Chapter 7 - A Black Theological Approach to Violence against Black People: Countering the Fear and Reality of Being “Othered”

Summary

One of my earliest memories is of standing in a playground of my primary school, aged five, as the only Black child being taunted by a larger group of White pupils. I remember clearly standing in the playground as a sea of White faces pointed little jabbing fingers in my direction followed by a well-known expletive “N***r.”

Up to that point in my life, I did not know that I was Black. As the eldest child of Black Caribbean migrants, I had been cocooned within the comparative safety of my extended family and the normativity of that sub-contextual world. Nothing in my previous four years had prepared me for the reality of being in an apparent and conspicuous minority of one. I remember looking around in vain for a familiar and friendly face with which I could identify, but none seemed to exist. I huddled into the corner of the playground, near the far wall, as the White jabbing fingers came closer and ever closer, mouthing in unison the racial epithet “N****r.” In an interesting case of “psychological remembering” or flashback, I remember my first viewing of Michael Jackson's epoch-making musical video, Thriller and witnessing the climactic scene where the frightened and embattled heroine is holed up in a bedroom as an army of fiendish zombies make their way ever so remorselessly towards her bed to devour her, and thinking, “Now this takes me back!”