Woman, great is your faith
In September’s editorial, Dinah referred to the story about Jesus and the Canaanite woman, asking if this shows that Jesus was being racist. The story, Mark 7.24, has Jesus wanting rest, but he could not escape notice. A Gentile woman came to Jesus, asking for her daughter to be healed. He said to her, ‘Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.’ She answered, ‘Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.’ He said, ‘For saying that you may go – the demon has left your daughter.’
I imagine Matthew pondering the story and adding a few details (Matthew 15: 21). He has the woman addressing Jesus as ‘Lord, Son of David’. He has the woman annoyingly shouting. And Jesus answers, ‘I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel’. Jesus’s final answer, ‘Woman, great is your faith’ seems warmer than in Mark. These few details give the story more depth in both emphasising Jesus’s mission to the Jews, and acknowledging his compassion for the Gentile woman. I also imagine Luke pondering the story and deciding to leave it out.
Is it just how people are?
The question ‘Is Jesus being racist?’ is more about what racism is than about Jesus’s words and actions here. Since the pseudo-scientific notion of ‘race’ did not exist in the ancient world, then racism is not an appropriate description of what’s going on here. You could dismiss that as a trivial point, as just semantics. But it’s not trivial; I hope I don’t have to convince Sofia readers that racism is a far from trivial issue – one that is literally a life and death matter to many in the world and one which (especially with the Black Lives Matter movement) confronts us, as mainly white SOF members.
One white supremacist response to the challenge of racism is to trivialise it by discounting the historical circumstances of racism. This is the ‘people have always been racist’ approach: people have always preferred people like them, have been rude and unkind to other groups. So, the reasoning goes on, that’s the same as racism today, it’s just how people are, and those on the receiving end should get over it.
But racism isn’t just how people are. It has specific roots in specific social conditions of oppression. Racism is about power. The concept of race is a direct product of colonialism, empire and slavery. The non-scientific idea of race arose quite specifically as a justification for slavery; race is not just a question of people having some different physical characteristics (skin colour especially) – it is about superiority of one ‘race’ over others. It’s the colonial story and it justified slavery.
The concept of ‘race’
The concept of ‘race’, as we know it, arose in the seventeenth century, was reinforced by Enlightenment ideas and the collusion of the churches in the eighteenth century, and was used overtly in the colonial expansion of the nineteenth century. Before then, the word referred to a community or kinship group with common ancestry, but with no implication of superiority.
The first significant numbers of African people were brought to the Americas in the early 1600s, working alongside European indentured servants and enslaved Indigenous people. As the Indigenous people escaped or died of disease, and as the indentured system became economically unviable, enslaved Africans became the main workforce, especially in plantations. From the 1660s slavery became hereditary and slaves were formally the property of their owners. The massive rise of capitalism and its wealth was fuelled by the slave economy of the colonies, and, as ever, the dominant social system required its justifying set of ideologies.
Slavery did not happen because of racism – plantation owners and capitalists don’t care what colour the skins of their sources of profit are. Racism grew as a justification for slavery. And racism requires the concept of race. As US author Ta-Nehisi Coates says: ‘Race is the child of racism, not the father’.
‘Scientific Racism’
Eighteenth century ‘scientific’ and ‘biological’ explanations of apparent differences consolidated the concept of ‘race’. Influential writers argued in favour of polygenism – the theory that different types of humans were created separately, with black people as a different species. Voltaire, comparing Caucasians to those with dark skin, claimed they were different species: ‘The negro race is a species of men different from ours as the breed of spaniels is from that of greyhounds. The mucous membrane, or network, which nature has spread between the muscles and the skin, is white in us and black or copper-coloured in them.’
Historians have suggested that Voltaire’s support for polygenism was shaped by his financial investments in French colonial companies.
Thomas Jefferson, the American politician, scientist and slave owner, is credited with significant contributions to scientific racism. According to an article published in the McGill Journal of Medicine: ‘One of the most influential pre-Darwinian racial theorists, Jefferson’s call for science to determine the obvious “inferiority” of African Americans is an extremely important stage in the evolution of scientific racism.’
The Enlightenment passion for sorting and categorisation reaches its summit in the work of Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778), the Swedish physician, botanist, and zoologist. This is from the Linnean Society: ‘One of the origins of scientific racism can be traced to Linnaeus’ work on the classification of man, which had devastating and far-reaching consequences for humanity. His work on man forms one of the 18th-century roots of modern scientific racism.’ For Linnaeus, there were four separate ‘varieties’ of humans with separate characteristics: European white; American reddish; Asian tawny; African black. There is no scientific basis for ‘race’ – it is entirely a social construct.
Some ‘did you knows’
The legacy of slavery and colonialism in the form of racism is uncomfortable to lots of white people, as I am aware from many conversations. Here are some typical reactions:
- ‘Did you know that slavery has always existed – it wasn’t just us?’
- ‘Did you know that Black people were involved in the slave trade?’
- ‘History is history – why don’t we just forget and move on’
Points 1 and 2 are of course true, but completely miss the point.
‘Slavery has always existed’
Slavery takes many forms and has indeed existed since Neolithic times, since the advent of class societies. Moses sanctions the acquisition of slaves from neighbouring nations (Leviticus 25.46). Ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome were built and sustained by slaves. But there was no attempt to justify slavery in terms of ‘race’. People became slaves mostly through destitution or capture in war. And our argument is not that the Atlantic slave trade was uniquely ‘bad’ – but that racism developed as a justification for the slave trade. Having said that, the mass enforced transportation and enslavement of Africans, and the specifics of chattel slavery, was a unique crime. According to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, 12.5 million Africans were shipped to the New World.
