IT REALLY did feel like a reckoning with a centuries-long story of racial injustices. In the summer of 2020, after the murder of George Floyd by a police officer, Derek Chauvin, in Minneapolis, protests took place. White clergy were among those at the forefront of marches, waving Black Lives Matter banners (News, 5 June 2020).
Started in 2013 by three black women — Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi — after the acquittal of George Zimmerman over the death of Trayvon Martin, Black Lives Matter became more than the political movement, and transformed into a rallying cry: a shorthand for an insistence on confronting and making amends for the racism of not just the past, but also the present.
This was the summer I wrote my book God Is Not a White Man: And other revelations (Books, 11 June 2021). Research-wise, it had been the best time in decades to have been writing such a book, as it felt as though the Western world was ready to topple the idols of white supremacy.
Over those months, I devoured other theological explorations of racism, such as James Cone’s The Cross and the Lynching Tree, M. Shawn Copeland’s Enfleshing Freedom, and Anthony Reddie’s Is God Colour-Blind? I spoke on panels, wrote articles, and gave keynote talks in front of predominantly white audiences, while the few black people in attendance nodded along as I told the stories of racism and othering, which felt like their stories, too.
It appeared to be a kairos moment of outpouring of personal pains and repentance about what had been. For a period, there seemed to be a significant amount of momentum. Aside from the virtue-signalling statements and “black squares” that companies and organisations posted on social media to signal their commitment to opposing racism, real and tangible steps were being taken. Key appointments of senior black figures across public life signalled real intent towards real and lasting change.
It was in the months following that the Archbishops’ Commission for Racial Justice was formed, aimed at setting out an agenda for change which would understand and address why disparities existed, with the hopes of creating a Church reflecting the diversity of God, in which all people could flourish.
Many of us thought that maybe, just maybe, black lives did matter, after all.
BUT that was then. This is now, and even the most cynical among us could not have predicted how far backwards we have ended up, at least when one observes the tone of public conversations on race, immigration, and diversity.
The thing about racism is that it continues to find new ways to reinvent itself, employing coded language to put forward anti-Black ideas, while attempting to make such racism palatable to contemporary sensibilities. In the United States, variations on the N-word used to be acceptable ways to talk about people of colour, while now they speak of “African Americans”.
A few years ago, I would have proudly called myself “woke” — a term coined in the 1930s and referring to staying alive — awake — to injustice; but the term “woke” is now used so often as a pejorative that it is impossible to use in any meaningful sense. Just 14 per cent of the British say that being “woke” is a good thing, a YouGov poll reports.
Black Lives Matter meant just what it said; but, just four years after the protests that captured the world, “BLM” has become code for a destructive, Marxist movement that right-wing Western governments want to squash: it signals not liberation, but a threat to the status quo, a thorn in the side of the powers that be.
Meanwhile, recent months have seen a backlash against diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), and the Republican party has blamed DEI for all of the ills in the United States, including bringing down planes. (President Trump said that a plane crash in Washington, DC, last month was the fault of air-traffic control and “a big push to put diversity into the Federal Aviation Authority programme”.)
Using the acronyms rather than spelling out the terms BLM or DEI in full makes the ulterior motives and racist undercurrents easier to hide. These terms conjure up similar sentiments to “political correctness gone mad”. Perhaps, for some, the reckoning with racial justice had gone too far, too.
This is a familiar story: incremental steps forward on issues of justice can be met with a more vehement backlash. This is why the first black US President was followed by a man who did not have a good track record on race relations. Barack Obama was followed by Donald Trump, just as Black Lives Matter was followed by Make America Great Again.
WHILE the UK may like to distance itself from our cousins across the Atlantic, there are suggestions that public opinion is closer to President Trump’s thinking than one might have thought. A poll by Opinium last month found that 58 per cent of British voters supported “declaring a national emergency in the Channel and beginning the process of returning thousands and thousands of criminal migrants back to the places they came from”.
Though it might seem like the backlash against anti-racism has accelerated in recent years, one only needs to look at the last government’s report on racial disparities, published less than a year after George Floyd’s murder, to know that there has been a slow and steady change in the public narrative in recent years. The No. 10-commissioned report, chaired by Tony Sewell and released in March 2021, said that the UK was not “deliberately rigged against ethnic minorities”, and that, though disparities did exist, very few of them were “directly to do with racism” (News, 9 April 2021).
For members of the Black community who disagree with this, the coming months will require a regrouping and perhaps restrategising about how to continue on the quest for racial justice in a world that is increasingly hostile to talking about inclusivity. Perhaps it will see racial-justice activists keeping a lower profile than we saw in 2020. This month is Black History Month in the US, and it feels much more muted than it has over the past few years. Closer to home, I heard hardly anything about Racial Justice Sunday last weekend, despite churches’ having seen it as a priority in the months after George Floyd’s murder.
Issues of justice remain as urgent as ever. But, as many have learned, maybe it’s all in the timing. As the quotation most famously attributed to Martin Luther King, Jr, reminds us: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” This is not an excuse for passivity or acceptance of rhetoric that wishes to take us backwards rather than forwards: instead, it is a motivating vision that should keep people working tirelessly for justice, despite opposition.
Chine McDonald is the director of Theos.
