How will history judge us?
How will history judge us and our attitude towards institutional racism? It is easy to see and condemn this insidious evil in others. It is equally easy to overlook how we ourselves treat other human beings in ways that are fundamentally racist. One shocking and shaming aspect of Christian history is the way it has treated Jewish people on the basis of race and religion. It was only in the latter part of the 20th century that Popes and other Christian leaders began the Church’s process of public, institutional repentance.
We might find comfort in criticising previous generations for their blindness to institutional racism. But perhaps our denunciation of others can also contribute to an inability to admit to racism in our own time and in our own nation.
My parents were living in central Africa when I was born. After we returned to the UK, there was a problem about getting me a passport for a school trip. I remember going up to London with my mother and joining a huge queue at some government office to sort it out.
Apart from us, everybody else in the queue was black. In itself, I thought that was not unusual. What was unusual was the fact that the white man in charge of the queue saw my mother and me, and ushered us forward to go in ahead of everyone else.
Looking back, it might now feel a bit self-righteous to say that we did in fact stay in the queue as a protest that we were not more special than anyone else. We didn’t. We accepted the privilege.
And that was the first time I saw a little bit of how institutional racism worked here in Blighty.
That small incident reminds me how I was told what life in England would be like. My parents were proud of their nation and encouraged me to respect what they described as its commitment to the virtues of tolerance, justice and truth.
But recent news stories (Windrush, Grenfell, Brexit, Coronavirus regulations) call into question any serious commitment to those virtues as the foundation of public and private life.
In the wake of this pandemic we have an uphill task to rebuild our economy. We also have to rebuild, as a matter of urgency, a common commitment to virtues that we respect and recognise in each other and are proud to live by.