Diocese of Liverpool

Thought for the Day, 27 August 2003

The Rt Rev. James Jones

Good Morning

The statement ‘we only have pink ones' sounds innocent enough! The sort of thing you might hear from an unhelpful sales-assistant.

But when Ingrid Nichols, who happens to be black and facing the amputation of her foot, heard these words from the consultant offering her an artificial limb she was, understandably shocked.

And this in the week when we mark the 40th anniversary of Martin Luther King's powerful “I have a dream” speech. It was a dream about his four little children, one day, living in a world where they will be judged not “by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character”.

Earlier this year I was in Birmingham, Alabama giving a series of addresses on the Gospels at the Anglican Cathedral, just a stone's throw from the Civil Rights Museum dedicated to the memory of Martin Luther King.

On the plane afterwards I fell into conversation with the black woman sitting next to me. She asked me about the talks I'd given. I explained how I thought that when Jesus cleansed the Temple he was attacking not commercialism but racism.

She had two reactions: Amazement that I had the nerve to take such a message to a mainly white congregation in Alabama; And surprise at this, to her, novel interpretation. “Where does it say that in the Bible?” she quizzed me.

I got out my copy of the Good Book, put it between us and to the head turning stares of the other passengers read the Gospel of Mark and the Prophet Isaiah which Jesus quoted.

When I finished explaining, she exclaimed: “Why did nobody ever tell me that?' She then told me her family's often brutal story and how, even in her life-time, there was a time when we would never have been allowed to sit together on a bus, let alone a plane!

Extraordinary!

As bizarre as a black person being told 40 years on they'd have to have a white foot or, to put the boot on the other foot, a white person being told they'd have to have a black one!

Defending ourselves against the charge of institutional racism, many of us protest that we are colour-blind, that we don't actually see the racial differences. I know what they mean. I've said it myself.

But being blind to a person's colour is in the end to ignore their God-given complexion and identity.

The failure of the NHS, fortunately soon repented of, was to be blind to the colour of Ingrid Nichol's skin. Thank God that, in the end, they were not deaf to the content of her character.