Nearly 90 people gathered at Methodist Central Hall last night for the 'Northern Premiere' of the MJR documentary, 'After the Flood: the church, slavery and reconciliation' (it would have been more but for an unfortunately timed local Covid burst). The film was positively received and the ensuing question and answer session with what was an amazing panel was wide-ranging, honest and challenging: of course, begging the question, what next? One answer on social media was: "Every church in Manchester should facilitate a viewing of this film and the ensuing conversations." How? The lack of local church leaders present was noticeable . We need more church members, as well as senior leaders such as those on the panel to advocate for bringing this issue to the local churches, where the real individual pain of racial injustice is.

Other feedback on social media and directly to MJR so far has included:

• Great event - informative, horrifying, provoking and Robert, typically (and brilliantly) forthright and challenging: ‘Where’s the cheque?!’
• I learnt a lot - many things I didn’t know.
• It was a good event, saddened and surprised at how few church leaders attended.
• Exceptionally good. Powerful, well-crafted, stunning sound track. Heartrending.
• A massive relief to my brain and soul to hear racial justice, reparations and slavery framed in religious and theological language.

The Q&A Panel: Rev Ian Rutherford (also our host), Ven Karen Lund, Beatrice Smith, Rev Mike Royal, Prof Robert Beckford, Rt Rev David Walker, Rev Alton Bell (chair).

Big thanks to the panel, our hosts at Methodist Central Hall and the workers behind the scenes.

Next screening is Birmingham on Friday. For more screenings go here. Like to have this film where you are? Email us.

Following the interview of Harry and Meghan by Oprah Winfrey and the storm of reaction to claims of racism at the highest levels of British society and indeed as a motivator of much press coverage of the couple, particularly Meghan, the chair of MJR, Rev Alton Bell, has issued a statement calling on the Monarchy to take this opportunity to bring about real and lasting racial reconciliation. Read the full statement here.

A Press Release "Has British racism been exposed yet again by the Sussex interview? Alton Bell believes: “This is an opportunity for reconciliation.” has also been issued today.

Statement from the Rt Revd Vivienne Faull, Bishop of Bristol 08/06/2020
The appalling death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police and the subsequent Black Lives Matter protests have brought the issues of racism, oppression, inequality and injustice once again into the spotlight, where they should be. These are issues that the Diocese of Bristol, like many organisations, has been aware of, discussed and attempted to address. However, while we have taken some positive steps, it is clear that we have not done enough.
The protests in Bristol yesterday and the destruction of the statue of Edward Colston mark a moment in the city’s history. As Bishop of Bristol I will now act with a renewed sense of urgency and determination to:

• Acknowledge and repent of the Church’s past involvement in and benefit from the slave trade;
• Challenge and address institutional racism, listening to and learning from the experiences of Black, Asian and minority ethnic people;
• Recruit and support more Black, Asian and minority ethnic clergy, staff and volunteers; 
• Make our churches truly welcoming to everyone, taking responsibility for the need for profound cultural change in our Church. 
• Work with others in the Diocese of Bristol and the Church of England to bring these things about

This work won’t be easy but we must be relentless in our commitment to bringing about change.

Colston was an English merchant, slave trader, and MP who endowed schools, almshouses, hospitals and churches across Bristol, including the cathedral. Read more in this Church Times article.

"COVID-19 has exposed a pre-existing underlying health condition in our society."

In a Press Release today Movement for Justice and Reconciliation has made a call for urgent action from the government on the disproportionate number of BAME people dying from COVID-19. Chair Alton Bell says: "Although underlying health conditions may have contributed to the disproportionate number of deaths, too few people have recognised that social inequality and the legacy of enslavement are also major contributory factors." MJR has produced research that shows the links to enslavement in the descendants and in our modern society. Read the full release here.

Chair of MJR, Rev Alton Bell, has written a response on behalf of the charity to the recent announcement by Cambridge University that it will launch a two-year study to investigate its historical links with colonial slavery and will examine how it might have gained financially from the slave trade. Similar research will also be carried out at Bristol University. 

"As chair of The Movement for Justice and reconciliation I welcome these announcements and MJR will work with these institutions to the extent to which the enslavement of Africans still affects their descendants today."

Rev Bell also comments: "...as the educational institutions, such as Glasgow, Bristol, Oxford and Cambridge Universities seek to find ways to redress the benefit they obtained from the slave trade, the UK and other complicit European countries should also acknowledge their involvement and their benefit and right the wrongs of the past." Read the full article here.

