Following up our recent post on the Church of England's new fund to address the legacy of slavery, Bishop Mike Royal, General Secretary, Churches Together in England, and MJR advisor has written this article for Premier Christianity magazine. His verdict is that "£100m is a drop in the ocean in terms of righting the wrongs of the slave trade", but "it does attempt to direct compensation in the right direction".

Mike also refers to contributions about the slave trade by historian David Olusoga, journalist Afua Hirsch and academic Prof Kehinde Andrews in the recent Harry and Meghan Netflix documentary. This important content has been lost in the subsequent media attention on other issues. Hirsch tells viewers that: “the first ever commercial slave voyage conducted by Britain was personally financed by Queen Elizabeth I. It continued to be financed by kings and queens right up until its abolition”. Olusoga reflects on what he was taught about the slave trade at school, “the only aspect…that was ever talked about was the abolition of slavery.” This is a “very selective slice of the history”, he says, and misses out “a critical aspect.” Slavery wasn’t just abolished, the slave owners “were compensated enormously. £20 million for their human property!”.

Read the full article here.

Nadine White, Race Correspondent for The Independent has written this reflection on another Black History Month and concluded: "​Racial equality in Britain is as distant a dream as ever".

Despite the high profile political appointments of people of colour, the heightened awareness of racial injustice since the murder of George Floyd in 2020 has not been harnessed. Instead "​From the widening ethnicity pay gap between Black and white workers to the “violent” deaths of Black people in prisons, the struggle is real. From the absence of Black history on school curriculums to the majority of Black Britons reporting experiences of racial discrimination by doctors and nurses, there’s yet more work to be done."

She quotes just released statistics that reveal that Black British people are still disproportionately affected in terms of detention and treatment compared to white people. The optimism of 2020 has largely gone as the government presses ahead with plans "to send thousands of Black, Asian and Middle Eastern refugees to Rwanda, describing them as 'illegal' migrants because they arrive by boat. Meanwhile, ministers have rightly opened our doors to tens of thousands of mostly white Ukrainians fleeing Russia’s bloody war."

The government’s Hate Crime Action Plan launched in 2016 appears to have ground to a halt and there hasn’t been a word from ministers about the worrying surge in these incidents in the last year.

​Read the full article here.

After this year's Black History Month the Guardian asked prominent Black British figures to assess where the UK stands in terms of equality and cohesion. Actor David Harewood says: 'There are voices on the right that are aggressively seeking to stamp out any discussion of white complicity in the disadvantage of black people. ... But that’s because they don’t understand that slavery and colonialism are the roots of what we go through today. The legacy of slavery is racism.'

Other voices include MPs, academics, writers and designers. Lester Holloway, editor of the Voice comments: 'a narrative of “common cause” is emerging between all oppressed communities'. (This is exactly the dynamic MJR has been seeking to draw attention to!). Read the full article here.

Founding trustee of MJR Clifford Hill has written an article for Black History Month in Prophecy Today on his early ministry in London amongst the original Windrush generation, going back to 1952, just 4 years after the ship arrived.  Unlike many British churches, Clifford and Monica offered a welcome and support, so much so that "my church house became known locally as the ‘Jamaican Labour Exchange’ as so many came for help and friendly advice." This was a "massive indictment of British churches that were unable, or unwilling, to offer simple love and hospitality to the newcomers who all came from Christian backgrounds and were desperately in need of friendship and help." In a fascinating insight into the early years in the UK of these migrants, Clifford writes about his experiences and the growth of the all-black churches, showing that they did not lose their Christian faith. Download and read the full article here (with kind permission of Prophecy Today.)

On the 30th June 2021 the Christian community lost one of its great leaders when Revd Dr Joel Edwards went home to be with the Lord Jesus whom he had served faithfully in the public square. MJR Chair Rev Alton Bell has written this tribute to a long-time friend and stalwart of the faith.

"Joel’s final words reflected the man who he was: A friend, brother, mentor."
Read Alton's tribute here.

