It wasn’t a movie, it was real

The entire world watched in horror as we saw the cruelty which unfolded across our TV screens in this, the twenty-first century.
One policeman in Minneapolis pinned a black man down with his bent knee on the man’s throat,
while he said, ‘I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe’, in a plea for his life.
Three other policemen stood by casually and allowed this barbaric act to happen.
Despite pleas for his life, in nine minutes George Floyd’s life blood was drained from him.
So we ask ourselves, did these four human beings just take another human being’s life?
Yes, and it wasn’t a movie, it was real.
This shameful and painful scene will be permanently etched in our minds and emotions as long as we live, and as long as the world lasts.

Another scene which I will always remember was a visit to a slave-holding fort in Africa.
We visited a small building in which you could hardly stand up straight because the ceiling was  so low.
Yet, two rows of shelves had been built for captured Africans to be crammed in like books on a shelf.
Added to that, ventilation was practically non-existent
and in agony some might well have moaned, ‘I can’t breathe’ before they died.
The records reveal that no less than twenty million Africans were transported from Africa to the Caribbean and to the Americas
by the British, French, Spanish, Dutch and Portuguese.
It is estimated that between 1651 and 1808 British slave ships transported approximately 1.9 million slaves to the British West Indies.
These figures do not include those who were killed during collection in Africa,
those who died while in slave forts, those who jumped overboard or who died on the long sea voyage.
In the British West Indies, the slave trade was the indispensable handmaid of the sugar industry
and in the eyes of the British colonial masters sugar was established as ‘king’.
Slaves worked very long hours, under inhuman conditions.
They were abused physically, verbally, and sexually – especially the women.
Slaves were regarded as cheap labour and classed in the plantation ledgers as cattle.
They were unpaid, never compensated and were the total property of the slave masters.
Their slave labour fuelled the production of sugar, rum and molasses, commodities which were transported to Britain.
Hence the institution of the triangular slave trade which lasted for centuries.
Sadly, the psyche which saw black people as sub-human and subjugated our ancestors, still exist within our societies today.
The sin of institutional racism is still with us.
I think that it was Shakespeare who said, ‘The evil that men do lives after them’.
So let us not wonder how we got here, if we are honest we know how we got here.

Tragic though it is, let us see George Floyd’s death as a gift as it serves as a wake-up call not only to America, but to all countries.
Thank God, the younger generation across the world, especially millennials,
are showing strong concerns through peaceful demonstrations;
in the same way that they are determined about climate change, and other social justice issues.

Let us pray:
Father God, help us to examine ourselves and let this be a time of renewal in our lives;
a time for re-educating ourselves so that we reject the evils of racism and speak out against it.
Help us to strive for a world in which we truly value each other, regardless of the colour of our skin.
Creator God, you made and value each of us and it must grieve your heart to see how some of us are being demeaned.
Help us all to banish the darkness of racism from our thoughts, attitudes and actions.
Please give us your grace to forgive and genuinely reach out to each other in Love and Light.

Amen

Glynne Gordon-Carter