Food For Thought is a public theology & Bible advocacy blog for Eternity from Sophia Think Tank’s David Wilson, who gathers top Christian thinkers to take a closer look at how the Christian faith addresses matters in society at large every week.

One of my favourite Muslims, Waleed Aly, wrote a piece for Fairfax newspapers last week on what he calls ‘silent racism’.  He draws a distinction between ‘goonish racism’ and ‘silent racism’ with the former being the kind we hear about after it has found its way through You Tube into the mainline media.  He describes it as “high level, weapons-grade derangement” and confesses that he is on the receiving end of such tirades quite often but that he has “almost no emotional reaction to this kind of goonish racism.  It’s simply too ridiculous to engage me”.

The debate needs to move beyond the fairly infrequent examples of goonish racism which are seemingly entertainment fodder for the media to what Aly states is the real problem, the “subterranean racism that goes largely unremarked upon and that we seem unable even to detect”.

Aly states that, “debating the meaning of the occasional racist tirade doesn’t help answer [the real questions].  It’s just not that helpful to take extreme individual behaviour as the starting point on an issue like this. Sure, it’s troubling. Sure, it’s more common than we like to admit. Sure, it’s a problem.  But it’s not the problem.”

What are some examples of this insidious silent racism?  Aly points to such things as an ANU study that found you are significantly less likely to get a job interview if you have a non-European name. It found that if your surname is Chinese you have to apply for 68% more jobs to get the same number of interviews as an Anglo-Australian. If you are Middle Eastern, it’s 64%. If you’re Indigenous it’s 35%. Aly calls this the “polite racism of the educated middle class”.

There are other examples of this all around us.  I have had people tell me quite ashamedly that they have different attitudes to human tragedy when the victims are not Anglo-Australian. The feelings of sorrow and compassion that are aroused when ‘Aussie’ kids are abused or a white woman is raped or a European looking man is bashed senseless on the street are simply not present if the people involved are ‘ethnic’. Silent racism!

Notice I said that this type of racism has been reported to me ‘quite ashamedly’. These people are shocked when they become aware of their racist attitudes.  Aly picks up this point when he says “The most insidious racism is just so ingrained its involuntary”. So, what can we do about it?  Once again we turn to the Judeo-Christian Scriptures for some wisdom.

Some people feel the Bible, particularly what Christians refer to as the Old Testament, is one of the feeders of racism and I can understand this position in the way it is read and taught by some. But racism (along with sexism, ageism, and any other form of ‘one-upmanship’) was never God’s intention in the first place. It just doesn’t fit the character of God and when the Jewish and/or Christian religions (or any other body of knowledge) are used to give rise to racism, silent or otherwise, it grieves the heart of God, according to the Bible.

Many passages talk of God’s hatred of favouritism and exclusion and call people to social inclusiveness. Just one example is the prayer of King Solomon as he reflects the heart of God in his dedication of the Temple in Jerusalem (recorded in 1 Kings Chapter 8). He says that this place is to be a place for all nations. In part it says: “As for the foreigner who does not belong to your people Israel but has come from a distant land because of your name— for they will hear of your great name and your mighty hand and your outstretched arm—when they come and pray toward this temple,  then hear from heaven, your dwelling place. Do whatever the foreigner asks of you, so that all the peoples of the earth may know your name and fear you, as do your own people Israel, and may know that this house I have built bears your Name, then hear from heaven their prayer and their plea, and uphold their cause.” (verses 41-45).

The case becomes even more explicit in the New Testament through the example of Jesus as he is involved with all sorts of people, and in the teachings of Paul the apostle as he encourages the early church to be tolerant and inclusive.  His philosophical stance is one of equality as he states that there is “no Gentile or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised….slave or free…” (Colossians 3:11).

The Bible is overwhelmingly anti-racist. Themes of inclusion, equality, tolerance, and unconditional love and acceptance dominate its teachings. But how does this address the deeply ingrained and often unrecognized ‘silent racism’ that Waleed Aly refers to? This short article is not the place to elaborate on the way forward except to say that the first step is to have the problem brought to our attention. Thanks goes to Aly for doing that and acknowledgement to The Bible once again for declaring how wrong racism of any kind really is.

The apostle Paul had to deal with ingrained racism when he was writing to the early church, and would’ve had this problem in mind when he said that we need to be transformed by the renewing of our minds (Romans 12:2).  Again, Waleed Aly is in agreement with the Judeo-Christian Scriptures. He concludes his article by saying: “It’s easy to point at the barking racists on the bus precisely because they aren’t us. They allow us to exonerate ourselves; to declare that if we have a problem with racism, at least people like us aren’t responsible for it. It allows us to escape self-examination of the racism we all probably harbour to some extent or other.

“That self-examination is crucial. Without it we have nothing to fix, and only other people to blame.”

The problem of silent racism has been brought to our attention.  Now is the time for self- examination for surely that is the starting place if any transformation through renewal of our thinking patterns is going to take place.

Featured image: Flickr_Sweet One