Seeing in colour

I hate racism. But I have been part of the problem. And I am determined to change.

Perhaps the problem us white folk have with racism is that we haven’t understood what it really means. I think many of us, most of us, grew up being taught not to bully anyone for looking different to us, and that we should be friends with others who look different because our different appearances are less important than the fact we are the same underneath, and it is rude and hurtful to pick on people’s differences. I don’t think there is anything wrong with that, except that I think we tend to stop there. I would never hate or bully someone because of the colour of their skin so I can’t be racist! But racism is bigger than simple racist bullying.

There was a time I tried to be colourblind, supposing that was the answer to racism. We are all human, we all have equal value and worth, so surely we need to aim to see no difference and treat oneanother exactly the same regardless of colour? It made sense. But increasingly I’m hearing black voices asking us to see colour!

It feels counterintuitive. But I think the reason colourblindness feels intuitively right and seeing difference feels wrong is that we have absorbed those antibullying messages but never gone beyond that to truly understand what racism is. If racism did literally just mean picking on people who look different then colourblindness might well solve it. To see difference feels uncomfortable as it feels like singling someone out, like discrimination. So why are black people telling us to see difference?

This world is unequal. All of us have equal worth and value, but that is not how society treats us. We may have equal rights on paper but even now black people are paid less on average for the same work, less access to good education, food and housing, are more likely to be stopped and searched by police or followed by security whilst shopping, receive welfare sanctions, be rightly and wrongly convicted of crime and given harsher sentences, and suffer discrimination that makes it hard to participate equally in many areas of society. Black academics are stopped by security as they go to work on their own campuses. Black birdwatchers are watched in suspicion by the white majority wondering what they are ‘really’ up to. Black businesspeople and keynote speakers are mistaken for cleaners when attending conferences. Black people are made outsiders and feel unwelcome in certain spaces in ways we white people rarely experience. Black victims of crime are often afraid to report incidents to the police for fear of how they as the victim will be treated. And so on, and so on. It’s bigger than outright bullying.

Black people tell us that often when they tell us of their experiences they are not listened to; they meet excuses or denial or minimisation. A first step to tackling that is to see in colour. To see that there is a difference. The difference is nothing to do with our worth, but everything to do with our experience of the world, as determined by the colour of our skin. If we see no difference, we cannot see that the other person experiences barriers to doing things we just take for granted. If we cannot see difference, we cannot hear their stories. If we see no difference we cannot see problems that we could help tackle. And crucially, if we see no difference then any attempt to address injustice will itself look like injustice. ‘Why should they get special treatment?’ we cry, when in reality we had special treatment already.

I have been guilty of all of this, and am only just beginning to get a grip on it. I might have been horrified at the thought of bullying a person for being black, but I have certainly criticised diversity drives by employers in the past, asking why we should be trying to increase the black proportion of the workforce; shouldn’t positions just be given by merit and kept in proportion to the black makeup of applicants..? I can see now that my colourblindness in that situation was itself racist; I was unable to see that such diversity pushes were aiming to address deepset inequalities of people feeling excluded from even applying to overly white workplaces, unconscious bias in the recruitment process, and of deprivation that disadvantaged black applicants educationally.

If all of us are treated the same, we remain unequal. For progress to be made we need to see difference and take into consideration what measures are needed to overcome white advantage and black disadvantage.

It’s also where ‘all lives matter’ comes from, and why it is problematic. We want all to be treated the same so why single out black lives as mattering? Of course all lives have equal intrinsic worth, but the reality is that black experience shows black lives are so often treated as expendable. To begin to tackle that means first acknowledging that black experience of being treated as if their lives are worth less by society, and then affirming that no black lives are not expendable, they do matter. ‘All lives cannot matter until black lives do’. Again, if all of us are treated the same, we remain unequal.

All of this feels uncomfortable of course, partly because this is our comfortable normality that’s being challenged, but also partly because our colourblind aspiration is sincere. But it is quite possible to be sincerely wrong. Good intentions are not enough. We must address it; seeing colour is just the first tentative step towards real fairness and equality.

Colourblindness may feel a million miles from kneeling on a man’s neck in the street to lynch him, even the opposite, but I am beginning to see that it is one link in a chain that culminates in overt violence. How? A sincere but misguided desire to see all the same way unintentionally denies the reality of black experience. This empowers those who intentionally deny black experience, those who would say black people got their legal equality already so should shut up now, those who think ‘political correctness has gone too far’. That empowers those who want to lash back at attempts to address inequality. And that in turn empowers those who turn to racist violence. We need to break the chain and reverse the process. By rejecting colourblindness and learning to see and hear black people we can begin to learn what it means to be black today. We can learn what inequalities still exist, and what it would look like to take action to address them. We can truly listen and learn and value and empower our black neighbours until their experience of society is no different to our own.

