Welcome. A couple of demanding pastoral issues mean that my blog on the issue of Reparations is delayed for a week. Instead a more general ‘stand back’ looking at how we have got to where we are. Please comment and commend.
The Changing Face of 'Race'.
I have just come across a box of booklets about ‘race’, mostly though not entirely from church sources. One striking thing is how much somewhat ephemeral material has been produced over the past fifty years. This is often in the shape of both diocesan and central church reports on their situations, and also study materials produced for parish groups and the like. There must has been an enormous amount of meetings. Interestingly, there is nothing like a similar amount of serious, well argued theological or pastoral books on the topic. It has been very largely material produced on the wing. Nor has there been much written that is grounded specifically in congregational life and how churches can become effective, living, multi-ethnic organisms. The overall impact is that good intentions abound, specific identification of good practice is rare.
So in what ways has the understanding and the reality of ‘race’ changed over the past fifty years?
1. The rise of obviously successful ethnic minorities
Because post-war immigration was of largely artisan and rural communities, there developed the assumption that 'immigrant' areas and people were poor. Ethnic minority settlement was taken as one indication of deprivation in an area – minorities were like a ‘barium meal’ which simply pointed to existing injustices in society. Now Barnet is as ethnically mixed as Brixton (though the ethnic groups are different). The laboratory that is multi-ethnic Britain includes groups that are outstandingly successful (in economic and educational terms) as well as those that struggle. This must shape our assessment of race and ethnicity.
The co-inciding of comfortably off/poor with white/non-white still has some traction, but the discrepancies are now so frequent that it needs substantial qualification. The ‘face’ of race has changed substantially when the Chancellor and Home Secretary, plus a disproportionately large number of other members of a Conservative Cabinet are not white. Similarly, during the Covid pandemic a surprisingly large number of the numerous medical academics have been from minority groups.
Such success has clearly not been equally distributed amongst all ethnic groups, nor have they all excelled in similar areas, but increasingly the idea that there is glass ceiling to minority achievement is ineffective. The differing trajectories of ethnic minorities in Britain inevitably invites explanation. Why do Bangladeshis fare better than Pakistanis; Ghanaians more than Jamaicans? There are complex historical, class and cultural factors at work, but the once widely held view that racism is the only, or even main factor at work clearly needs qualifying. By contrast more attention needs to be given to what can be learned, and possibly replicated from minority successes, and the likelihood that strong family structures are central. A 1976 Report from the British Council of Churches spoke rather disparagingly of migrants who had made a ‘prosperous adjustment’ to British society, as though all migrants should remain poor. Aspiration is rightly no longer regarded with such suspicion.
2. The emergence of religion as a major issue
Earlier discourse about 'race' was entirely secular. White people who were serious about racism or multi-culturalism tended to be left of centre, with an implicit world-view that religion was a thing of the past, from which mercifully we were increasingly becoming free. At best it was a sub-set of ‘culture’ and therefore deserved distant and rather restrained respect - until people’s mind were re-orientated to recognising and working with the primacy of secularised political, social and economic issues. The explosion of Moslem anger over Salman Rushdie’s ‘Satanic Verses’ in 1988 marked an unusually distinct turning point here. Moslems took religion seriously and secularists needed to work with them as people with strong religious convictions.
The continuing intensification of Islamic identity amongst some Moslem groups has made this ever more urgent, after 9/11 with fear of acts of violence, more recently with Jihadists going to Syria. Other religious groups have received nothing like as much attention, largely because they are not seen to be as problematic. (‘How many people do we have to kill before people pay attention to us’ lamented one Hindu leader). Nonetheless the size of religious votes, especially of Hindus, means that government has to take pains to be onside with them.
The response to the rise of minority ethnic Christian groups is interestingly ambivalent in this respect. Are they ‘Christian’ and therefore a taken-for-granted section of the establishment who can be assumed to be fairly docile. Or are they ‘minority ethnic’ and therefore exceptional and in need of special acceptance?
A couple of incidents relating to the Redeemed Christian Church of God (RCCG) are interesting here. As Mayor of London, as part of Black History Month, Boris Johnson invited black Londoners to vote for their favourite black Londoner, no doubt expecting a sportsperson or entertainer. Instead the RCCG mobilised their members and Pastor Agu Irukwu won the poll, presenting Johnson with the dilemma of either celebrating Pastor Agu’s victory and alienating the gay lobby who disapproved of his opposition to gay marriage, or seemingly snubbing the RCCG voters. More recently Keir Starmer got his fingers burned, visiting RCCG’s Jesus House centre in Hendon to commend them for their extensive work for the common good (such as ‘Christmas with Jesus’ free Christmas dinners distributed to those in need) but then in our increasingly polarising society, being lambasted by LBGT supporters for guilt by association in keeping such company. Thus it seems that whilst non-Christian ethnic minorities can dissent from mainstream secular attitudes without being punished, for the moment Christian ethnic minorities are expected to toe the line as are white Christians. Nobody presses a Moslem, such as Sadiq Khan about his views on gay marriage (he is assumed to be kosher, but is not pressed to say so in order not to lose the votes of his fellow, usually more conservative, Moslems).
A succession of legal cases over issues such as the right to wear crosses at work, the right of registrars not to officiate at gay weddings, or social work students being expelled for expressing disagreement with gay marriage have all featured Christians from minority ethnic backgrounds. In their nearest to an Easter acknowledgement this year, the Sunday Times ran an article by Tamiwa Owolade underlining the strength, and surprising exceptionalism, of London with regard to traditionalist attitudes to abortion or gay marriage, fuelled in large part by the strength of minority ethnic, especially African, churches.