‘Black people were involved’
And those who point to the involvement of Africans in slavery miss the point. It’s often used in the sense of ‘well lots of blacks were involved so why blame white people?’ The slave economy is not about ‘race’, it’s about class. It is one class using the enforced labour of another for production of profit. To repeat, European capitalists don’t care whether the labour is black or white. But in the case of the transatlantic slave trade, racism was used as a moral justification for the atrocities.
African states were class societies whose elites benefited from slavery. The slave trade was, as we all know, a triangular trade involving Europe, Africa and the Americas. For most people, knowledge is depressingly low – and for the one point in the triangle – Africa – it is practically zero.
In St Peter’s church, Dorchester, there’s a big plaque commemorating the brutal suppression of a revolt by enslaved people in Jamaica in 1760, known as Tacky’s revolt – Tacky was the most prominent of the leaders killed in the suppression. The plaque is covered up now, pending its removal to the Dorset Museum next door. The process leading to its removal attracted some publicity locally and the Daily Mail tried to do its woke culture war thing. It led to a Church of England Consistory Court judgement (church bureaucracy is arcane, but it gets there) and contributed to the commendable C of E report and guidelines on ‘contested heritage’.
All this prompted a close look at the history of Tacky’s revolt, and by chance an excellent book on the revolt had just been published by Vincent Brown, Professor of African and African American studies at Harvard University. Vincent Brown kindly helped in the discussion with the C of E hierarchy. A major point of the book is that the events in Jamaica cannot be understood without looking at the history of Africa – in this case the ‘Gold Coast’ and ‘Slave Coast’ (Ivory Coast, Ghana, to Nigeria) – the second point in the triangle. There were several states in competition for wealth and resources, with the Asante becoming a regional superpower in the late seventeenth century. The states were class societies, with a bottom class of unfree people with certain traditional rights. The demand for chattel slaves for transportation was disruptive, with wars increasingly being fought to obtain slaves (rather than slaves from defeated nations being a sort of by-product of war). Tacky, the leader of the 1760 revolt in Jamaica was part of the elite, and traded slaves with the British before himself being defeated, captured and enslaved.
My point in briefly mentioning the situation in Africa is twofold. First, to emphasise that slavery is a class-based institution, not inherently to do with ‘race’. Slavery does not come from racism – racism arose from slavery. Second, it’s not a case of admitting that ‘Black people were involved too, you know’; on the contrary it is important to understand the history of African societies in the slave trade – avoiding that is colonialist history – blindness in portraying Black people just as helpless victims.
‘It’s History now’
My third example of white reaction is the ‘it’s history now, let’s move on’ approach. What a snake-pit that is; there’s so much buried in that reaction! In 2020 the National Trust issued a report looking at the way its properties were linked with colonialism and slavery, which would seem a perfectly reasonable question for an organisation involved with heritage and history. A proposal was floated to put a notice (3ft by 2ft maybe) in its properties (some of which are massive) asking, and answering, the simple question: ‘where did the wealth to build and maintain this property come from?’ Sounds reasonable.
The reaction from the right-wing press and the right-wing commentators was one of fury – ‘self-hatred’, ‘ruining our heritage’, calls for boycotts and court action, and so on. These people understand perfectly well how colonialism and racism are linked to their privilege and power – they don’t need a lesson in that, they want to suppress the debate.
The history of racism matters because it’s still with us – it matters today. To understand the source of racism is the start of combatting racism. Whenever a Black person is subject to racism (slights, jokes, educational disadvantage, police violence) that person is suffering not just a personal insult but is part of historical injustice. Racial injustice, or institutional racism, is not ‘history’.
Vast inequalities of wealth and power, both domestically and internationally, cannot simply be explained by slavery; but it is certainly an important factor. And given the link between slavery and racism, that imbalance of wealth and power reinforces racial injustice.
If you come down to Dorset, you might drive along the A31 between Wimborne and Bere Regis. You will drive next to a wall that seems to go on for ever, punctuated by some fine gates with statues of stags. I think of the wall as stuck together not by cement but by African blood. It hides the 700 acre garden and deer park of probably the wealthiest landowner in the Commons and the largest individual landowner in the county – Richard Drax, MP for South Dorset. The enormous family wealth comes from slave-based sugar plantations in Barbados and Jamaica, and Drax still owns Drax Hall, a 250-hectare plantation in Barbados. The comparison between Drax’s wealth and the life of most Barbadian people is not ‘history’, and that is what is motivating the demands from the Barbados government for reparations, starting by handing over Drax Hall to the people of Barbados.
The issue of reparations is both simple and complex. It’s simple because there is a straightforward moral imperative. If you have done somebody wrong, the right thing to do is to acknowledge the wrong, to apologise, and (critically) to do something about putting it right. And since we (relatively well-off British people) have benefited from the wrong, we share responsibility. But, certainly, the form that reparations should take is far from straightforward, as the recent report by the Church of England (10 Jan 2023) acknowledges.
Other types of racism
In this article I have concentrated on racism as it manifests itself towards those of Black African heritage, and its links to transatlantic slavery. Of course there are different types of racism, and I am absolutely not arguing that any one type of racism is worse than any other. Hatred directed at South Asians, Irish, Chinese – all have different historical specifics. But they all share the legacy of colonialism and empire. Anti-Semitism and prejudice against Gypsy, Roma and Travellers are different types of racism again relating to power and oppression. They all have specific histories. Their roots are in colonialism – personal attitudes are but a manifestation of these roots.
David Rhodes is a retired software consultant living in Dorchester – a wavering Christian, and quiet SOF member for thirty years. David is a member of Stand Up to Racism Dorset.