This article by Phillip Roscoe asserts that the transatlantic slave trade "pioneered a new kind of finance, secured on the bodies of the powerless. Today, the arcane products of high finance, targeting the poor and troubled as profit opportunities for the already-rich, still bear that deep unfairness." The slaver's banking system was based on the system of financialisation developed by Florentine banking dynasties of the 15th century which gave rise to money as we know it now. The "obscene novelty" of the slavers’ innovation was that this financial value was secured on human bodies.

​Slave traders also pioneered the use of insurance as a means of guaranteeing the financial value of the their commodities.  It was the infamous Zong Trial of 1783, when slavers tried to claim insurance on lost cargo of humans, which exposed the toxic relationship between finance and slavery. Contemporary finance is "still riddled with regimes of dominance and exploitation at work". Read the full article here.

Six weeks on from the widespread public outrage at the murder of George Floyd and the upsurge in support for #BlackLivesMatter, a crisis point has been reached. Will the tipping point leading to real and actual change be reached, or, as so many times in the past, will support ebb away as the news-cycle and headlines move on, and with them, the short-attention span of the public and politicians?

This article by Nesrine Malik, titled "It seems black lives don't matter quite so much, now that we've got to the hard bit" takes a pessimistic view, listing recent actions such as the BBC banning its hosts and presenters from "wearing Black Lives Matter badges because it is seen as an expression of some sort of 'political' opinion" as evidence of a reversion back to as we were. Malik states that protest is easy – the hard part is sustaining the movement after that first adrenalin rush to the point of first realising what real change will cost, systemically and for individuals, and then actually making it happen.  Getting past that first hurdle may prove too difficult: "Everyone applauds a movement for social justice until it 'goes too far; – when it starts making 'unreasonable demands' in the service of its 'political agenda'"

"We have a great knack for supporting victims once the injustices are out in the open – when David and Goliath have been clearly identified, and a particularly British sensibility of fair play has been assailed." But... when it comes to the "underlying injustice – to making the links between the deportation and death of a Windrush citizen, the NHS worker impoverished by Home Office fees and unsettled by cruel hostile environment policies, the unelected special adviser breaking lockdown rules, and the political party we keep voting in – we’re not so good."

"The same is now happening with the Black Lives Matter movement. Everyone is on board with the principle, but when it comes to the change that is required, the idealistic passengers the movement picked up along the way suddenly come down with a case of extreme pragmatism. Part of the reason for their belated reluctance is that the course of actual change is unflashy. After the first moment passes, the supportive ally has nothing to show for their continued backing for the cause: there are no public high-fives for your continuing solidarity. You can’t post it, you can’t hashtag it; most of the time you can’t even do it without jeopardising something, whether that’s your income, status, job prospects or even friendships. But the main reason for the ebbing support is that change is just hard."

Read the full article here. And ask: Is this fading away inevitable? How do we keep the momentum going?

Historian David Olosuga in this Guardian article states: "For people who don’t know Bristol, the real shock when they heard that the statue of a 17th-century slave trader had been torn from its plinth and thrown into the harbour was that 21st-century Bristol still had a statue of a slave trader on public display".

Edward Colston helped to oversee the transportation into slavery of an estimated 84,000 Africans, of whom, it is believed, around 19,000 died on the voyage. Their bodies were thrown into the sea. Olosuga comments: "The historical symmetry of this moment is poetic. A bronze effigy of an infamous and prolific slave trader dragged through the streets of a city built on the wealth of that trade, and then dumped, like the victims of the Middle Passage, into the water. Colston lies at the bottom of a harbour in which the ships of the triangular slave trade once moored, by the dockside on to which their cargoes were unloaded. The crowd who saw to it that Colston fell were of all races, but some were the descendants of the enslaved black and brown Bristolians whose ancestors were chained to the decks of Colston’s ships."

Olosuga goes on to condemn the "overt and shameless, but not unique" long defence of Colston's reputation which frustrated a number of campaigns to have the statue peacefully removed, or at least to have a plaque on it which told his whole story. "Today is the first full day since 1895 on which the effigy of a mass murderer does not cast its shadow over Bristol’s city centre. Those who lament the dawning of this day, and who are appalled by what happened on Sunday, need to ask themselves some difficult questions. Do they honestly believe that Bristol was a better place yesterday because the figure of a slave trader stood at its centre? Are they genuinely unable – even now – to understand why those descended from Colston’s victims have always regarded his statue as an outrage and for decades pleaded for its removal?

