In the fifth of our Lent series, a writer describes how at a time of grief and angst about God and gender and black suffering she discovered a book that helped her reframe how she thought about her religion, her body and her racial identity
It’s been two years since millions of us watched a black man – George Floyd – die as a police officer knelt on his neck for nine minutes and 29 seconds while he uttered the chilling words: “I can’t breathe”. These three words came to represent the sense of suffocation felt by black people across the world, especially those who live our lives in white-majority spaces. In the months following Floyd’s murder, we saw a reckoning with racial justice the likes of which I had not seen in my lifetime. Institutions, governments, businesses, media and the Church looked inwards and searched themselves for signs of the racism that was pervasive but often invisible within their midst.
What struck me in those months was the outpouring of grief I saw within the black community, even those of us who lived an ocean away from the Minneapolis street in which George Floyd breathed his last. For so many of us, when we watched Floyd’s murder on our screens, there was something that recognised in those harrowing images our own necks on the line in the way that only oppressed groups can empathise with each other’s plights. His suffering was our suffering; his oppression our story. I myself felt an overwhelming sense of grief as this one man’s death plunged me back into the historic stories of the brutalisation of black bodies. It just so happened that I was researching and writing my book God Is Not a White Man in those strange months at the start of the pandemic. Where the world was quieter, many of us on tenterhooks, more alive to our own mortality and the fragility of life. In those months, as research for the book took me to the past and I learned again of stories of black oppression in the transatlantic slave trade, but also the brutalisation that continued into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Not just lynchings on American streets, but murders of black teenage boys like Stephen Lawrence in south-east London when I was nine years old. In looking back at the past horrors, I realised that we had not moved as far from such atrocities as we might like to have thought. In 2020, a black man could be killed in broad daylight by a police officer whose role was to serve and protect. The past no longer felt like a foreign country but a familiar place we had not travelled far from.
