‘Perceiving the Temperature of the Water’: the Swarthmore Lecture, 2022

Lecture by Helen Minnis. Report by Joseph Jones.

Before getting to her title, Helen Minnis, a professor of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at the University of Glasgow, wanted to get something off her chest: ‘I’ll be honest, my response to being asked to do the Swarthmore lecture was mixed… Despite having written more than 100 scientific papers on child psychiatry, what was I being asked to talk about? Racism.’ Her daughter had laughed at the idea of Friends scanning Meeting rooms with binoculars, looking for a person of colour.

But, Helen went on, ‘I had been involved in some fascinating work on this topic over the previous few years, so I realised… that I do have something useful to say’. Those watching (250 or so at Friends House, and more than 450 online) would soon agree.

Readers who missed it should find the repeat on YouTube (or wait for the book later in the year), rather than assume we can convey the fullness of the ministry here. But in truth, live in the room, there were moments of surprise – real joyful shock – that will be difficult to replicate if you weren’t there.

Race itself was a racist concept, said Helen. During the transatlantic slave trade, ‘skin colour became a crude way to decide who, in those new colonies, had human rights and who did not’. She preferred the Pulitzer-prizewinning Isabel Wilkerson’s terminology of ‘caste’: ‘an artificial hierarchy that helps determine standing and respect.’

Helen drew on her experiences as a black scientist, which meant ‘asking questions and trying to answer them’. ‘Why do certain questions occur to certain people?’, she asked. ‘I suspect that some of the greatest scientific ideas come to people who have been forced… into an underdog position.’ She offered two examples: Marie Curie, the only person ever to win a Nobel prize in two different sciences, and Patricia Bath, who had to fund her own study before becoming the first African American woman to receive a patent.

Helen addressed Quakers directly when she described the origin of her lecture’s title. It’s from a metaphor of an old fish swimming through the water and encountering two younger fish. ‘Hi guys’, says the fish, ‘hope you’re enjoying the water today’. The two younger fish chorus ‘What is water?’ White people are often blinded by the comfort of their own water, she said – an environment so perfectly constructed in their favour that they forget it’s there at all. By contrast, she offered Nina Simone’s ‘Backlash Blues’ as an example of ‘the level of anger felt by thwarted people’. Then came the words ‘and I’m going to sing it for you now’. What?! Jaws dropped as Helen threw back her head and belted it out in a wonderful, tuneful tone, every word note-perfect. In a Yearly Meeting that came to new understanding of what voices it had been suppressing, it was a magnificent example of what it might have been missing. n

Joe is editor of the Friend. Watch the lecture on YouTube at https://youtu.be/DkdxE2yvPOM.

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