Black Lives Matter by Trevor Thorn.

First, many thanks to Liz Manning for her challenging blog entry of 14^th June, Racism, Writing and How Do We respond?https://morethanwriters.blogspot.com/2020/06/racism-writing-and-how-do-we-respond.html

This has been one of three occurrences which have drawn me, as Liz was, into daring to write on a topic that, I am ashamed to say, I know only very little.

I am a white man, shielding: so at this time I feel particularly impotent as I am precluded from participating in any protests, even local ones. I have for a long time been one of the leaders of a small group called ‘Living With Integrity’ (LWI) which operates across two villages just North of Cambridge UK, trying to keep abreast of Justice issues. Yet I now discover I have had only minimal awareness of the issues, both historical and current, that have faced and face, black people here in the UK and across the world. I confess to being ashamed of this, particularly as the purpose of the LWI group is

·      To provide opportunities for discussion on issues where we can promote justice and environmental concerns.

·       Seek to understand how we might respond responsibly to such issues 

·      Offer these ideas into our local communities

I had, of course, seen news reports of the hideous murder of George Floyd, but it took a challenge from a friend during a garden conversation to make Pam, my wife, and me realise that “Black Lives Matter’ should rapidly become a priority issue for a group with such aims, to consider alongside a recent decision to concentrate our efforts into building our understandings of Climate Chaos issues.

I started to dig deeper and the third influence quickly emerged from this early reading in the form of a question: ‘When have I ever been denigrated, despised, challenged, insulted or worse, simply because of my whiteness?’ What a telling question!

So, thank you again Liz for all the ideas and challenges of your blogpost and reminder of both where power lies and how it is executed. I will be using your links as we gather our group together in the near future to discuss this (virtually, of course). And thank you for the particular challenge of ‘… it’s the least we can do as Christian writers – to use the talent God has given us for justice. We can consider the characters we put in our novels, be unafraid to question in our blogs, write to our MPs for change, take positive action in what we share on social media.’ I will be bearing this in mind.

I would also invite every reader of, and contributor to, this blog to work out how they might possibly encourage their own congregations/ fellowships to consider whether these two key justice issues should be made priorities in every church where they gather for worship. I make this invitation, knowing it will not be easy. 

Finally, I offer one more resource for consideration by others wishing to inform themselves more about this shameful topic. It is the Amazon’s Black Employee Network Recommended Watching at 
https://www.imdb.com/list/ls080026112/?ref_=tt_rels_1&st_dt=&mode=detail&page=1&sort=list_order,asc

The list extends well beyond Amazon Prime and incorporates Netflix offerings as well as films on other networks.

Trevor Thorn