Tegegn Bayissa

• Linguistics
• Theology
• Education
• Media
• Electronics

• MA, University of Sheffield
• BA (Hons), University of Manchester
• PGDE, University of Bolton
• PGD, University of Salford

Racism

Area of focus

Broadly engaging with the nexus between politics, religion, race and racism, closely looking at the Judeo-Christian tradition of England, this research investigates a historic theological concept, a much over-looked area, which has come to be known with a shorthand as the Curse of Ham, a concept developed out of the biblical flood narrative of Genesis chapters 9-10 and the Noahic ‘curses’ and ‘blessings’. The study analysis the multi-layered politics of the religion out of which racial ideological frameworks were birthed.

Contribution

The outcome of this study is multi-faceted. Chiefly, it aims to contribute to an understanding of racism against black people and the black experience in the West in ways radically different from the canonical Western perspective; the ongoing debates around decolonisation; discussions on the politics of Black radicalism; the Pan-African struggles; and the urgency of the need to create a liberated, independent, united Afrika as one, autonomous, and sovereign political entity that defends and protects its citizens globally.

Conception of the research

This research was born out of over two decades of lived experience and observation as a Black Afrikan man in England reflecting on numerous questions relating to politics, religion, race, racism, and the connections between the state and the church. In formulated one Research Question for this study, several questions kept coming to mind in the early days. Some of these included the following basic inquiries:

1. Why and how has a low regard for a black man and a high regard for a white man come about?

2. If a nation’s Christian religion is a mandate for that nation to travel across the seas and rule people, why didn’t Christians from Ethiopia, where Christian religion was long established several centuries before it did in England, travel to England or other parts of Europe and enslave white people and dominate the world?

3. If the message of Christianity was love, peace, equality, dignity and respect for all humanity and creation, and mutual support and development, then why did Christian England commit acts of barbarity on black people (and other oppressed people)?

4. Why did white, English Christian clergymen, own black people as their slaves?

5. If Africans were helpless and uncivilised savages, and if Christian West went into Africa to help them, then does Christian civilisation mean war, murder, the destruction of other people, and ruling over them?

6. If Christianity was believed to be incompatible with racism and if England was a Christian country, then why was there racism in this Christian country?

7. If a nation’s prosperity and military strength was because of the nation’s Christian religion, England is now increasingly seen as ‘secular’, and there are by far more Christians in Afrika than there are in England, why is there economic and political power disparity between the two?

8. How has England’s Christianity and civilisation help Afrika?

9. Why was it important to cast biblical characters such as Jesus in the image of a white man, Mary in the image of a white woman, and the devil in the image of a black man?

Context

Racism against black people in England is a widely misunderstood, overlooked, resisted, and denied problem. From the insanity of racial slavery five hundred years ago, to colonialism, to the era of neo-colonialism, racial capitalism, scientific, artistic and academic racism, black people have been subjected to the most brutal and inhumane acts, denigration, and injustices perpetrated against them by Western Christian colonial powers.

They were deceived, divided, terrorised, captured, stolen, shackled with fetters, forcibly uprooted, cut off from their family roots, cultures and languages in their homeland of Afrika, piled up like sardines in confined spaces on purposely designed slave ships named Jesus, Mary and others, millions perished in the Middle Passage, survivors scattered around the Caribbean, America and Europe; sold, bought and owned like property, renamed and branded with iron markers on their skins, legally declared possessions and three fifths of human, categorised as beasts, caged with animals and placed in zoos as public spectacles, lynched, segregated, incarcerated, brutalised and murdered, and today, continue to experience racism, division and injustices as colonies in Western nation states. The Afrikan Holocaust remains untold story in the history of Christian West’s barbarism and savagery against black people and the continent of Afrika.

The same Christian powers colonised Afrika, destroyed black civilisation and high culture, burnt and looted historical and cultural treasures, partitioned the landmass, divided it among themselves at the so called Berlin Conference, constructed modern nation states whilst draining Afrikan resources, set up conflicts, increased unrest, quashed revolts, assassinated revolutionaries, created mechanisms of control, keeping the new states under perpetual slavery of financial debt and under-development through webs of deceits and corruptions, destabilised the regions and created refugees. Christian West prospered on the back of black people’s loss and Afrika’s destruction.

Thus, the entirety of Christian West is built on racism. While draining its human and material resources, Christian West presents itself as the saviour of the lost and sick black race and casts the black race and Afrika negatively.

It misrepresents black people and Afrika through its various state apparatus, the media, churches, and educational institutions. The deliberately manufactured and systematically disseminated negativities about black people and the misrepresentations of Afrika is such that when many people think of black Africa, they think of a people with no history, a people who have just recently been brought to light through Western efforts; they think of ignorance, famine, diseases, bare-footed and naked bodies, covered in flies, living in bushes or huts, tribes, clans, wars, savages and barbarians. The colonial divide and rule system and control over the mind is such that there are black people, both in the West and in Afrika, who see the white man as their saviour.

They see the West as the promised land, fellow Afrikan as their enemy and the continent of Afrika as the place of slavery to escape from. Many black people in the West are too comfortable to be able to realise their continued enslavement and participation in the mechanisms of slavery. Such black people also exist in shame, in shame of being associated with ‘savage’ Afrika.

