I have a dream

I woke in the night on Friday from quite a vivid dream. I was helping to make a “rap” record, and I was the only “white” person in the studio. (I am not really white – my face and chest are pink, my arms are brown, especially in summer, but I do have white legs.) Everyone in the studio who knew how the equipment worked was “black”, and they were very friendly and helpful, amused by my ignorance of the technology, but not condescending. Suddenly, back to real life – and there in the dark, only partly awake, I knew I had to write a blog post about racism.

Martin Luther King made a very famous speech, in which he said, “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character.” And what is the news from America? While the country has definitely moved on, it happens that all twenty actors nominated for the top “Oscars” this year are white. The Master of Ceremonies at the Award Ceremony will be a black man, Chris Rock; and the President of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is a black woman, Cheryl Boone Isaacs (pictured above). But not one black actor has been nominated for any of the top twenty awards. If it had just happened once it would have looked like just chance, but when it happens two years running, it starts to look more like cultural bias.

In the United States of America, approximately 13% of the population is from African-American stock, descended from Africans taken there against their will. One of my Bahá’í friends, the actor Earl Cameron (now 98 years old), told me that his grandfather was seized from his fishing boat by a passing ship, after the British Parliament had outlawed slavery, and was sold as a slave in the Americas, ending up in Bermuda. Given that the black population of the Americas is there because of direct acts of force and violence, there is great sensitivity about the need now to ensure that everyone is being treated as being of equal value. The Bahá’í religion was founded on the principle of the oneness of mankind. Bahá’u’lláh said: “O people of the world, ye are all the fruit of one tree and the leaves of one branch,” and His son ‘Abdu’l-Bahá said (about a hundred years ago): “Let them look not upon a man's colour but upon his heart. If the heart be filled with light, that man is nigh unto the threshold of his Lord, … be he white or be he black.”

One of the early Bahá’ís in the United States was Louis Gregory, whose parents had been born into slavery, and who became very active with the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá encouraged Louis Gregory to marry a white English lady called Louisa Mathew. They married in 1912. He saw inter-racial marriage amongst the Bahá’ís as an example to the rest of the population, even though such a marriage was actually illegal in some of the States and caused them many problems. Many years later, Martin Luther King counted several Bahá’ís among his friends.

So what of the Oscar nominations? Already this year’s events have jolted the process somewhat, and the membership of the Academy in future will be deliberately steered into a different, and more diverse, direction. History is shaping us, as ‘Abdu’l-Bahá knew it would, in the direction of Martin Luther King’s prophetic dream.