#BlackLivesMatter: A White British Quaker's Perspective

'Slave Trade' by John Raphael Smith, after George Morland's
‘Execrable human traffick, or the affectionate slaves’

Recent events have brought back to wider public consciousness that rallying cry, “Black Lives Matter”. It comes from the United States of America, but its resonance is felt around the world. As we see from the incidents that prompt outcry, it is most easily associated with excess deaths of black people – but it’s about a lot more than that.

Now, most Quakers in Britain are white. Not all of us, by any stretch, but definitely most. We’re also mostly relatively educated, with a much higher incidence of post-graduate qualifications than the general population, and there’s a definite tendency towards being culturally middle class. This has a lot of results, some of which I’ve written about before, but one of them is a real difficulty in engaging with the deep issues that underlie the statement that Black lives matter. I’ve seen Quakers in public on social media respond to that simple statement with one of the most problematic responses that we see everywhere – that “all lives matter”.

Why is that statement a problem? After all, don’t we – with our pacifist tradition and believe in a sort of universal divinity – really fundamentally believe that all lives matter? Yes, of course we do. It would be silly to suggest otherwise. In fact, especially among Quakers, it’s so obvious that it doesn’t even need saying. So why do we need to say that Black lives matter?

We need to say that Black lives matter because so much in the world, across the global economic North, there’s a lot that implicitly says they don’t. Socio-economic disparities tend to leave more Black people on the poorer end of the divide. Black (and other minority ethnic) people are often treated with greater suspicion by police and security services. In some countries, that extra suspicion leads to people dying – but it isn’t just deaths at the hands of the state, or even deaths at all, that counts when we say that Black lives matter. Society is by and large much more interested in seeing white children fulfil their potential (witness the significant interest in apparent underperformance in school of white working class boys), and more likely to see it as inevitable that Black youths will end up involved in violent crime (leading to a higher degree of suspicion of young Black people). Here in the UK, black people have lower life expectancy than the population at large.

Situations where the police kill someone while apprehending them or in a fight on the street are pretty low in the UK, so it’s hard to have useful stats, but deaths in custody happen. They happen a lot to people with mental health problems – and they happen with significantly increased incidence to black people with mental health problems. Black men are more likely, here in the UK, to lose some of their life potential to a custodial sentence and everything that entails once you are released – and I don’t mean that in terms of higher rates of offending. Black men are more likely than white men to receive a custodial sentence, and more likely to be held on remand rather than released on bail. This isn’t just about it mattering that Black people stay alive, but about valuing the whole of those lives.

These impacts are none of them unique to Black people, but the history that gives rise to them is unique to Black people in some parts of the world. In the US, where Black Lives Matter started as a movement, Black people do have a unique history of oppression not shared with any other ethnic group – as they do in parts of the Commonwealth, but in Britain itself, we haven’t had slavery (except possibly of the feudal sort; when slavery is discussed in this context it is generally chattel slavery) on our own soil for a long time; it disappeared from England after the Norman conquest, and from Scotland and Wales scant centuries later, and even then it was generally slavery of others in the British population, or other North Europeans. Not that people didn’t bring slaves here, and keep them as slaves, and even sell them as slaves on British soil; they did not have any right to do so, and the law would not generally uphold their rights over their slaves, but nor did the authorities do anything to stop it. As such, we do not have the same heritage of slavery as an obvious building block of our country as they do in America.

A lot of our Black population, though, comes from the Caribbean, where (in the vast majority of cases) their ancestors were enslaved, often taken by British slave traders and owned by British plantation owners. The core of the long-standing Black British population, the Afro-Caribbean populations of so many inner cities, started out in Britain in large part through the Windrush Generation, brought here as cheap labour to help rebuild our country and our economy after the Second World War. They might not have been slaves, but they were the descendants of slaves as much as any African American, and they were being exploited even while they were still ‘free’. They met a culture that thoroughly othered them, even though the experience of African American servicemen who were here during the war was often one of relative tolerance. The famous signs that greeted these people who came to a country they had been raised to admire, ill-equipped for the rather different climate that they hadn’t been warned about, read “no Blacks, no Irish, no dogs”. Still, they did what we had brought them here to do.

The wealth of Britain is built on the exploitation of the native or slave-transported populations of our former Empire. Even the wealth of old Quaker families is partly derived from slavery, either directly in the form of slave-worked plantations in the Americas, or indirectly in the form of raw materials bought from such sources. White guilt solves nothing – but our understanding history and the present issues – and how they are related – is vital to our finding right action. We seek the guidance of the Spirit, but we do so with hearts and minds prepared.

Now, I don’t know what that means we should do. I still have a lot to learn about this myself. But one thing I can do is encourage my fellow white people, Quakers not least, to learn as well. There’s enough been written by the people who have first-hand knowledge of this, and in many cases significant academic backgrounds as well, that we can use. As a disabled person, I will always say you need to learn about disability and what it means from disabled people, but also that we can’t be teaching every one of you about it personally. We don’t have any right to personal tutelage from Black (and other minority ethnic) people, but that’s okay; they’ve already spoken and written plenty, and we can learn from that.

One final note. I said already that these problems aren’t unique to Black people; depending on where you are in the world, some or all of them apply to other ethnic groups. People of European descent generally even face systemic prejudice in some parts of the world, though it is comparatively unusual; people of specific white European descent have quite recently faced widespread prejudice within white-dominated societies (‘no Irish’), and in many cases still do today. In today’s Britain, consider the various Traveller groups, Roma, and so on, who have faced a long history of prejudice, and more recent prejudice towards Eastern European immigrants that has spread to encompass more long-established populations of such national origins. In many colonised parts of the world that now have a dominant white culture, indigenous people suffer massive problems – either from current systemic prejudice or from straightforward socio-economic consequences of historic discrimination, and usually both. Roma are distrusted and mistreated across Europe. The geopolitical climate of my entire adulthood leads to widespread mistrust of Arabs and other Muslim-majority ethnicities. Antisemitism would appear to be on the rise with the growing strength of the so-called ‘alt-right’ and nationalist populism.

Some problems are experienced in relation to factors that are not in themselves ethnic, but are correlated with ethnicity, such as mistrust of Muslims (or members of any faith that might get confused with Islam, as witnessed at Sikh Gurdwaras). Some problems arise that are not related to ethnicity at all, like the fact the biggest risk factor for dying in police custody in the UK is mental illness. Black lives aren’t the only lives that our societies devalue. This is not, though, the time for “what about”. We don’t solve anything when we try to solve everything at once – in fact, we tend to make very little progress. Most of the provisions of the Equality Act 2010, for instance, come from laws that already existed – it consolidated and to some extent harmonised existing protections related to race/ethnicity, sex, disability. All of those were from separate laws separately fought for over decades. If anyone had tried from scratch to campaign for a general equality law, they would have found it much harder to make progress.

So let this be about Black people, and perhaps the natural expansion of this to the different but related issues faced by people of other ethnic groups. Build alliances so there can be future work on other sorts of prejudice and devaluing of people. Don’t make it about your preferred category of prejudice – that just looks like you think that other category is more important, however you dress it up. We can focus on other problems another time – this is the moment to fight this particular category of injustice.

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