RACISM: some thoughts

When I was seven years old, my family lived in Capetown in South Africa for several months in 1956.  It was at the height of the apartheid era, and I remember my child’s horror and shock at seeing how black people were being treated.  My parents were utterly disgusted, with my father writing to his father that ‘this is virtually a police state with a racial policy similar to the Aryan policy formerly held by Nazi Germany.  It is all very stupid as well as un-Christian.’

While we were there, the Mirfield Father Trevor Huddleston, who was working in South Africa at the time, brought out his book exposing racism ‘Naught for your Comfort’.  It sold out on the first day, but Huddleston had to flee, his life in danger from the white authorities.

This was a formative experience for me, and was one of the reasons I worked for nearly ten years in Northern Nigeria in the 1970s and 1980s, learning to value enormously the resilient faith, wisdom and sacrifice of our Nigerian colleagues.

So I, like many others, am utterly outraged and appalled to watch a white police officer deliberately murdering an innocent black man by kneeling on his neck in broad daylight.  This can never be justified.

And yet, there is racism in the church here in England too.  I know of church members who speak slightingly of another woman who attends regularly simply because she is Asian.  They don’t try and speak to her.  They sit apart from her.  They scoff at everything she does.  And they don’t see it as wrong.

Jesus’ disciple Peter had a similar problem.  There were the acceptable and the unacceptable.  People who were not Jews were not acceptable to God, so he thought.  And then he had a vision which changed his mind, heart and attitudes completely and for ever.

Then Peter began to speak: “I now realize how true it is that God does not show favouritism, but accepts from every nation the one who fears him and does what is right.

(from the New Testament, the book of the Acts of the Apostles).

Those of us who passionately believe in the equal worth to God of every person under heaven, whatever our beliefs and ethics, should be making a stand and speaking up  – somehow, anyhow – against racism wherever we find it – at home, at work, with friends, at games stadia, and most certainly at church.

“In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.” — Martin Luther King, Jr.

 “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.” — Desmond Tutu