They aspire to be like white and Western. They invest in and consume manufactured appearances, modelled in the image of their colonial masters by artificially allowing the suppression of the natural production of their melanin with scientifically created chemicals in L’Oreal, Garnier, Pond and other brands; and allowing their hair to be burnt so that it is straight, by handing over their money, hard-earned through enslavement, aka, employment in, and to, a racist system called capitalism, while at the same time capitalism drains and bleeds Afrika and keeps it under its feet. In popular culture today, a black coloured inanimate object, such as a black car or a black suit, is desirable and highly priced, but a ‘black’ skinned human being is made to be an object of shame and to be distanced from.

While in America and Britain a black man is a nigger, in Israel he is a denigrated cushi and in India he is the lowest Cast. England, one of the major Western enslavers of black people and colonisers of Africa, built wealth on racism. And England has been known as a Christian country, built on Judeo-Christian tradition, now described as a tolerant, multi-cultural and post-racial society. While Christianity is commonly believed to be incompatible with racism, England itself is presented as almost antithetical to racism. After the reshaping of the former British empire, many people of various backgrounds from its external colonies and from outside of Western colonies have been immigrating for several reasons, at different times, and living here.

After their arrival, many non-white people have been experiencing racism in all aspects of life. Race Relations Commission and related legislations such as the 1965, 1968, 1976 and later, the Equality Act 2010, which covers Race is one of the ‘nine protected characteristics’, were created at different times but none of this have been able to eradicate racism. A black man from Afrika is always perceived and treated differently. Social engineers and law makers created the defective and deceptive category label known by the acronym BAME (Black, Asian, Minority Ethnic), lumping black people with other non-white minorities, obscuring the layers of differentiated racism, and maintaining divide rule system. Many black men are vulnerable, and undergo racial denigration, harassment, bullying and victimisation in various places such as work and education.

There is no legal definition of the targeted racism against black people, specifically applicable to the black experience. And many remain victims of injustice in the justice system in Britain, with the courts concluding that racism is hard to prove, hence further protecting and defending racism against black people. In England today, discussing an experience of racism is almost a taboo subject. In some contexts, it is coded as the ‘r word’ or ‘that thing’. The word gets mentioned in public when the media decides to broadcast in the news, such as the murder of George Floyd, leading to street protests.

After the cameras turn away, the lights turned off, many people forget the ‘incident’ but racism remains. There are many problems faced by an ordinary black Afrikan man attempting to discuss racism in England today – denials, turning the story around against the victim and presenting perpetrators as victims, vilification, smearing, ostracization, victimisation and depression, to mention some. As a silent killer, racism systematically damages, the wellbeing of victims. There are many lonely, black Afrikan men, with no friends, family, or support network in England who experience the under-reported consequences of racial trauma.

Among the many misconceptions surrounding the problem of racism are the general thinking that racism is viewed as an incident that just occurs somewhere and gets resolved and everyone moves on, such as when an epithet is aimed at a celebrity, or a banana is thrown onto a football pitch; or it is seen as a problem in America, American police or the KKK, or it is generally associated with the far right parties in Britain such as BNP, EDL, Britain First and other similar organisations. Many also naively associate racism as being a behaviour of someone who is ‘bad’; and as people do not like being known as ‘bad’, they resist accusations of racism, enraged, dismiss and discredit the victim as ‘playing the race card’.

Misconceptions around racism also exists among people from “BAME” group who think that they know what racism is automatically by virtue of being from “BAME”. In fact, a physical “BAME” membership in and of itself is not, and cannot, be evidence of possessing knowledge of what racism is. While many people in England say they ‘can’t see colour’ or ‘race’, at the same time, they evidence their race awareness when they produce the exclusionary declarative statement, couched in the form of question: Where are you from from? Or, when one complains of racism, they produce a plainly formulated command: Pack up and go home. While many describe ‘race’ as a ‘myth, the government and institutions collect demographic data on pre-set forms with a set of tick-boxes showing whether someone belongs to white, black, or other categories, and at the same time, the existence of racism is denied. Race and racism have been studied for decades, generating debates and disagreements within sociology and other academic disciplines. Common description of race is ‘social construct’ or ‘myth’.

No single, unanimously agreed upon definition of racism exists. With the description of race as a myth or social construct and the absence of legal definition of racism against black people, the amount of research, the volumes of journals and other literature produced, conference papers presented and debates had; discussions and talks in various platforms; legislations and commissions by the government; ‘Equality & Diversity and Inclusion’ teams and trainings in various organisations; tokenistic appointments in certain white spaces; all of these combined have not been able to eradicate anti-black racism.

Difficulties in studying racism

While there are many ‘gaps’ in knowledge in the study of race and racism, there are also different kinds of difficulties faced by different researchers of racism. Who researches racism, and discusses it with who, and where, are fundamental to the communication and understanding of this research problem; a White Privileged researcher might research racism to gain knowledge and possibly enable the creation of another piece of legislation or policy statement. Conducting the same research as a Black Afrikan is a different matter. Like any spaces that are institutionally racist, such as the Church and the Police, universities are not without problems. Being black Afrikan man and researching racism in England is not the same as researching on other subject matters, for example, electronics, hydraulics, or dentistry.

The black Afrikan man dedicated to justice researching on racism personally experiences racism daily, engages with emotionally and mentally disturbing historic materials/documents, meets stiff resistances and difficulties from anywhere.

These problems can be exacerbated if compounded by an absence of platform or support from a dedicated community that directly understands racism and engages with the researcher’s area of study. The experience can be doubly painful, far more isolating, traumatic, and depressing, but eventually rewarding, because the effort contributes towards the long struggle for liberation.

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