Towards a post-racial UK

George Bernard Shaw wrote: ‘You use a glass mirror to see your face; you use works of art to see your soul.’

These past weeks I have been pondering the way the films honoured at the recent Academy Awards reflect the soul of contemporary society. Nomadland (Best Picture, Best Actress and Best Director) explores the fallout of the 2008 economic crisis for a generation of ‘houseless’ Americans who are too old to find re-employment but too poor to retire. The Father (Best Actor and Best Adapted Screenplay) looks at the growing epidemic of dementia from within the mind of a sufferer. And Shaka King’s historical drama, Judas and the Black Messiah (Best Supporting Actor), although set during the late 1960s, brings us to reflect on the continuing fight against racial injustice as highlighted by the Black Lives Matter protests that followed the murder of George Floyd a year ago.

The axis of Judas and the Black Messiah revolves around the relationship of Fred Hampton (played by Daniel Kaluuya), the charismatic chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party, and William O’Neal, a petty criminal turned FBI mole who infiltrates Hampton’s inner circle, eventually becoming his security captain. Kaluuya deservedly won Best Supporting Actor for his portrayal of the Maoist-inspired Black Power leader. He captures Hampton’s public persona of fiery orator and revolutionary idealist, and also his more human side when he shyly courts fellow activist Deborah Johnson (Dominique Fishback).

Later, his affections are torn between fleeing America with Deborah and their unborn child, or continuing to fight for his people knowing that it will mean imprisonment and possibly death. In the end the latter is Hampton’s fate, murdered in his bed by two shots to the head during a police raid on his flat, carried out as part of the COINTELPRO programme of then-FBI director Edgar Hoover (played by a demonic-looking Martin Sheen). The coroner’s inquest found that Hampton’s death was ‘justifiable homicide’ despite the police firing over 90 rounds of ammunition in reply to a single shot from Hampton’s men.

Lakeith Stanfield, who plays O’Neal, could also justifiably have been awarded an Oscar. The film cuts several times to real-life footage of O’Neal from a 1989 documentary. When asked what role he played in the civil rights movement, O’Neal replies: ‘I was in the struggle’. But the struggle Stanfield portrays through his superb acting takes place inside O’Neal, his face alone bearing witness to the vulnerability and torment of someone who discovers that whatever choice he makes he will die, either murdered by his fellow Black Panthers if exposed as a snitch or destroyed by the guilt of betraying a courageous and principled man that he is gradually coming to admire.

Since the 1960s, race equality laws have been passed both in the US and UK, but what current events show is that racism and its effects are never far below the surface in our polarised societies. Hampton’s Panthers ran a Free Breakfast programme which fed over 300 children each morning, a situation that sadly continues today, as evidenced by the footballer Marcus Rashford’s campaign for free school lunches to continue during lockdown and school holidays. A friend recently told me how she was spat on and racially abused in the street for being Asian and therefore responsible for the Coronavirus pandemic. I had to admit that as a white man race was not something I had given much thought to, a situation that I now recognise as very different from the experience of many people of colour. Hampton’s belief in Maoist ideology may today look naive in the light of the genocides perpetrated by Mao in the name of progress (and China’s current persecution of the Uyghur people). But in the face of a white church that largely stayed on the sidelines, and in some cases actively opposed anti-racism, it is understandable that Hampton’s search for an ideology should find a home in communism, with its focus on class struggle, revolutionary activity and the history of oppressed versus oppressor.

What is especially sad is that the first chapter of the Bible gives the best grounding for anti-racism that there is: ‘So God made humankind in his own image’ (Gen. 1:27). There is no greater foundation for the dignity and solidarity of human beings to be found in any philosophy, religion or critical theory. Perhaps then, now is the moment for Christians, both black and white, to take the lead in the next step towards a truly post-racial society.

Judas and the Black Messiah (2021, Dir. Shaka King) – available on most streaming services.