Archbishop's Notebook

I’m not surprised that black people are still eight times more likely than white people to be stopped and searched by the police, despite the less frequent use of those powers. It happened to me regularly in the 1990s. One rainy night I was driving through the City of London in one of the cars loaned to bishops for their work, when a constable flagged me down. It was winter and a scarf covered my dog collar. I asked him repeatedly why I had been stopped. He replied repeatedly and with increasing agitation, ‘Just open the boot.’ Then he asked me what I did. When I said, ‘I’m the Bishop for Stepney’, and I removed the scarf from around my neck and he saw my collar, he nervously gasped, ‘Whoops.’ I felt a bit sorry for him and the small world he lived in. Black man with nice car? Black man a bishop? They didn’t fit his stereotypes. I would like to think that experience enlarged his outlook — at least a bit.

It is 25 years since Stephen Lawrence was murdered in a London suburb, solely because he was black. The subsequent Stephen Lawrence Inquiry, chaired by Sir William Macpherson of Cluny, which I helped to compile, uncovered in this particular case, ‘institutional racism’ in the Metropolitan Police. That carefully chosen wording has been misquoted ever since. We did not say that police were institutionally racist, as if it were official police policy to stigmatise black people. It was — and clearly still is — more subtle. Institutional racism is the product of unwitting prejudice, ignorance, carelessness, stereotyping and a reluctance to change. That aggregates to a festering prejudice. And it’s widespread. Try this Q&A test. Q: How many Anglicans are people of colour? A: Most of them. Whoops!