L IVIN G CHAPLAINCY
Who is my neighbour? T he world continues to be beset with the COVID-19 virus with many countries still in the grip of thousands of new daily cases. The United States of America is the worst hit country with well over 100,000 deaths. The USA has also seen significant uprisings and protests as a result of the death of George Floyd, an African American man, at the hands of a police officer in Minneapolis on 25 May. The world has sat up and taken notice and there has been a renewed push to eradicate racism in the Western world. The slogan ‘Black Lives Matter’ has been used in protests and acts of solidarity in numerous countries around the world, including New Zealand. In fact, thousands of New Zealanders joined in marches of solidarity with the BLM movement. Some people have responded with a challenge that ‘all lives matter’ but as Year 9 student Talia Wood explained in her winning speech, if you go to the doctor with a broken arm wanting it treated, you would not be happy for the doctor just to say, “Well, all bones matter!” At the moment, many black and indigenous peoples all across the Western world feel broken and in pain. They feel that systems have been designed to favour white people and discriminate against black people. The situation in the US is very concerning and it is clear that there is widespread discrimination against black citizens. Here in New Zealand it is, perhaps, not so clear to many people. However, one area in which it is quite clear is in 38
DIO TODAY
criminal justice. In 2018, Stuff published an interactive exploring New Zealand’s prison population. It uncovered that Ma-ori are more likely to be imprisoned than non-Ma-ori for exactly the same crime, more likely to be imprisoned for almost every category of crime for which non-Ma-ori were given different types of sentences. While this information is not new to many people who show an interest in our criminal justice system, it is a reminder that even though many people know about this, little has been done to confront the injustice that exists. Systemic racism has been part of the fabric of our society since the colonial government began in 1840. But, it is not just Ma-ori who experience racism in New Zealand. Racial inequities are hard to talk about because they engender emotional responses. No one wants to be labelled a racist and there are so many stereotypes about so many different groups of people, and jokes that are made about different cultures, that people feel threatened when it is labelled as prejudice. But, how deeply has each of us really looked into our hearts to check ourselves for seeds of racism and prejudice? Do we have different reactions and responses to people with different skin colour or ethnic identity to us? Do we make assumptions about a person’s character, values, motivations, or backgrounds just based on the colour of their skin or the shape of their eyes? People of other ethnicities do too and have had people yell at them in the street to go back
to their own countries even though they were born here, and their parents were born here, and their grandparents were born here. People on the street and in some work places are told to stop speaking their own languages. These things all stem from our prejudices and biases. Any statements like ‘all black people are…’, ‘all white people are…’ and so on, are never going to be accurate, and stem from prejudice rather than fact.
Christians have been associated with much racism in the past. Some of the most damning examples are: beginning in the Early Church, as Christianity became its own religion rather than merely an aberration of Judaism, and then became the state religion of the Roman Empire, antisemitism and the denigration and humiliation of Jews and Judaism has continued through the centuries; the Crusades against Muslims that occurred between the 9th and 13th centuries; slavery justified by scripture; British colonisation of many non-European countries and the assumption that the colonisers brought civilization with them; and association with the Nazi regime in WWII. These are only a few examples but it is a history that is hard to deny and that highlights the dominance of European attitudes in the Christian Church, to the exclusion of other races and ethnicities. It seems that Christianity became a euro-centric religion that effectively made a darker
