Churches, Blackness, and Contested Multiculturalism

Europe, Africa, and North America

R. Smith, W. Ackah, A. Reddie, R. Smith, W. Ackah, A. Reddie

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137386380
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology of Religion
• Index: Social Sciences

This volume assesses contemporary church responses to multicultural diversity and resisted categories of social difference, with a central focus on whether or how racial, ethnic, religious, sexual, and gender differences are validated by churches (and especially black churches) torn between competing inclusive and exclusive tendencies.

Part I

Foundational Dimensions of Nascent Twentieth-Century Multiculturalisms

1

Anti-Black Problematics in Imperial and Contemporary British Christianity

Anthony G. Reddie

The anti-black problematic of Christianity in Britain,¹ and also across the contours of the African Diaspora, arises from the realization that this phenomenon has had a long and interpenetrating relationship with colonialism and empire. I write this chapter as a child of Caribbean migrants, who themselves were the children of the British Empire, growing up as they did in Jamaica. My assessment vis-à-vis the colonial context in which Christianity in Britain is located can be witnessed, in part, in two dialogically marching responses to this phenomenon. The very fact that I write this chapter as a black, African Caribbean male whose parents come from the Caribbean island of Jamaica, tells you a great deal about the positionality of Britain with a part of the world several thousand miles from these shores. In the words of a poster beloved of the antiracist movements of the 1970s and 1980s, “We Are Here Because You Were There.”² It should be axiomatic, therefore, that one cannot talk about Christianity in Britain without engaging with the broader thematic hinterland that is Empire and Colonialism. The overarching framework that incorporated the bulk of Black Diasporan Christianity has been that of “Imperial Mission Christianity.” In using this term, I am speaking of a historical phenomenon in which there has existed an interpenetrating relationship between European expansionism, notions of white superiority, and the material artifact of the apparatus of empire.

The relationship between empire, colonialism, in many respects remains the unacknowledged “elephant in the room.” Empire and colonialism found much of its intellectual underscoring on the basis of white, Eurocentric supremacy, which marked the clear binary between notions of civilized and acceptable against uncivilized and transgressive. There are no prizes for guessing on which side of the divide black people found themselves relegated?

One cannot talk about an anti-black problematic to Christianity without understanding the corrosive power of the obverse of this, namely that of “Invisible Whiteness.”

Whiteness, Belonging, and English Identity

Paul Gilroy’s seminal text, There Ain’t No Black in The Union Jack³ is predicated on the normative assumptions between belonging, English identity, and notions of whiteness. The plethora of immigration laws that have been enacted over the past 40 or so years in Britain would seem to attest to this relationship. The dialectical struggle between the affirmation of blackness and (white) British Christianity must be placed within the wider context of an imagined notion of “pristine whiteness.” In using this term I am pointing to the ways in which notions of “civilized” and “purity,” have been constructed as synonyms for whiteness, which in turn, becomes a beacon for that which is preferable and acceptable. I would argue that it is not only in the imagined mythologized mind of “Far Right” adherents that there is a symbiotic relationship between whiteness and the nature of belonging in Britain.

The economic construction of post–World War II Britain was very much predicated on the privileges of whiteness when juxtaposed with the seemingly casual dismissal of black and minority ethnic people as “cheap labour,” in the industrial reconstruction of the nation.⁴ Indeed, it should be noted that my own parents were encouraged to leave the Caribbean for Britain to work as cheap labor in the areas of the British economy that it was felt were somewhat beneath the dignity of white people in Britain. The development of black Christianity in Britain is largely (although not exclusively) predicated on the postmigration of black (largely) Caribbean people, such as my parents.

Whiteness as a concept is a complex and contested phenomena. A number of scholars have explored the nature of whiteness and its concomitant relationship to notions of privilege and superiority.⁵ It must be noted that some scholars have argued that the seeming homogeneous construct of whiteness, as being one of privilege and superiority does not take account of the realities of dispossessed and disaffected white working-class and underclass communities on outer-city estates in Britain.⁶ It is argued that the privileges of whiteness, particularly, in terms of the economic advantage of societal acceptance,⁷ do not extend to all white people in Britain.⁸ That is to say, poverty, disadvantage, and marginalization no longer have any color, and white people are caught up in the complexities of postindustrial melancholia as are black and minority ethnic people.⁹

What is often missed by the apologists who want to argue for a more nuanced and complex understanding of whiteness is the symbolic power that it has accrued, which transcends the economic and materialist basis of its hegemony. I do not dispute that poor, working-class and underclass white people also experience marginalization and cultural and emotional deprivation. I hope it is not the case that as a black theologian, I have been guilty of asserting that only black people suffer. I accept the marginalized experience of some white communities in Britain and in other advanced technological, democratic, liberal democracies in the West.

