. How to understand this disconnect? A theologian such as Willie James Jennings would probably argue her pivot was astute and that Bob Jones University is the tip, only the most outrageous and obvious example, of a massive iceberg of white superiority that chills the prospects of black people in every walk of life in every part of the world. Or on the other hand, is Bob Jones University merely a pathetic remnant of an old order that is rapidly fading?
It is impressive that McDonald has chosen to reach beyond her personal experience to connect with the wider and negative experience of Black people in a world dominated by white supremacy, and she underlines that commonality of identity by always spelling ‘Black’ with a capital B. She seeks to depict how resisting white supremacy illuminates our understanding of God, sexual relationships, global politics and economy, feminism, education, health and church. But it is ominous that so much of her material is from the past or the United States. Rightly she does mention current British examples: the outrageous Home Office treatment of ‘Windrush generation’ migrants, the unequal impact of Covid deaths, inequalities in employment procedures. But when one of her worst case personal examples is being mistaken for another African when arriving for an Any Questions programme in West Sussex (p 117) a cynic could make the misleading conclusion that racism in Britain, then, can’t be that bad.
Far more serious is the way the white supremacy/Black suffering perspective skews her reading of events. Her grasp of history can be poor – she has Columbus meeting African slaves even though they arrived in the Americas twenty years after his death. More serious is her use in at least three places to describe slaves as having been ‘kidnapped’ by white slavers in Africa, as portrayed fictionally in Alex Haley’s Roots. Whilst the horrors of the Middle Passage and subsequent inhumane and brutal enslavement in the Americas were far worse than enslavement by fellow Africans, nonetheless it has been estimated by Orlando Patterson that prior to the European’s arrivals 70% of West Africans were slaves, so to write of the ‘cries of those people who had gone from complete freedom to this nightmarish existence’ (p 165, see also pp 107 & 178) is a distortion of history. James Walvin writes: “The slave trade could not have existed without a complex system of slave-trading beyond the sight and ken of the Europeans. These systems of slavery had their origins not so much in European demands for Africans but in much older, traditional systems within Africa” (in Black Ivory: A History of British Slavery, p 26). For Equiano, who she refers to, it took six months to travel from being kidnapped by Igbos from another locality, to arrive at the coast and sold to British slavers.
Her ignoring of black-on-black brutality distorts her perspective. Black young men in both Britain and the USA are more likely to die at the hands of other black people than the police. Do Black deaths matter only when the death is at the hand of a white person. As I write, the BLM activist Sasha Johnson is in critical condition from a gunshot wound to the head at a party on 25th May ‘by parties unknown’. Had a white finger pulled the trigger by now she would be a household name with demonstrations on the streets.
Such down-playing of black responsibility and agency correspondingly undervalues black capability. ‘Black majority churches’ in Britain were pioneered by Pentecostals, who came here first from the Caribbean and then from West Africa, with the faith and energy to evangelise their peers in Britain (and to evangelise the natives in the latter case). To say ‘they started their own churches when they were not welcomed by white ones’ (p 128, also p 192) is instead to give all the agency, albeit negatively, to white people, as writers such as Joel Edwards and Joe Aldred have pointed out (even though sheer racism or lack of cultural intelligence in the traditional churches led to black Pentecostals having fertile ground in which to evangelise).
The above weaknesses stem from a key element of the book, the author’s commitment to identity with all Black people, who in Britain ‘take it so personally when Black people in the US are killed . . . because we see ourselves in other Black people everywhere – close bonds form between oppressed groups in a way that can’t be understood outside those groups’ (pp 170-1). She then refers to a powerful passage from Desmond Tutu expounding the richness of the Zulu concept sense of Ubuntu: ‘We belong in a bundle of life. We say a person is a person through other persons.’ But she misunderstands. For Tutu there are no boundaries to the bundle – it is all humanity as we are brought into relationship with each other. Whilst McDonald’s prioritising ‘Black’ as a significant sub-division in the bundle gives her a strong sense of connectedness that deserves to be respected, but it also leads to her magnifying cases (not necessarily relevant to the here and now) of injustices against Black people, and to blindness to injustices perpetrated by Black people. Foregrounding her Blackness also foists on her a burden of collateral angst that marrying a white man might be ‘an act of deep betrayal – a turning of my back on my heritage’ (p 50). Similar angst is evinced in her self-questioning in working for an aid agency as wealth and poverty differences closely follow those of colour. For the cost of ‘racialising’ Blackness is to make the ambiguities and confusions that multi-racial societies inevitably generate so fraught that all interactions become inauthentic and fragile.
Reading this book reminded me of the psychological trick whereby the lines drawn on a paper can be construed as, say, the face of an old woman at one moment, then – by throwing a switch in your brain – you can then construe them as say, a graceful swan or some other object. How do we construe life in multi-racial Britain?
· a) Emerging from a racist history, still carrying many flaws, but with currents of movement to greater openness and equality, with a continuing need for wise, intelligent incremental change;
Or
· b) Set within a continuing and powerful framework of white supremacy, whose malign effects, albeit slightly dimmed, still intrude into every corner of national life.
Reflecting on her student journalistic output at Cambridge she ‘shudders’ at what she communicated: ‘an attempt to convey that we as the Black community at Cambridge had integrated well, were not different or disadvantaged or worthy of pity’ (p 153). In other words, construal (a). Whereas now she is proposing construal (b). So, is the Chine of her early twenties, or late thirties nearer to reality?
I am grateful for her book because it is a thought-provoking and serious attempt by a black person from a comfortable and successful background to connect with the historic and worldwide suffering of Black people. She highlights injustices and prejudices that need attention, but I believe her overall case is not made. Too many of her examples are distant or inaccurate. For a white male from a comfortable though not rich background to dissent from it - in fact to opt for construal (a) - might well be an impertinent refusal to listen to and value the pain in someone else’s experience, nonetheless I am not convinced she has taken the measure of contemporary Britain correctly. Instead, seeing ‘white supremacy’ as a less determined and rigid factor and our society as more fluid and open really does offer a constructive and positive way forward.
I think she should switch back, and start spelling ‘black’ without the capital B.