I see the irony in being another white voice talking about how to tackle racism, but on the other hand I know it is our responsibility as white people to proactively try to learn about how to be antiracist and live it out. I share this to share how I am confronting my own racism, and hopefully help white readers to do the same. So I will end not by prescribing what we should do to end racism, but by committing myself to listen, listen, listen to black voices, and to act on what I learn*. I’m on a journey and I hope you will join me.

 

 

*Many good places to start have already been shared by black antiracist activists in response to current interest. Here is one that I thought pretty comprehensive, and with a UK perspective, but there are many others out there. Use resources people have voluntarily shared already rather than asking your black friends their experience; it may well be very traumatic a thing to ask of them, and there is lots out there.

When loving one another is not enough

 

(Edit: He has now published a much stronger piece, more the sort of challenging message that I at least need to hear. Read it here; it’s better than mine.)

Last night Switchfoot posted up a new message from Jon Foreman, responding to the state of America from his position, seeing that in a divided world people can still come together through music, and calling for fans to respond to current events with love for their fellow Americans:

This message is good; but with the greatest respect to my hero, very inadequate.

The problem is not just division, it’s that we are divided over real-world issues and how to respond to them. The problem is not a lack of love, but that love can look very different to another person, even to the extent of threatening your view of what love looks like in a particular situation. And loving ‘fellow Americans’ is nowhere near enough in a global world, where we have to engage with the rest of the world, where people the world over are made in God’s image and loved by God.

Telling us we need to love one another is vital, but not enough. Yes we need to engage with those we don’t agree with, and do it with kindness, listening, and consideration.

But that alone is not enough. The problem is not just division; the problem is there are real world problems we need to address. Simply showing love to the white supremacist does not address white supremacy. Simply loving the person who disagrees with us on what to do about gun violence does not solve the gun violence crisis. We absolutely have to cross the room and listen and engage and work together, but we do also have to do the work somehow.

I am convinced we all think we are motivated by love. We just differ in what love looks like to us, and when we see another group acting against what we think is loving, we feel our love is being attacked by ‘the haters’ and get defensive. It’s easy to see that those we agree with are the ones being loving in the situation, up against The Other, who clearly lack love and need to come together with us.

An example: To one side of the gun violence issue it is clear. They are motivated by deep love for their children and those of others. They believe in the good guy with the gun, in the freedom to carry weapons to defend their family and be a hero if confronted with danger. This is what love looks like. To take away that defence is insanity, the other side clearly do not love enough to want to protect our children. But to that other side, the picture is different. They too deeply love their children and those of others. They believe the evidence of other countries that have vastly reduced gun deaths by regulating the availability of guns. To keep so many weapons in circulation, available at any time to anyone, including weapons designed to kill large numbers of people very quickly, is insanity, the other side clearly do not love enough to want to protect our children. Both are love positions. But they disagree deeply on what love looks like.

There are differences of approach too. To one group, love looks like keeping quiet about the divisive issues and simply being kind to those around us. From that perspective, those who speak out are troublemakers out to stir up hatred and fracturing society. But from the other perspective, love looks like speaking out against evil and challenging injustice. From that perspective, keeping quiet is acceptance of and complicity with that evil and injustice. Even the white supremacist is presumably motivated by love, albeit a very narrowly defined love that loves only a certain group and resents the idea of that group giving any power to or sharing any resources with another group.

This is where the call to ‘love our fellow Americans’ becomes dangerously inadequate. We need to go so, so beyond love for our fellow citizens, and expand our hearts to love all humanity beyond borders. It is perfectly possible to love your fellow Americans, documented citizens, perhaps those descended from the founding European pioneers, but struggle to tolerate those citizens who have arrived more recently and/or from other backgrounds, and to not at all love the ‘foreigner’. That love is really too small. It could condone the worst atrocities committed against those who fall outside its narrow boundaries. The same goes for those of us who live elsewhere. Here in the UK, there are plenty who again love their fellow Brits – perhaps those whose ancestors have been here hundreds of years and who fit their mental image of what England should look like – and resent sharing any resources with those they perceive as ‘foreigners’, whether that be minority groups, the EU or refugees, because they love those who fit their ideals over and above others and wish them to be able to enjoy all the country’s benefits without having to share with anyone else. It is love – but it is too small.

I realise in saying this that this is my version of love. But I truly do not believe that love for our own countrymen is enough on its own to fix our nations. If nothing else, God’s love is bigger than our borders, affirming that every person is made in God’s image and worth dying for, wherever they happen to have been born. We have to try to love on that scale at least, even if it takes a lot of listening and heartache to work out how practically to move forward in living that out together.

And yes, we do need to move forward into action, because individual kindness will not solve those society-wide, and global, crises we face. It may well begin by finding the common ground, and recognising the love position of The Other. But where someone’s love position is too narrowly defined, that probably does need challenging somehow, and even where it isn’t, there will be vast differences to work through before a practical solution can arise out of that common ground.

‘Love one another’ is necessary, but not sufficient.