But the transcendent power that lies in whiteness finds its most corrosive power in the nature of its symbolic rendering as a signifier for that which is normative and acceptable. As the black British theologian, David Isiorho has suggested, there has long been a symbiotic relationship, for example, between Englishness and whiteness within the nation state of Great Britain.¹⁰ Two current expressions of right-wing politics in Britain are worth noting here: the British National Party and the English Defence League, both of which style themselves as “Christian” groups whose aim is to safeguard “the Christian heritage of England.” In both cases, the “enemy” is primarily Muslim people in Britain who are “non-Christian” and largely nonwhite. Whiteness, in effect, becomes the synonym for defining what it means to authentically belong within Britain.

So if one considers the aforementioned as providing the overarching macro-theory for notions of “Christian belonging” and acceptability in this country, then is there any wonder that the conspicuous nature of blackness as the obverse of “invisible whiteness” has made many black people internalize a form of anti-blackness in their religio-cultural consciousness?

Black Christianity and Black Theology in Britain

For many black Brits, life is best understood in terms of the mass migration of black people from the Caribbean islands of the British Empire to the United Kingdom of Britain between 1948 and 1965,¹¹ and the continued existence of black communities in the nation since that epoch.

The mass migratory movement of black people from Africa and the Caribbean in the years following the end of World War II has often been termed “Windrush.”¹² The 1945 postwar presence of black people within inner cities in Britain and the churches to be found there is a phenomenon that has been described by a great many sociologists and historians.¹³ This influx is perceived as commencing with the arrival of 492 Caribbean people at Tilbury dock on the ship The SS Empire Windrush, on June 22, 1948. While there has been a black presence in Britain since the times of the Romans, the birth of Britain’s black communities,¹⁴ for the most part, dates from the influx of Caribbean migrants in the post–World War II epoch.

When speaking of “Black Theology in Britain,” I am speaking of the specific self-named enterprise of reinterpreting the meaning of God as revealed in Christ, in light of existential black experiences of marginalization and oppression in Britain. This approach to engaging with the Christian tradition is not unlike Black Theology in differing arenas, like the United States or South Africa, where one’s point of departure is the existential and ontological reality of blackness and the black experience, in dialogue with the Bible.

Black Christianity in Britain provides the overarching phenomenon out of which Black Theology in Britain has emerged. The development of Black Theology in Britain has emerged from black Christians seeking to develop a more politicized and liberative form of faith with which to challenge the incessant racism confronting all black people in the post-Windrush era. Like its counterparts in disparate parts of the world, Black Theology does not exist in a vacuum. As in all such formative movements, the development of radical thinking and (especially) action needs to be anchored within the confines and frameworks of communities of collective solidarity and praxis.

Black Theology in Britain, like all theologies of liberation, is governed by the necessity of ortho-praxis rather than orthodoxy. In using this statement, what I mean to suggest is that one’s starting point in talking about God is governed by the necessity to find a basis for acting in response to the existential struggles and vicissitudes of life, which impinge upon one’s daily operations in the attempt to be a human being. The need to respond to the realities of life as it is in postcolonial Britain is one that has challenged many black British Christians to seek in God a means of making sense of the often-constructed absurdities of postmodern life in this island nation.¹⁵

In seeking to make sense of the black condition in Britain, Black Theology has been inspired by the work of, predominantly, North American scholars, most notably James Cone,¹⁶ Dwight Hopkins,¹⁷ Delores Williams,¹⁸ and Jackie Grant.¹⁹ The frameworks for reimaging Christianity by means of an explorative heuristic of black hermeneutics, drawn from black existential experience, has been most forcibly explored from within the British context by Robert Beckford²⁰ and Anthony Reddie.²¹

In seeking to outline the definitional di...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• Part I   Foundational Dimensions of Nascent Twentieth-Century Multiculturalisms
• Part II   Expanding Contemporary Diversities and Entrenched Majority Cultures
• Part III   Resistant Blackness, Persistent Poverty, and Hesitant Multiculturalisms
• Bibliography
• Contributors
• Index