Having been brought up in a white minority of 2% in Trinidad and Tobago, I never experienced racial hatred, and for that, I want to say thank you to my friends, acquaintances and parishioners. Trinidad is not perfect; nowhere is, but the love, care and respect which I was always shown humbles me. Fast forward many years to the Vaal south of Johannesburg, in Sebokeng and Sharpeville, we were the only white people, loved, cared for, never mistreated, never laughed at or mocked. Yes, I know we were in positions of so-called authority but truly it wasn’t about power.Why is it then that my own ‘white race’ finds it so hard to love ‘the other’, to speak with grace, to care regardless of circumstances? I know the history as well as the next person, and am not racked with liberal pseudo-guilt. It does astonish me that some of ‘my people’ can be so ignorant, so afraid of those who aren’t like them.
I was asked the other day whether I had ever preached against racism, and can truly say that I’ve done that with some frequency over the years. That doesn’t let me off the hook, for it’s easy to say that racism is wrong, evil, pointless and stupid. It’s less easy to let go of my own desire to be right, to be superior, to be in charge, to control and order others, and really hard to stop framing other people in the narrow perspective of my little insight.
So I’m not writing this to assuage some supposed human guilt lurking in the corners of my heart. I just needed to say thank you to all my friends for letting me be me, letting me be different, letting me into your lives even though you were ‘not like me’. In the middle of a coronavirus epidemic, I needed to ask why we are more afraid of dying of that virus than of poisoning each other with the virulence of hatred of the other. I needed also to say, as a Christian, that I really believe that in Christ there is no inferior other, male, female, Jew, Gentile, slave, free, but all are called to be one, in Christ.
