What the early church teaches about racial harmony

Recently, I have been reading Acts chapter 6 in an effort to understand how the early church overcame ethnic tensions which would so easily have fractured our modern-day multi-ethnic communities.

The apostles’ approach, as described below, can still impart important wisdom which can inform modern methods of dealing with and dissipating racial tension.

Firstly, in Luke’s summary of the grievance brought to the apostles by Grecian Jews, what’s striking is the conspicuous absence of a perpetrator.

In those days when the number of disciples was increasing, the Hellenistic Jews among them complained against the Hebraic Jews because their widows were being overlooked in the daily distribution of food (Acts 6:1).

The disparity in relief for Grecian widows was the inadvertent result of burgeoning church growth. Certainly, nothing in this verse suggests an intent to discriminate. Yet, the absence of a blameworthy culprit neither led the apostles to declare the grievance to be more perception than reality, nor did it precipitate a ‘witch hunt’.

They also did not resort to counter-accusing the Grecian Jews of ‘playing the ethnicity card’.

Instead, they directly addressed the disparity itself by appointing representatives chosen by those most affected by the issue to distribute relief in an even-handed manner:

Brothers and sisters, choose seven men from among you who are known to be full of the Spirit and wisdom. We will turn this responsibility over to them and will give our attention to prayer and the ministry of the word (Acts 6:3).

The apostles’ response contrasts sharply with the kind of reaction to BLM protests that legal scholars call the ‘perpetrator perspective’.

As Dr Alan David Freeman explains it: ‘The perpetrator perspective presupposes a world composed of atomistic individuals whose actions are outside of and apart from the social fabric and without historical continuity. From this perspective, the law views racial discrimination not as a social phenomenon, but merely as the misguided conduct of particular actors.’

It is a world where, but for the conduct of these misguided ones, the system of equality of opportunity would work to provide a distribution of the good things in life without racial disparities and where deprivations that did correlate with race would be ‘deserved’ by those deprived on grounds of insufficient ‘merit’.

The US case of Griggs vs Duke Power Co. exemplifies the weakness of the perpetrator perspective.

Back in the 1950s, the company’s policy restricted black employees to the ‘labour’ department, in which the highest-paid employees earned less than the lowest-paid staff in the four other departments.

Immediately after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 came into force, Duke Power added two employment tests which, if passed, would allow any employee to transfer to higher-paying departments. The Bennett Mechanical Comprehension Test was a test of mechanical aptitude, and the Wonderlic Cognitive Ability Test was an IQ test measuring general intelligence.

Ten years earlier, in Brown vs the Board of Education, the US Supreme Court had formally acknowledged the disparately negative effect of racially-segregated education on black people.

So, as part of that impact, it was not surprising that black candidates were almost ten times less likely than whites to meet Duke Power’s new employment and transfer requirements.

Of course, those who hold to the ‘no perpetrator = no discrimination’ perspective might well insist that, despite suspect timing, the new testing regime was still scrupulously fair and, most importantly, colour-blind.

In the end, the Supreme Court found Duke Power’s new testing criteria to be unlawful because the testing regime was not a genuine business requirement. Previously, the company had promoted many of its white employees, who lacked such qualifications but had still progressed successfully.

Notably, the Supreme Court avoided the ‘perpetrator perspective’ that led the government-commissioned Sewell Report to recommend that: ‘to limit the widening charge of racism, and further dilution of its importance, we suggest assessing the intent of the perpetrator as well as the perception of the victim.’

They also avoided the enforcement of affirmative action quotas, which is so evident in the recently published Church of England report on race, ‘From Lament to Action’.

Wisely, their judgment went: ‘Criteria for employment or promotion may not provide equality of opportunity merely in the sense of the fabled offer of milk to the stork and the fox. On the contrary, … the posture and condition of the job seeker [must] be taken into account. It has … to resort again to the fable … provided that the vessel in which the milk is proffered be one all seekers can use.’

That’s what genuine equality looks like.