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A school teacher racially abused me in the first year of secondary school. My parent’s response to the incident taught me a great deal about how Christians respond to discrimination. It was 1976. In my first metalwork class, my schoolmates and I, barely out of primary school, were introduced to our first project. I struggled with the design phase and so, like any inquiring schoolboy, raised my hand to signal that I needed help. My teacher, responded with a startling comment. He said, “If you don’t get this right, I will put you on a banana boat back to Jamaica.” I was shocked. Some of my classmates were equally stunned, but others laughed out of a sense of pre-pubecent embarassment. After school, at home, I rehearsed the incident for my parents. They were dismayed but had contrasting responses to my predicament. My mother, a deeply spiritual woman of prayer, declared, she was going “to talk to Jesus.” This turn of phrase was code for intercessory prayer. Like the German theologian Dorothee Soelle, my mother understood prayer to be an act of protest to God against injustice. In contrast, my father, was more of a liberation theologian, and therfore, visible, direct action in the eartly realm proceeded any form of spritual reflection. He told me he was going to ‘talk’ to my metalwork teacher. The recent booing of the England football team by some of their fans - for their anti-racism gesture of taking the knee - along with the reporting of The England and Wales Cricket Board’s investigation into players historic racist and sexist tweets - took me back to the events of 1976, and the question of how to respond to racism? Should we protest in private or public, in prayer or direct action? Much depends on how we view racism. Is it a personal difficulty to overcome or a human catastrophe visited for far too long on black and brown people? For my father it was the latter, racism was a great human suffering which he had to confront unequivocally. Now, I don’t know what my father said to the teacher, but I can say that my classmates and I never experienced any form of verbal discrimination again. I am not saying my mother’s prayers didn’t count in some way, but in the young minds of my schoolmates and I, my Jamaican father’s resistance set the standard for confronting discrimination.