​Read the full article here.

This article, by Siana Bangura in today's Independent, urges white people to play their part in ending racism.

"Racism is a familiar blade, and for those of us at its sharp end, the killing of George Floyd in Minnesota has not surprised us. However, compounded by the injustice of a Covid-19 landscape in which black people have been, once again, hit the hardest according to data from the Office for National Statistics, this instance of brutality feels like the last straw. Black women in the UK are 4.3 times more likely to die from Covid-19 than white women, while black men were 4.2 times more likely to die. The report went on to say that these alarming disparities seem to be 'partly a result of socio-economic disadvantage and other circumstances, but a remaining part of the difference has not yet been explained'. Spoiler alert: it’s no mystery – structural inequality kills."

Siana notes that once again with the protests in the USA "the onus has been put on black people to dismantle their subjugation themselves and to remain calm while doing so." She then quotes a viral tweet which sums up the dichotomy: 
“My main issue with racism is that it’s a white problem but black people are the experts” and goes on to appeal to white people to get active and get vocal. "Silence is betrayal at best, and at its very worst, it is the foundation of all covert expressions of white supremacy... You may not have directly inflicted physical pain on black people in your lifetime, but figuratively – in many cases, of course, literally – your knees have been pressed on our necks for centuries." To those who say they are afraid of saying or doing the wrong thing she replies: "to create change, you must be humble enough to make mistakes, apologise with your whole heart, and be ready to keep trying. That is truly what is needed now."

Read the full article.

(MJR Trustee Paul Keeble writes)

This opinion piece in the Irish Times gives a perspective on the recent history of Britain (and the USA) is notable because of its viewpoint. Titled "We need to pay very close attention to what is happening in Britain now", writer Una Mulally is writing from an Irish context as a near-neighbour that has enjoyed (or endured?) a long relationship with Britain which gives a unique position from which to observe and comment. It's not a positive picture.

Very critical of the current political regimes in both Britain and the US and the process that has led to the ascent of Boris Johnson and Donald Trump, as both countries "fall apart", a question is asked for others watching on: "we must interrogate how we can prevent falling as far as these two nations. How do we hold on to civility and decency, when it has evaporated elsewhere? What kind of environment gave rise to such toxicity?"

She continues: "The more we know ourselves, the less likely we are to betray ourselves, and each other. A lot of this is about empathy, but it is also about self-knowledge." For both Britain and the US a lack of self-knowledge is a barrier to progress. "If one does not confront the basic truths of one’s national identity, one will not be able to trace a path forward. Everything becomes a fiction, a narrative designed to block any kind of self-examination." For both nations a major basic truth is the "central malady" of racism.

"The toxicity at the heart of America is racism. It’s a country full of white people who have never confronted the fact that their so-called 'freedoms'. and their country’s economic power, were built on slavery. ... Similarly, Britain has never meaningfully confronted its racism, which is colonialism, building an 'empire' on the back of invading and pillaging and inflicting misery on whatever shores its brutal mercenaries... landed on." Including of course, Ireland.

Here I need to declare an interest. I grew up in Protestant Northern Ireland and was taught in school a selective history of the island. It was only in later life that I learned of the centuries of exploitation by the British and found out about Drogheda, The Famine, the Easter Rising and much more, arguably continuing to the present day in the dismissive attitude behind the "Irish Backstop" fiasco. I have lived in England for many years and continue to note the level of ignorance (which to an extent I used to share) about the island to the west... and how often Northern Ireland, a part of the UK, is casually referred to as "Ireland". A small symptom of a bigger problem?

It should give pause for thought that this observation made by a close neighbour is that our main root-problem is self-deception about our racism, an ongoing legacy of a history of colonialism, marked by exploitation and oppression. "The violence of British colonialism is embedded in the fabric of the world, in the horrors of illegal wars, in the consequences of bleeding nations of their resources, in the couldn’t-give-a-toss attitude towards Ireland."

​Read the full article here.