deprivation is not limited to black people, but black people do suffer unequally in British society from pressures that can contain them. There is a wealth of theological material that applies to this understanding that ‘race’ is concerned with the way that distinctive ethnic groups are kept in positions of powerlessness and deprivation: there is the understanding of the Exodus as God’s work in liberating an oppressed and trapped people; there are those elements in the law which sought to contain