As churches such as RCCG become increasingly confident and numerous in this country it will be interesting to see whether or not politicians feel the need to take more divisive steps to court their votes.
3. The recognition of institutional racism.
As with the rise of religion so too with ‘institutional racism’ there is a quite specific event which brought it to the fore – in this case the MacPherson Report of 1999 into the Metropolitan Police’s response to the murder of Stephen Lawrence. The Labour Government commissioning of the enquiry and the resultant report was probably the single most important event in British community relations since the arrival of the Empire Windrush. It also gave the lie to those who say that conventional party politics don't impact 'race' and largely vindicated the complaints about official injustice that black people had been making for the previous 50 years. That more than twenty years later the ‘Windrush scandal’ would erupt with the gross injustices of the Home Office’s mistreatment of Caribbean background people disgracefully underlined the racist institutional carelessness with which the authorities could still treat black people.
Whilst the concept of institutional racism had been around since the 1970’s, the importance of the MacPherson Report was that it delineated in detail examples of it working in the less than professional response by the police both to tracking down Stephen Lawrence’s killers and their treatment of the family. The idea that ‘racists’ were simply people who took a personal and conscious decision to reject non-white people was far too limiting and simple to cover the manifold ways in which people were being disadvantaged.
But in some ways ‘institutional racism’ was a victim of its own success. The trem had an aura of intellectual, sociological seriousness and came to be applied to any outcome of ethnic inequality, but without MacPherson’s rigour in tracking the specific ways in which the institution operated to disadvantage minorities. It was this promiscuous use of the term that led the Sowell Report to downplay (but not deny) its existence. Meanwhile controversy continues as regards concepts such as Critical Race Theory and white privilege. Whilst open to serious criticisms they do flag up, like the concept of institutional racism, that racism is much more deeply built into ex-colonial societies than can be comprehended by seeing racism as simply prejudiced, ignorant evil choices.
It is within this framework that understanding history has come to such prominence recently. It is only by understanding ‘race relations’ within the context of deeply unequal and often exploitative relationships that we can get a rounded picture of our present situation.
4. The arrival of white ethnic minorities.
Ethnicity, culture, race, immigration were also issues of debate where it was assumed that skin colour was a constant factor. Until entry of EU citizens from eastern Europe into the UK rocketed from 2004. Unlike migrants from English-speaking countries or from western Europe linguistic and cultural differences became significant in a way that was not seen to be significant with, say, Australian or French migrants. The numbers were bigger, commend of English was generally less, and the competition for skilled manual or unskilled work was greater.
So, when in the late 90s aggressive begging by East European asylum seekers became a cause of widespread anger, was that 'racism'? Whilst that issue passed, the question of job competitiveness and cultural separation remained, and fuelled a widely felt demand for Brexit in 2016. Whilst some have seen that vote as being fuelled by a nostalgia for Empire, I think the narrative of Britain’s role in WW2, of superiority over Europeans, and a Churchillian doughtiness fuelled a hostility to immigration from eastern Europe, leading to acts of aggression against people or premises.
Eastern European migration therefore brought a new level of complexity to discussions of ‘race’ in Britain. Colour was not necessarily a factor in producing hostility or new challenges. It was a reminder, as the Troubles in Ulster had long illustrated, that ethnic tensions between people who were physically almost similar could still be a real issue. Illustrated of course even more tragically in Ukraine – a conflict which seems to have particular resonance in Britain as a reminder of a heroic military (and successful) past.
‘Race’ is clearly about more than colour.
5. Superdiversity.
In various ways §1, 2 & 4 all stress the diversity of Britain’s multi-ethnic population – in social class, religion, and areas of origin. One can also fold in the significance of differences in gender, age, length of stay in Britain to emphasise thatmulti-ethnic Britain is a complex patch-work where simple binaries no longer apply. In the 1970s it still wasn’t too much of a simplification to say that all Britain’s ethnic minorities (and majority) loved cricket.
The Parekh Report, published by the Runnymede Trust in 2000, wisely warned against seeing Britain as a ‘95:5’ society – a British bloc and a minority ethnic bloc. Whilst the figures would now be more like 80:20 (including white immigrants!) the lumping together of white British and ethnic minorities as separate groups is untenable. Nonetheless attempts to do that, by the use of BAME, and then more recently the clumsier UKME/GMH, still persist. One outcome from the death of George Floyd has been a reversion to seeing race as primarily a white/black issue, the more so as concern with Islamist separation and violence has receded. Curiously this has been reflected in a marked upsurge of black, or mixed, people appearing in tv adverts, to the neglect of people from other minorities.
But superdiversity emphasises, amongst other things, the very wide range of geographical and cultural backgrounds that people in Britain now come from. It not only tracks the proliferation of variables within the British population which increasingly qualifies all generalisations about race, it also underlines that the situation is so complex as to be unpredictable. It is this unpredictability that makes the present face of multi-ethnic Britain both challenging and fascinating.
Thanks John.. this is a pretty good overview and honest assesment of the complexity and the movement around race and ethnic relations since we were on the case at the end of the 1970's. A couple of things I would add are:
1) the waxing and waning, and to some extent mainstreaming, of far right neo-fascist, and populist political parties and narratives... It's not all one way traffic and complicated by social media silos, and international communication, with USA, India, Easter Europe etc. but it's important.
2) the refugee / asylum crisis and responses too it... which in the latest legislation makes some sanctuary seekers "illegal" and threatened with deportation to Rwanda, while others - especially White Ukrainians are welcomed as "good refugees".
Incidentally why do you continue to use the spelling "Moslem" when I think most people have been using Muslim for several decades - on the understanding that this is the preferred spelling among Muslim communities?