Abstract on Prejudice

Racism is hardly a gentlemanly prejudice. Though this symposium has been assembled ostensibly to allow a variety of informed and intelligent statements about race as such, it is highly unlikely that anyone would have thought the job worth doing if racism did not exist in the world. My one complaint about an otherwise impeccable work is that the tone is so consistently gentlemanly, civilised and unaggressive. The contributors might have been discussing dietary problems or the function of modern mass media. Perhaps the tone was deliberate. The editors may have felt that race and racism is such an explosive issue that it had to be handled with the delicacy necessary among members of a Bomb Demolition Squad. But out of eleven chapters there is only one in which some of those who are on the receiving end of racist prejudice – an Indian immigrant, a West African social worker and an page 27 African student – have been free to comment on their experience. And their comments arein turn almost unbelievably unemotional, considered, civilised and abstract. Here, for example, is part of the short statement of an African student studying in Britain . . .

There are many . . . ways in which Britons show their colour consciousness. We have noticed it in restaurants, dance-halls, trains, even, incredibly, in churches. Although perhaps slight, these displays of prejudice are deeply offensive to Africans who have at least their share of national and racial pride. Worse, they make us forget the many acts of kindness we experience from our British hosts.

Naturally some Africans tolerate racial discrimination and prejudice better than others. Some react violently and carry back to their own countries bitter memories of their treatment in Britain. Many students go back to positions of power and responsibility and they may be tempted to ‘get their own back’ on their white minorities . . .

Reading this, I remember the brilliant, athletic and intensely handsome young African educator whom I sat alongside at a conference in Tokyo. He had been a student in England. His whole personality was rigid with wary, outraged aggression. Perhaps he would go back to Africa and gladly welcome a supply of Chinese arms. I could not blame him. It was evident that at some stage in his life he had been so deeply and consistently humiliated that only the extreme alternatives of paranoia or all-forgiving sanctity remained for him; and if he had chosen the first and not the second, it did not mean he was a worse man than you or I.

The limitation of this book is, therefore, that it tends to skate abstractly over the tragic and terrible inanities of racism. Nevertheless many of the contributors provide guidelines for Christian thought and action. I recommend in particular a chapter entitled ‘The Christian View of Intermarriage’, contributed by Roy S. Lee, a Church of England clergyman. Mr Lee’s comments may seem to exaggerate the difficulties of racial intermarriage, yet they are worth considering closely, since such marriages are probably the only final key to the problem of racism itself. One’s spouse’s problems through marriage become one’s own problems. Though legal equality and social respect are undeniably essential as an objective ground-work, subjective identification is also necessary. This is true of other problems as well as those provided by race and racism.

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