By Mike James
mikejames@aecrc.org
Our Caribbean Church also calls us to concrete action on Race issues
“There is also much that can be done by the Church in this matter. We must constantly preach and teach that any form of racial prejudice is a direct sin against Christ’s command to love our neighbour as ourselves. We must stress and promote the positive values inherent in each culture so that people will come to respect them and those who hold them. It will be useful to encourage serious study into racial origins and the causes of conflict so that people can look at this whole question in a mature and non-emotional manner. In this way members of different ethnic groups will come to discover and appreciate each other. And we must always be ready to denounce without fear any forms of racial oppression or malpractice that come to our notice. Above all, we must take good care that we ourselves in our churches, schools and institutions, take no account of differences of race or colour but treat all equally. We appeal to each Christian and everyone who reads this letter to ask themselves honestly if they have within them any hidden trace of racial prejudice and how this affects the way they speak of and treat members of other races.” (Art 53 Justice and Peace in a New Caribbean)
While we rightly criticise political parties and other interest groups who exploit race in order to achieve power for themselves, there is the need for us to reflect seriously on whether we are following Christ in the racial stereotypes we so often use to refer to others in our “private” conversations, in the dishonest justifications we offer for employing “our own” or in encouraging our children to marry “your own kind”.
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Perhaps another word for serious reflection on race in the Caribbean can come from a recent letter to Trinidad Express entitled “Our racial makeup all but pure”,
“Just because a person has straight hair and a pointed nose does not mean that such a person’s genetic code came strictly from persons who had straight hair and pointed noses. The law of genetics does not work like that.
The family trees of T&T residents who are looked upon as descendants of Africa reveal parentage derived from people who look, say, of East Indian, Chinese, Italian, or Spanish descent. Genetics simply caused them to have an outer appearance consistent with characteristics ascribed to some pure race. The racial makeup of T&T’s present generations certainly is all but pure. There are no genetically pure persons of African descent in T&T, nor are there any persons of pure East Indian descent in T&T. Family trees constructed without prejudice will attest to this fact.”
In the last census (2002), 18.4% of Trinbagonians described themselves as mixed, while the corresponding figure in Guyana was 17%, extraordinarily up from 10% who so described themselves in 1990, as people become increasingly able to admit their mixed heritage. (Perhaps in the US which does not include the category Mixed in its census data, a Barack Obama may one day be able to describe himself as Mixed rather than Black)
In any case, the scientists all tell us that racial differences make up a minute fraction of 1% of the genes that account for our common humanity. What we all share as children of God and human reduces to insignificance any racial distinctions. We are all made in the image and likeness of God. All of us. Equally.
