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Politics
Race
4 min read

Claims of institutional racism let politicians off the hook

They need to be mindful of something else baked into our institutions.

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

A TV roundtable discussion with five people against a backdrop of Parliament.
Politicians and pundits discuss the Lee Anderson issue.

Racism charges have recently divided very neatly along political lines. Tearing chunks out of each other at the Despatch Box, prime minister Rishi Sunak and Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer have both bet their houses by playing the race card on each other. 

Starmer claims the Conservative Party wallows in Islamophobia, having withdrawn the whip from its former deputy chairman for stating publicly that Islamist extremists control the Mayor of London. For his part, Sunak, yah-boos back that Labour didn’t have a runner in the Rochdale by-election, after suspending its candidate for peddling an anti-Israel conspiracy theory.  

Rochdale was duly won by the famously pro-Arab former Labour MP George Galloway. Sunak wants us to hold that Labour is as antisemitic as it was under Jeremy Corbyn.   

So there we have it. Labour is antisemitic and the Tories are Islamophobic (not a good word, but the currency of the moment). Pick your prejudice and vote accordingly at the general election. 

Whatever the validity or otherwise of these claims, it’s in the interest of both parties to accuse their opponents of being rotten to the core with these attitudes. It doesn’t really work for them to claim that Sunak personally is an Islamophobe or Starmer an antisemite.  

This has to be about the whole political parties over which they preside. It’s really about institutional racism. So when a Conservative MP, Paul Scully, has to apologise for calling some parts of Birmingham and London “no-go areas” for non-Muslims, it’s taken as a reflection on Conservatives as a whole.  

Similarly, it’s an insufficiency to criticise particular journalists for their reporting bias; a former BBC director-general has to call the entire corporation “institutionally antisemitic.”  

The apartheid governments of South Africa were systemically racist, the Conservative and Labour parties – and the BBC which reports on them – are not. 

I have a big problem with these generalisations. The political parties contain racists of both kinds, antisemitic and Islamophobic, as well as very many members of no racism at all (thankfully). And I happen to know from personal experience that the BBC operates an informal policy of equal-opportunities bigotry – there are as many Islamophobes as there are antisemites in the organisation, though together they amount to a small minority (again thankfully). 

There is, consequently, no institutional racism in these places of work, though they are all rich in the employment of racist individuals because, alas, so is the world. 

Institutional racism was a term coined in the Sixties, but it really only gained traction as an indictment of the Metropolitan Police in 1999’s Macpherson Report into the racist murder of teenager Stephen Lawrence. 

I was uneasy with that terminology then and remain so now. Police officers are (or can be) racist; the constabularies for which they work are not. If they were so, they would train their officers to be racists – and they didn’t and do not.  

Their training may have been rubbish in all sorts of ways, but there is a world of difference between omission and commission. The apartheid governments of South Africa were systemically racist, the Conservative and Labour parties – and the BBC which reports on them – are not. 

Our politicians might be mindful of that, whatever their faith or none. And they might like to note some of the imperatives of its teaching 

Two matters stem from this. The first is simply that individuals are responsible for racist attitudes, not the organisation for which they work, although those organisations have a duty to call out racists in their midst. 

The other is to recognise what we are, institutionally and systemically. The UK’s uncodified constitution has two Churches established in law, the Church of England and the Presbyterian Church of Scotland. The monarch is the supreme governor of the former, as well as head of state. 

That is simply the way it is and, this side of disestablishment of the Church, it follows that (in England and Scotland at least) we live in a Christian country, however few of its inhabitants now attend its churches. In short, Christianity is baked into our systems and institutions. 

Our politicians might be mindful of that, whatever their faith or none. And they might like to note some of the imperatives of its teaching: care for the afflicted in the story of the Good Samaritan; the welcome of strangers in the report of the Syrophoenician woman who seeks crumbs from the table; the love of neighbour; Paul’s universalism. 

This (and much else besides) is meant, in law, to define who we are. We might expect an elected servant of the state such as Lee Anderson, the Tory suspended from his party for claiming a Muslim power grab of London, or Azhar Ali, the Labour candidate similarly booted out for claiming that Israel conspires to murder its own citizens, to know something of the national creed that defines our parliamentary democracy. 

That parliament doesn’t contain institutionally racist parties, any more than the BBC or our police forces are systemically racist. Rather, we should hold individuals to account, whoever they are. Because, ultimately, claims of institutional racism let individuals off the hook. Institutional Christianity does not.   

Review
Culture
Grace
Music
Race
5 min read

Revisiting Amazing Grace inspires new songs

Today’s musicians capture both the barbaric and the beautiful.

Jonathan is Team Rector for Wickford and Runwell. He is co-author of The Secret Chord, and writes on the arts.

three folk musicians face the camera across a meadow
Angeline, Cohen & Jon.

John Newton’s Amazing Grace was originally written to accompany his sermon for New Year’s Day 1773 and has become the most recorded and most sung hymn in the world. Last year was the 250th anniversary of the hymn’s creation while next year is the 300th anniversary of Newton’s birth. 

