George Floyd was less fortunate: his heart collapsed under the sheer weight of the police brutality. Child Q survived her ordeal. Or did she?
The story goes that the police were invited into the school because teachers thought they could smell cannabis on her. Child Q was then taken out of an exam and strip searched, a process that involved the exposure of her intimate body parts, even in the knowledge that she was menstruating. This heinous behaviour took place on school premises without an appropriate adult present. In the end, the four officers found no cannabis.
Whether it's her zest for life, her passion and commitment to education, or trust in people and the system, the moment the police violated her body, her flame for life was undoubtedly extinguished. In a moment she became an adult, her innocence shattered.
On 25 May 2020, Minneapolis officers arrested George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man, after a convenience store employee called 911 and told the police that Mr Floyd had bought cigarettes with a counterfeit $20 bill. Seventeen minutes after the first squad car arrived on the scene, Floyd, aggressively pinned down between three officers, was unconscious and showing no signs of life.
The experiences of Child Q and George Floyd are both symptomatic of a system that refuses to respect their humanity and are horrific examples of institutional racism. Child Q's experience follows the Sewell Report in the UK which did not attribute institutional racism as the primary force behind the exclusion of countless numbers of Black and Brown people. Instead, it played around with lofty concepts and made a few robust recommendations while dancing around the issue that eliminates Black and Brown people from the mainstream.
In the case of Floyd, being 'roughed up' by white police officers draws sharp parallels with the experience of our parents in the sixties and seventies. Decades later, the internal and external forces that crushed the Windrush communities remain firmly intact.
Institutional racism is not the only factor that drove the mistreatment of Child Q and the death of George Floyd. The inability to see Black and Brown people as equal to white people is the second factor, and this has been an issue for centuries.
Much of it is predicated on the curse of Ham. Genesis 9 recounts how God blessed Noah and his sons Shem, Ham, and Japheth after the flood, reiterating the blessing given in Eden to the be fruitful, multiply and populate the earth. Not long after, Noah planted a vineyard, overindulged in the fruit of his labour, got drunk and lay uncovered in his tent. His sons Ham, the father of Canaan 'saw the nakedness of his father' and told his brothers, who covered their father. When Noah woke up from his stupor, he condemned Ham's bad behaviour, saying 'Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be to his brothers.'
It is hard to comprehend that a narrative so lean in detail has so often been weaponized to promote white people as the superior race over Black people, and at other times employed to justify the enslavement of Black Africans on the grounds that they were descendants of Ham.
Yet I sometimes wonder if this theory has been unconsciously imbibed by some in our society, inadvertently emboldening the discriminatory system. I am not suggesting the police officers at the heart of the Child Q situation were familiar with this doctrine - I would be surprised if they were. But I do think this doctrine has given theological justification in some circles to treat Black people as less than.
How can this racialised global construct be deconstructed? As a starting point it requires the privileged to continue to reflect on the Divine community, God's interdependence. All the partners in God's trinitarian life are united in a single coherent unified divinity. Their individuality and diversity are defined by their relationships with each other. The divine partners indwell one another without losing or compromising their differences. It is love, love for self and love for others that binds the diverse life of God in an undivided unity.
This model of unity in diversity is eloquently explored by a white Western theologian, Miroslav Volf, in his influential book Exclusion and Embrace. The image of embrace captures the possibility of making sacrificial and vulnerable space within oneself for the 'othered.'
Volf argues that only by making such space for the other, can we begin to see and respect the world and theologies that others see and read. This does not demand a loss of self; instead it calls for a limiting of self.
Reflection, whether it be on the words of Jennings or Volf, must at some point lead to action and one group that has excelled in this is Black Lives Matter. Alicia Garza and Opal Tometi, the organisers of BLM, have continuously reinforced the need for action to follow reflection and the movement itself shot into action with a social media hashtag, #BlackLivesMatter, after the acquittal of George Zimmerman who shot Trayvon Martin in 2012. It was BLM's response to the murder of George Floyd that then firmly placed it on the international landscape and it has continued to spearhead demonstrations against police brutality worldwide.
Our Christian history is replete with names that have converted words into action, Sojourner Truth being one such person. Sojourner was perhaps the most famous African American woman in the 19<sup>th century, and for good reason. She was not just an evangelist but a women's rights activist who became known for her speech with the famous refrain 'Ain't I a Woman?'. Similar activists worth noting include Bonhoeffer and Nelson Mandela.
Today's Church, emulating yesterday's Church, needs to practise a theology of protest. I was delighted to hear about the hundreds of protesters that marched through east London in support of Child Q, rightly chanting 'power to Black girl Child Q' and 'safe schools'.
But where was the Church? A theology of protest invites the Church to embody its creative anger and, while speaking truth to power, demand that 'justice rolls like a river and a never-ending stream.' If there is an incident that should have eclipsed the importance of press releases and the circulation of statements among Church bodies, it is this one.
Ideally, faith communities and society need to continue parading the UK streets chanting 'Ain't I a Woman?'.
Wale Hudson-Roberts is Justice Enabler at the Baptist Union of Great Britain and the pastor of John Bunyan Baptist Church in Cowley, Oxford.
