Let the Children Come to Me... (well, the White ones anyway)

by Peter Cruchley, Council for World Mission

One of my most painful moments in the CWM Legacies of Slavery Hearings was in Jamaica. Our group met with twenty young people, all students at the University of the West Indies. They began to open up about their perceptions of blackness and the pressures around them as young black people in Jamaica. They were outwardly confident gifted young people but several began to tell about their attempts to bleach their skin, to try and look fair. Those with the darkest skin colour shared that even in Jamaica they experience prejudice, and felt looked down upon. Beauty is perceived in terms of fair skin colour, the fairer your skin the more beautiful you are. Some even told stories of friends who had even attempted to bleach the skin of their babies.

This was profoundly disturbing for the Hearings group to process. It told the group that even in majority black cultures the experience of blackness is still occupied by whiteness, and measured in terms of whiteness. And that it begins not in adolescence but in infancy. If this is the experience of black children in Jamaica, what is the experience of black children in majority white cultures like the UK for example?

On a CWM-World Council of Churches workshop on evangelism and colonisation in Canada we heard examples of the legacies of slavery there in terms of black on black violence amongst young people, which is spiralling from a feeling that, as one young person put it, ‘I am dead already’. In Dec 2018, the Ontario Human Rights Commission released a report based on seven years of data on police action which revealed that Black Toronto residents are 20 times more likely to be shot dead by police. While black residents make up less than 10 percent of the city’s population, they accounted for 61 percent of all cases where police used force that resulted in death and 70 percent of police shootings that resulted in death.

In the UK, the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) reported in 2019 that racial abuse and bullying of children has risen by a fifth since 2015. This is a further manifestation of the racist white supremacist urges in the UK driving Brexit, and the underlying failure by White people to repent of racism and convert their cultures and systems to embrace the diversity and complexity of God’s good creation. This explains why one of our black participants in the Legacies hearings said her granddaughter first experienced racism at the age of 3, as soon as she was old enough to enter the education system.

This is a profoundly religious and spiritual issue. How can Whiteness invade Blackness and occupy the norms and metaphors of beauty and goodness without a spiritual force behind and around it? How do churches made up of all ages and generations and races tolerate such a situation, let alone perpetuate it? How can Jesus be allied with this? Because Jesus is white. He has been made the figurehead and poster boy of White empire, and the image of White Jesus remains omnipresent in the iconography, even of Black churches. We saw images of White Jesus in churches in both the Africa and Jamaica Legacies Hearings, for example.

How do churches help Black and white children and young people navigate white dominant cultures and racist social systems? Are churches aware how we perpetuate White norms in our ways of working, worshipping and believing? How should a post-colonial mission organisation respond? Especially one which wants to tackle the legacies of slavery we have? The veteran Black Theologian, James Cone, challenges us: If God is White, Kill him.

As part of this putting to death of the White God, CWM is planning work on children and racism and the work churches can do to create spaces where racism is named and challenged. There will be a planning group meeting Oct 17-19 in the UK to begin our thinking. Churches need to be places where all children especially experience the freedom of Christ, and find themselves known and loved and affirmed, not just the white ones. Churches could be places where children are strengthened for their struggles and are the first place where they know without a shadow of doubt that black is beautiful and powerful, that they are not dead already and God certainly is not white.