Genesis, Church and Colour

Extract

Events at Nottingham and Notting Hill may well be symptoms of a more deep-seated and widespread evil in our midst. It is true that bullying Teddy-boys have been suitably punished, but it is also true, at the time of writing, that our popular press has printed letters which betray considerable race-feeling and racial prejudice. And anyway there is apparently conclusive evidence that the population of Britain falls into three broad groups of roughly equal size: one third is tolerant of coloured people, one third is mildly prejudiced, and one third is very prejudiced. These are saddening figures; and, alas, all the ugly incidents and ugly attitudes at Nottingham and Notting Hill do but confirm the accuracy of the estimate.

This is what obtains in twentieth-century Britain. In striking contrast, antiquity did not know of racial prejudice. The true Greek saw the world as something divided between Hellenes and Barbarians; another division would give the categories of citizen and slave. You were born, or became, a Roman citizen, without the slightest reference or advertence to skin pigmentation. Jews in the time of St Paul, whatever their exclusiveness and strong feedings about ‘gentiles’ or uncircumcised non-Jews, were quite unconscious of colour differences. We read in the Acts of the Apostles of an Ethiopian, a minister of Queen Candace of Ethiopia, who had gone to Jerusalem to worship (Acts viii, 27). He was no doubt a devout proselyte, and accepted like all others . . . ‘from every nation under heaven, Parthian, Medes, Elamites, inhabitants of Mesopotamia, Judaea, Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia . . .’ (Acts ii, 8-10).