Racism

Shirer’s comments and white evangelicals’ use of her statements are problematic because this way of thinking has been used against African-American Christians for years to prevent us from seeking justice and equality. It’s also used to neutralize our message that our lives matter too. White evangelicals use this way of thinking to deter people of color from protesting and challenging the political status quo. It’s a lazy attempt to avoid issues of race. Many pastors and church leaders don’t want to discuss race and how it affects their churches and denominations, especially during such a heated political climate. It seems that mainline churches would like people of color in their congregations to shut up about race and assimilate into their church culture masked as Kingdom identity.

A new study published in Christianity Today claims to debunk dominant narratives around the 81 percent of white evangelicals who voted for Donald Trump in 2016. New York Times columnist David Brooks shared it and concluded: “Many Evangelicals voted for Trump, reluctantly, because of economics and health care more than abortion and social issues.” If this sounds too good to be true, it’s because it is.

These attacks on people’s innate dignity and sacred worth assault our most cherished moral and religious values. We read in Genesis that all people are made in the image of God. In Paul’s letters, he proclaims that in God earthly divisions fall away, that all people form part of God’s body. Jesus himself promises: Whatever you do to the least of these, you do to me. Attempts to excuse human rights abuses committed against some people are thus not just unconstitutional — they assault God by denigrating and desecrating that divine, indwelling spark.

In the spring prior to the Charleston church massacre, during my daily commute to my older daughter’s school, I noticed a wad of faded red fabric drooping from a flagpole outside of a stranger’s house.

It couldn’t be.

I pulled right to slow down in my lane and looked once and then again to verify. There, tucked beneath the folds of the familiar stars and stripes, two blue lines crossed over the red fabric with the telltale white stars.

According to The Root, Long says he was acting in self-defense, using spray paint and fire after a white supremacist threatened him with a gun. Long alleges that marcher Richard Preston aimed a gun at his head and fired a bullet into the ground.

MY OLDEST SON is about to turn 11, which means he is old enough to both recognize and call out the hypocrisies of the adult world. Here are two recent examples:

• While watching an NBA game, he says that adults are always saying that boys shouldn’t judge girls by their looks, but what else are you supposed to be doing while cheerleaders are doing their moves? And what do cheerleaders have to do with basketball anyway?
• As my wife and I are singing along to old-school hip-hop in the car, he says that if boys are not supposed to talk about girls’ body parts in ways that make them feel like objects, why is it okay for this guy to sing about liking “big butts”? And why is it okay for us—his parents—to be singing along?

These questions make my wife and me squirm. Generally, we try to face things square on, but on the subject of why we tolerate certain messages in the pop culture that we like, we go mum.

But something in Molly Ringwald’s New Yorker piece this spring about watching her ’80s-era Brat Pack movies with her then 10-year-old daughter made me think more deeply about the whole dynamic. Ringwald writes about how uncomfortable she was being confronted by the racist and sexist themes in those movies. The horribly racist caricature of Long Duk Dong in Sixteen Candles. The under-the-table panties scene in The Breakfast Club. The casual ways boys in those movies talked about trading drunk girls as if it were normal.

THE CIVIL RIGHTS movement. #BlackLivesMatter. Racial reconciliation. It would be easy for me to imagine the words of Eliza in the musical “Hamilton” and sing, “I’m erasing myself from the narrative.”

At first glance, those statements, movements, and conversations might be mistakenly boiled down to division and brokenness between two Americas—one black, one white.

But I’m neither. I’m “yellow.”

I didn’t choose to erase myself in history, but it’s what I learned. Asian Americans weren’t erased from American history as much as we just didn’t exist in the Plymouth Rock story of East Coast immigration, with its emphasis on Europe’s poor and hungry “huddled masses.” We learned that “assimilation” was as much about becoming “white” as it was about becoming “American.” We learned that the civil rights movement was a fight for equal rights for black Americans, with little connection to “others” like myself. There was no category for someone who looked like me unless it was Oriental, chink, or gook—racial slurs I first heard as a child on suburban playgrounds (and still hear as an adult), slurs tied to a history and wars I knew very little about. In America, race is a social construct divided most simply between black and white.

I also learned that the best I could hope for was to become a model minority, an “honorary white” who would never be considered a “real” American.

So I just didn’t become one. In an act of rebellion, I chose not to become a naturalized U.S. citizen until a few years ago. In the process I learned what it means to opt into a binary conversation with a different, clear, defined perspective. I needed to learn who I was, created as a Korean-American woman carrying God’s image. I needed to learn that Jesus, Mary, Martha, and Esther weren’t blue-eyed or blonde.

“It is an atrocity that an unarmed young man was shot at twenty times in his own backyard and shows the urgent need in these times for intervention against police misconduct. We will call for a complete and thorough investigation into this young man’s death," Rev. Al Sharpton said in a statement. 

As a black woman, my confidence is not just perceived as arrogance, but as intimidating and angry.