This month has been an interesting one for the Bray family. Our child is growing strong, we’ve started posting a lot of videos on YouTube, but the most interesting of all has been our chats about race.

The death of George Floyd has sparked up peaceful protests and conversations about race all over the world. It’s brought into the question police in America treat people of colour in unjustly but it has also brought up conversations about racial injustice in all parts of the world, not just overt racism but covert racism. Conversations at work, church, and all over popular media. Personally, I believe it’s a good thing for people to talk about their experiences and let others know the negative things people of colour have to go through on a regular basis. It’s important for those experiences not just to be heard and forgotten about but for deliberate and well thought out actions to be planned in order to prevent these experiences from happening to future generations.

I’ve been very fortunate in the fact that I’ve grown up in a very diverse part of the UK, went to diverse schools, a primarily black church and had diverse friends. I haven’t had the experience of being the only or one of the few people of colour in an area, a school or a group of friends. I haven’t been stopped and searched by the police, falsely accused of a crime or treated outwardly differently from most others. This is not to say I haven’t experienced any indirect racism or know of others that have experienced racism in the UK.

During my time at university in Kent, I have been one of the few people of colour in a pub when a racist joke was readout. I have heard the n-word used on various occasions to refer to people of colour and have been starred at by all the members of staff in a small supermarket whilst walking out having not purchased any items. I believe there have been smaller less obvious occasions but they’ve been removed out of my mind. But where most racism occurs is in the shadows, in communities and groups of similar races and like-minded people.

On our trip to Ghana last year we heard a lot of racist comments being made to the Chinese, Hannah has informed me of times people have said racist things about black people, I have heard racist things said about white people in groups of black people, these sorts of comments, in my opinion, are what contributes to keeping racism alive in this day and age and it’s important (especially as Christians) to stop these sorts of comments from going further and call out our brothers and sisters who say them.

We live in a fallen broken world and nothing is perfect, racism isn’t something that we can’t completely eradicate but I think it’s something we should work towards, especially in the church. We tend to bring up topics like homophobia, adultery and pre-marital sex in Christian circles but it’s very rare to talk about race and it hasn’t been until recently that these topics have been spoken about more and more, racism is a sin, and we see it spoken about time and time again in the new testament. Christians should be the ones who bring people together, break down barriers and lead people to Christ.