White Consciousness and Black Lives Matter

(My friend Nathan McGuire asked me to write this for his blog. You can see the article there - https://www.nathanlmcguire.com/blog/white-consciousness-and-black-lives-matter)

It could have been expected that the worldwide Covid pandemic would produce worldwide socio-political convulsions. The health crisis has brought to the surface deep underlying inequalities and injustices. In particular, of course, we see this in the unrest and uprisings sparked by the killing of a black man in Minneapolis. In one sense, nothing unusual; we’ve seen many of these. But coming during the tensions caused by inefficient and unjust responses to Coronavirus, it exploded into a global reaction.

More than just the murder of a single black man, this event sparked the tinder that has amassed from centuries of oppression and exploitation. This is seen in the way in which people of colour have suffered from the epidemic itself. This is not due to some essentialist biological vulnerability, but to the manner of structural and historically embedded exclusion and subjugation, which black people have experienced in practically every culture: poverty, overcrowded housing, and employment in sectors where social distancing is impossible. These demonstrations have therefore connected with the lived experience people of African-descent have undergone globally. It cannot be said that this is an over-reaction to something that occurred in a foreign country. No, it resonates with the race-based killings in police custody, and longterm marginalisation of black people, in Britain as well.

It seems, however, that this has become a moment, in which some white people have started to take notice. Though I get somewhat angry at the public pronouncements of white pastors, supporting Black Lives Matter, a kind of johnny-come-lately virtue signalling, to get themselves off a moral hook, when they have never commented on this before; making statements which they frequently get wrong in tone and tenor - witness the excruciating comments of mega-church pastor Louie Giglio, on “white blessing”, and his subsequent embarrassing, cringe-worthy, so-called apology.

As white Christians, we have to reject the temptations of the ‘white saviour complex’ (Mt. 4.1-11), and accept that we cannot be leaders in this movement. Our role is to listen and learn. My daughter, as in so many matters, is my political mentor, and has recommended Layla Saad’s book, Me and White Supremacy. Additionally, in an online forum discussing BLM, I think my greatest contribution was attending to the articulate voices of justifiably angry sisters and brothers. This posture will demand repeated confrontations, as our inherited misconceptions and prejudices are painfully corrected and deconstructed. Many times, I have forced myself to hear what is being said to me, rather than defending myself, or ‘white-splaining’ why they’re ‘wrong’ – what’s called ‘gaslighting’.

And yet, our voices do matter. During my MA, I studied Black Theology in South Africa under Apartheid. Black consciousness leaders there declared they were fed up with being asked to explain racism to white folks. It’s a feeling repeated recently in Reni Eddo-Lodge’s book, Why I am no longer Talking to White People about Race. Racism is a white problem; although its effects are felt by black people, its source is white. And it needs white people to stand up, speak, and act. It is not enough to be a white liberal. Non-confrontational, passive, quietist, non-racism must be replaced with an activist and positive anti-racism, which intervenes at individual and institutional levels – when we hear racist remarks on the bus, and when we witness exclusivist practices in the workplace.

Such humility requires more than an academic, theoretical, understanding. For me, the biggest learning has come through participation in life: anti-racist struggles, immigration support, and anti-deportation campaigns. But also through lived relationships with those who have been my mentors in inner-city London. Christianity is incarnational, and we learn through living; bodies more than books. Here we discover that White Privilege is real. We are listened to, given access to positions of power, when our actual talents may not merit it. Not that all white people are ‘privileged’ as such. Simply that, there is an overlay, on top of the various discriminations and inadequacies, which they (or, we) feel, which compensates and renders us an advantage. White consciousness means being conscious of whiteness, this constructed, artificial lie of an identity. When we realise this, then it is together that we enter in to the liberation which Christ proffers, as part of the multi-coloured Body of Christ, according to the multi-coloured wisdom of God (Eph. 3.10). Nevertheless, it is not enough to mouth the platitude of ‘All Lives Matter’, as if we are stating a profound truth. In reality, the universal arrives through the particular. That is, at this point, it is precisely black lives which are being destroyed, and therefore need to be defended. All lives, the universal, can only be protected, if we protect the, particular, black lives in front of us. 

This also involves more than an individualistic reaction, but also a symbolic and structural response. The furore over statues of racist and colonialist historical figures reveals the need to challenge the images which reinforce the master-slave mindset, which is so often internalised by its targets. But the issue also hits home with all the memorials and monuments to colonialists that exist in Christian church buildings. Perhaps Lieutenant so-and-so was really brave, but exactly what was he doing in Sudan in the 1880s, fighting people defending their homeland? And how about the presence of so many regimental flags, that adorn our cathedrals, glorifying the invaders who created the British Empire? As regards the power-structures in our ecclesial bodies, why are they so ‘white’? It’s not just the traditional churches. I know many white pastors of charismatic churches, who rejoice that they are multi-racial; while the leadership is completely white and the membership black, a racially stratified landscape, all the worse for being unconscious and unware.

Faced with this legacy, historical redress demands that we must decrease and they must increase (Jn. 3.30). The gospel is one, but it addresses us differentially, according to our social location. For the powerful, it means a pulling down; for the powerless, it means a raising up (Lk. 1.52-53). And this also involves them raising themselves up with their own strength, a process in which we can ever only be auxiliaries, not the prime movers, even while we take initiative to challenge the racism of the white power structures from within. We are in the position of those early believers who lived within Caesar’s household (Phil. 4.22). Similarly to those black people who defend the status quo, and adopt the equivalent position of ‘house slaves’, so we correspond to the white functionaries of the slave-system, who work within and benefit from that apparatus, but who choose freely to betray it, becoming class traitors, and join the rebellious movement to overthrow the system. So the Romans who followed Christ, were allying themselves, not to a new religion, but to a Jewish sect, part of a despised people, who nevertheless carried within themselves the promise of the eschatological future, the new heaven and new earth.