Pigmentation and Christian Morals

Extract

Every man of sense who has had to fill up a form in which there is a space labelled ‘race’ must have been tempted to write down ‘human’. That ‘Caucasian’ (an echo of a long obsolete ethnological theory) or ‘Negro’ should be required answers has profound moral and political significance in our time. It represents the enchantment of the intellect by a myth comparable in its power and in its forbidding consequences to the myth of antisemitism. The follies and cruelties that go with this enchantment are well known and need not be listed. We may well suspect that the spell that binds so many cannot be broken by argument, that time spent in examining the sophistries of racialist theory (resting for the most part on a radical confusion of phenotype with genotype) is time wasted. But Christians at least have a duty to examine their consciences and their presuppositions, both in order to correct their attitudes and in order to know how to witness to the truth in the world of our day.

What we do in unavoidable ignorance of how things are may be excusable or perhaps meritorious, even in those cases where a knowledge of how things are would have prompted us to quite other courses.