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Good morning. In headlines over the weekend the issue of race seemed to crop up, time and again. 'Birmingham Goalkeeper 'shaken up' by alleged racial abuse' said one. 'Child Migrants Racially Abused' said another. And then of course, in the major story of the weekend, every news outlet covered the story of the brutal death of Tyre Nicols at the hands of 5 black police officers – raising once more the issue of the difference in policing of black and white citizens. Looking back over my life time, I can't help but feel that while racist speech is now officially unacceptable, racism is still deeply rooted. If explicit, casual, racist remarks have been barred from the arena of acceptable, legal speech, racism itself hasn't simply disappeared - as those headlines witness. When St Paul was preaching in Athens he declared, according to the Book of Acts, that 'From one blood - or from one man - God made all the nations to dwell on the face of the earth'. This belief in the unity of mankind was based on the story of Genesis. But to Paul's Athenian hearers the distinction between Greeks and barbarians was categorical and fundamental - as a distinction between us and them is fundamental to all racist thinking. When Christians in the 19th century held to the theory of a single origin for all humanity - 'monogenesis' as it was known - they were mocked as unscientific. Polygenesis - the theory of multiple human origins - was for a while, the scientific orthodoxy - until twentieth century theories concluded that we are all, so to speak, out of Africa. Humans may exist in diverse communities, differentiated by language, culture and history, but underlying all these differences is a common humanity. Yet if Christian doctrine - and science - teach this unity of humankind - Christians as individuals, and institutionally in churches, have sometimes believed and behaved otherwise. In perhaps the most outrageous example of a denial of common humanity, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel had the word 'Society' branded on the chests of the enslaved people who worked its Caribbean plantations. Today is actually the 200th anniversary of the very first meeting, on the 31st January 1823, of the small group which campaigned successfully for the abolition of enslavement in the British colonies. Most members of that group had been involved in the earlier campaign against the slave trade, but they gathered knowing there was more to do. It seems to me that we still have work to do confronting racism. Growing up I don't remember ever hearing, whether in a classroom or from a pulpit, an explicit explanation of the fact that racism was not only wrong, morally speaking, but scientifically fallacious – a denial of our common humanity. Racism may no longer be expressed in polite public discourse - but we need to do more to ensure that it is confronted head on as a lie.