The Church and Racial Injustice

My Remarks to a Fringe meeting of the General Synod of the Church of England

Friends, let me start on a conciliatory note. Let me start by stating what I think we all agree about. We all agree that racial prejudice is wrong. Whether it be white on black, or black on white, it’s wrong. We all agree that the Church should appoint and promote its members on merit, not skin colour and we all agree that if the Church—as I assume it has—has been guilty of racial prejudice, then it should repent and correct it. And finally, I take it for granted that we all agree that when somebody does something wrong, they owe the wronged person an apology and reparation, or restitution, or compensation.

That’s all Christian moral common sense.

However, when it comes to wrong done two centuries ago by some ancestors of ours, what our responsibility is, corporately, is not straightforward at all. And that’s the main burden of what I have to say in the next few minutes.

Now, I’m a Scotsman. I tend to speak bluntly. Forgive me. It’s possible something I say might offend you. I don’t intend to offend you. I’m just trying to speak the truth as I see it and I speak the truth because I think it’s important. I think I can call in aid Jesus, who said things that lots of people found offensive. He didn’t say them to offend; he said them because they were in his view true and important to say.

So, the first thing I want to say is that we’ve got to reckon with the fact that the past was very, very different from our present. The past, for most people, was dreadful. Dreadful. History is full of an ocean of injustice, most of it completely beyond human repair. And that’s one reason I believe in God. Because I believe in justice and because it is clear to me that in most cases there is nothing you and I can do about injustice in the past. Therefore, there must be an afterlife, there must be a God, there must be a final judgment.

Second, in thinking about historic injustice, there’s the issue of fairness. We have to wrap our modern minds around the fact that up, until abolition in the early 1800s, slavery was a universal institution practiced by people of every skin colour on every continent. Slavery was so common that, when slaves won their freedom, perhaps through rebellion in the ancient world, they frequently went on to take slaves of their own. When the so-called “Maroons” in Jamaica escaped from the plantations into the forested interior in the 1700s, some of them kept slaves of their own. And when I was visiting my wife’s American family in Raleigh, North Carolina, a few Decembers ago, I went to visit the Museum of the History of North Carolina, where I learned that in 1860, on the eve of the American Civil War, there were 30,000 freed slaves in North Carolina, some of whom kept black slaves of their own.

So, my question is, Why pick out from the ocean of injustice the white enslavement of black Africans? Why ignore the fact that black Africans have been involved in enslaving other black Africans for centuries before the Europeans first arrived on the coast of West Africa in about 1450, trading them first to the Romans and then to the Arabs? It’s reckoned that, over about a 400-year period, about 17 million Africans were traded north to the Arab and Muslim Mediterranean. It’s a practical certainty that some of those bought by European traders on the coast of West Africa and transported to the Americas had themselves been slave raiders, even slave traders. The raiders in turn had been raided. It’s also practical certainty that Britons of West African heritage, some of them, are the descendants of slave raiders and traders and owners. And I think I read yesterday that Kemi Badenoch has said as much of her own ancestors.

The story of slavery is not simply a story of white oppressors and black victims. Yet, it does tend to be told in those simplistic—and, I think, divisively racial—terms. So, the question is, if we’re going to get worried about historic slavery, why this laser focus on white oppressors and black victims? Historically, that’s not justified.

My third point is there’s an issue in addition to that of fairness. There’s an issue of justice when considering what we now owe, and to whom, for the involvement in slavery of some of our ancestors. Why do we set at naught the fact that the British, most of them Anglican, repented of slave trading and slavery in the early 1800s, when they were among the first peoples in the history of the world to abolish both? And why set at naught the fact that the British, many of them Anglican, and some of them not wearing white skins, did serious penance for 150 years by spending money and spending lives suppressing slavery from Brazil across Africa, across the Middle East, across India, across Asia to New Zealand? Why do we fail to do their memory justice and proceed as if what they did counts for nothing now?

My fourth point has to do with the question of to what extent we, here in this country, now, benefit from profits made from slave trading and slavery. Early on in Project Spire, unqualified claims were made that Britain’s current prosperity is considerably or largely based on the profits from slavery. Well, anyone who says that without qualification is either ignorant or lying, because the truth is that’s highly contested. It’s not an established fact. So, either you don’t know that, or, you know it and you’re not saying it. Yes, Eric Williams, and other Marxist followers of Eric Williams, will claim the profits, the contribution made by slavery to industrialization, were enormous. On the other hand, David Eltis, who is reckoned to be the leading living historian of transatlantic slavery, when I spoke to him last March, used the word ‘small’ to describe it. And when writing of the contribution of slave trading to the wider economy of Liverpool, which was the major slave trading port in 1750, he uses the word ‘trivial’. And David is a number cruncher. For example, in his latest book he has precisely raised the number of Africans enslaved and traded across the Atlantic from 12.5 million to 12.75 million. And what about last year’s winner of the Nobel Prize for Economics, Joel Mokyr, who reckons that without slavery, Britain’s Industrial Revolution would have proceeded ‘at a marginally slower pace’.

Regarding the Church Commissioners, I notice that whereas, originally, they claimed that the Church’s assets owed a lot to slavery profits, more recently they’ve been talking more weakly about ‘links’. I have no doubt that Anglicans, some Anglicans, had direct links with slavery through investments for example, or through working on plantations, but not most. And as for indirect links, all of us have indirect links with all manner of historical injustice. Almost nothing we have inherited is without the taint of some sin, such is the human condition.

Fifth and finally, do the descendants of slaves in the early 1800s, now living here in Britain or in the Caribbean, suffer intergenerational trauma. Well, I can say that it is evident that not all of them do. If you speak to Trevor Phillips, who is in fact the descendant of African slaves taken to British Guiana, he doesn’t make that fact a central part of his identity. If you speak to Tony Sewell, descendant of slaves taken to Jamaica, he doesn’t make it a central part of his identity. In fact, he campaigns against young black Britons making their status as victims of slavery a major part of their identity. He thinks it’s profoundly unhelpful. So, at least we can say not all descendants of slaves feel that they are traumatized. And secondly, I was talking to someone the other day whose grandparents were in Auschwitz. And he said to me, that was their trauma, it’s not mine.

So, if there is intergenerational trauma, it needs to be demonstrated. In my experience so far, it’s not been. And besides, if it were true that the descendants of slaves all suffered intergenerational racial trauma, they would suffer presumably roughly equally. Yet, people in Barbados, mainly the descendants of slaves, are flourishing compared to slave-descendants in Jamaica and even flourishing compared to Nigerians, some of whom are the descendants of slave-raiders and traders.

To conclude, whether or not you agree with everything I’ve said, or anything I’ve said, I hope you will at least appreciate—and this is my main point—that the issue of our present responsibility for wrongs committed by some ancestors in the very distant past is a complicated one, which needs careful working out. And here is my basic complaint against the Church Commissioners, namely, that before they launched Project Spire, they published no worked out ethical justification for the project. And since then – two-and-a-half years ago - they still haven’t published any carefuly worked ethical justification.

Thank you.