A voice in the wilderness?

To be sure he won’t be wearing camel hair and he is unlikely to be dining on locusts or wild honey but as Trevor Phillips this week addresses Manchester’s Council for Community Relations his message will be no less prophetic. Challenging and uncomfortable to hear in the true prophetic tradition his concerns will be dismissed by many as alarmist, but go unheeded at society’s peril. As Stevie Wonder recently sung ‘what’s the fuss?’

The Chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality will warn that race relations policy is failing to tackle the roots of ethnic alienation and extremism. A failing which he believes could lead to a ‘New Orleans-style Britain of passively coexisting ethnic and religious communities, eyeing each other uneasily over the fences of differences.’


Reflecting the insidious nature of the problem Phillips contends that ‘we are sleepwalking our way to segregation. We are becoming strangers to each other and leaving communities to be marooned outside the mainstream.’ Such disengagement only fuels the dissatisfaction and disillusion that leads to extremism in all its ugly glory.

As Phillip’s rightly observes ‘segregated communities are set up for destruction’ because the truth is we need each other. As a society we cannot survive and thrive without one another. There is an old film that demonstrates this powerfully. Entitled The Defiant Ones, it depicts two escaped convicts manacled together. One is black and the other is white. They fall into a ditch with steep, slippery sides. One convict claws his way nearly to the top, and just as he is about to make it, he discovers that he can’t get out because he is still manacled to his mate at the bottom, so he slithers back down. The only way they can make it out of that ditch is together – up, and up, and up, then out together. In our world, in our everyday communities we can survive only together. We can be truly free, ultimately, only together.

Waking sleepwalkers maybe dangerous, but this week a voice in the wilderness is alerting us that the alternative is no longer an option.