The former slave trader who became a Church of England minister and abolitionist, preached his sermon on the theme of God’s mercy as outlined in a biblical passage from the first book of Chronicles. There, King David prays ‘Who am I Lord and what is my family that you have brought me thus far?’ Newton found parallels with his own life, having been saved from sinfulness and a storm at sea. 

Among the many events and projects marking the two anniversaries, a folk album entitled Grace Will Lead Me Home may well be one of the most interesting. That is because, while it celebrates the hymn and its legacy, this album also explores “the distance between the world’s most beloved hymn and a most vile and shameful period in history, the trans-Atlantic slave trade”. 

As captain of a slave ship when he became a Christian, Newton continued shipping Africans across the Atlantic. Later, he became Curate in Charge at St Peter and St Paul’s Church in Olney, where he befriended William Cowper and wrote the words to many hymns, including ‘Amazing Grace’. Later still, he lent his voice to the abolitionist cause. Despite these tensions in Newton’s life-story, the love that people have for ‘Amazing Grace’, including those who are descended from the slaves that Newton shipped across the Atlantic, became very apparent in a series of interviews conducted as part of the project before the songs forming the album were written and selected. 

‘I’m going to hear John Newton preach’ is a key track on the album in which Jon Bickley describes Newton’s transformation from “foul-mouthed drunken sailor” to the captain able to “talk about how Grace can set you free”. In between, however, Bickley notes that the slaves disembark “leaving a trail of blood across the quay” while “the Captain’s in his cabin” writing about grace. Bickley’s songs on the album culminate in a powerful plea for reparations for slavery entitled ‘Sorry’. He writes:  

“300 years after the birth of John Newton the road to redemption for those nations who profited from the slave trade looks long and difficult but surely it starts by saying Sorry.” 

Bickley collaborated on the album with two musicians who have also played on other recent folk albums exploring the transatlantic slave trade and its legacy. Both Angeline Morrison and Cohen Braithwaite-Kilcoyne played on a project by Reg Meuross entitled Stolen From God, while Morrison had also released The Sorrow Songs, which featured Braithwaite-Kilcoyne, to considerable acclaim. Both artists brought the weight of their study as well as their considerable artistic talents to the Grace Will Lead Me Home project. 

Braithwaite-Kilcoyne brought the profound and arresting ‘Press Gang Song’ to the album. This is a resume of what it takes to become a slave trader from a readiness to “sail the fierce sea” to the willingness to “abuse your fellow man lead him shackled in chains”, “brutalise and violate, disregard their cries of pain”, “cast them overboard to a watery grace”, “for when that you do you shall master your trade”. This was the journey taken by Newton in becoming a slave trader.  

Morrison, whose ‘Grace will lead me home’ is based on the Christian hope of resurrection, also writes from that perspective in ‘The Hand of Fanny Johnson’ from The Sorrow Songs. There, having noted the universality of death which “comes for the rich and the lowly”, she sings: 

“My dear mother said that a funeral is holy, 
The sanctified earth receiving the body, 
And in the hereafter that’s when we will all be 
Remade, entire and whole.”  

Stolen from God, while clearly noting and condemning the way in which European Christians viewed the degradation inflicted on others as their God-given route to wealth, also makes some words of Frederick Douglass, a former slave turned abolitionist, writer and orator, central to the song cycle: 

“Between the Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference… so wide that to receive the one as good, pure and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked… I love the pure, peaceable and impartial Christianity of Christ; I therefore hate the corrupt, slave-holding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land.” 

The song ‘Stolen from God’ makes this contrast its central theme: 

“God made these hands to hold and caress 
He made these hands to worship and bless 
He made these hands to hold my own child 
God made these hands to be mild” 

Yet, those involved in the slave trade: 

“You made these hands to blister and bleed 
To slave for the white man and bend to his greed 
To cut coffee for gentlemen cane for their wives 
At the cost of my family’s lives” 

As a result, your legacy is “written in blood, everything stolen from God”. 

This contradiction in the Christianity that underpinned the transatlantic slave trade is central to the story of Amazing Grace and its legacy (see Bickley’s ‘The choir still sings Amazing Grace’). Newton did come to see the error of his ways and lend his voice to the abolitionist cause in support of those like William Wilberforce, Thomas Clarkson and Olaudah Equiano. Meuross effectively captures the beginning of this change in a song called ‘Bridgewater’ about an early petition against slavery: 

“Reverend Chubb Mr Tucket Mr White 
Call on every Christian soul to join the fight 
To stand up as a nation ‘gainst this wicked violation 
Though it might be bad for trade you know it’s right… 
O brother oh brother oh brother 
First the tide must turn before the flood” 

The Sorrow Songs, Stolen From God and Grace Will Lead Me Home are three deeply moving and challenging albums, with Morrison and Braithwaite-Kilcoyne as the exceptional musicians linking all three, that tackle the history of the transatlantic slave trade, unearthing both incredible tales and uncomfortable truths. The Church is among the institutions that need most to hear and receive the truths and tales these albums share. 

  

Angeline Morrison – The Sorrow Songs (Topic Records 2022) 

Reg Meuross – Stolen From God (Hatsongs Records 2023) 

Angeline, Cohen & Jon – Grace Will Lead Me Home (Invisible Folk 2024)