This article by Afua Hirsch appeared in the Guardian as a response to the recent violence in Charlottesville. In it she asks important questions about statues in the UK and who gets remembered from history and why. William Wilberforce is known for his abolition work, (though not the many black activist and writers who also campaigned). However, he was vigorously opposed by Nelson, the naval hero, who used "his position of huge influence to perpetuate the tyranny, serial rape and exploitation organised by West Indian planters, some of whom he counted among his closest friends." Should his statue be next on the list for toppling?

Afua comments: "We have 'moved on' from this era no more than the US has from its slavery and segregationist past. The difference is that America is now in the midst of frenzied debate on what to do about it, whereas Britain – in our inertia, arrogance and intellectual laziness – is not." Read the full article here.

MJR trustee Joe Aldred has written a response to the recent white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, USA. In it he encourages Christians to "not opt only for the easy answers of prayer, protest and denunciation" but to also make a stand for truth. "We can stand against lies which say one race is superior to another. We can condemn the selfish ambition and the fake news we see. But most of all we can preach the truth of the gospel. Once a person has accepted Jesus as their Lord, there will be no room for racism or hatred in their lives." Read the full article here.

​A response to Ijeoma Oluo's article "White People: I Don’t Want You To Understand Me Better, I Want You To Understand Yourselves." by MJR's Nigel Pocock

This article seems to be an appeal to white Americans who have grown up in the southern US states to develop a self-understanding of their ‘interpretational reflexes’ of which they are blissfully unaware. While the author lists the pain which she has suffered as a Black woman writer, and this must, consciously or otherwise, be an attempt to evoke ‘empathy’ (imaginatively living in another’s shoes), it is not what she consciously appeals for. She clearly wants a level playing field, and sees the unconscious dominant white southern ideology as being the problem. She wants white southerners to come out of denial, and to face this ideology of white dominance.

Psychologists like Yale Professor of Psychology Paul Bloom (2016) agree with our author. His argument (not accepted by all) is that empathy is usually directed not towards another ‘out-group’ but towards an in-group or individual with whom we share as much in common as possible. For this reason, empathy can be highly dangerous. It can lead to gross over-reaction over the death of (say) one person, with a completely disproportionate response, even leading to mass killings and violence. Research shows that greater empathy is correlated to greater harshness of punishment towards people seen as threats (this of course cuts both ways, black vs. white, white vs. black, and feeds the process known as ‘co-radicalisation’). The dominant ideology of the plantocratic élite was justified through ‘pluralistic ignorance’, a psychological mechanism where people may have doubts, but dare not share these doubts, lest they undermine the status quo; they therefore reinforce the dominant ideology in language and actions, even while festering doubts may be there. This dominant ideology maintained the flow of capital, expropriation of land, the planting of cotton, and the growth of southern slavery, all in lockstep between the American South and the Liverpool and Lancashire cotton mills, with UK government support (anyone not convinced of this, should read Sven Beckert’s great work, Empire of Cotton: A New History of Global Capitalism, which was recommended by Jim Walvin).

​How can people address the huge suffering that this ‘lockstep’ caused, both to the Southern slaves, and the Lancashire mill workers? Bloom says that no-one can live with empathy, without burnout, even if this empathy is pro-social as regards an out-group. He recommends a rational compassion. Compassion is the projection outwards of loving thoughts (not inwards towards another’s suffering, which is empathy). Research studies shows that compassion leads to greater motivation to help, while empathy brings sadness and pain. Bloom acknowledges that (say) empathy drove and awakened the antislavery campaign, for example the Brooks motif), but that compassion is (psychosocially, for example Thomas Winterbottom’s medical work in Sierra Leone) a better way . . . Would this surprise our author? Probably not, for it seems that this is what she has in view.
 
What is the significance of this, for MJR, if Bloom is right? Films like ‘Twelve Years a Slave’, and the new version of ‘Roots’ might unavoidably focus too much on the violence and therefore the empathy aspect, rather than compassion. This suggests the need for a more subtle approach, rather than hitting people with the most painful images conceivable. How can love, especially agapē love, be encouraged? The New Testament has four words for ‘love’: agapē, eros, storgē, and philein, with the latter two being concerned with the in-group, eros with sexuality, and agapē with obedience to God, not empathy, per se. We are called to love others, even people very different, even enemies, because that was modelled by Jesus, and this is what God wants! ‘Compassion’, in this use, seems to be pretty much synonymous with agapē type love.

(Read Ijeoma Olou's article here.)