#multiethnicity

In Church as It Is in Heaven, Jamaal E. Williams and Timothy Paul Jones. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press|Praxis, 2023. Summary: Two pastors, one black, one white, describe the thick formative practices that have helped them foster a multiethnic church, following the form of liturgy used in their and others’ congregations. I recall a certain bright-eyed optimism among evangelicals in the…

Mixed Blessing, Chandra Crane, Foreward by Jemar Tisby. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2020. Summary: The author describes her own challenges and blessings of being a person of mixed ethnic and cultural identity, and how the Christian can affirm and include the growing number of mixed identity persons. “So what are you?” can be one of the most difficult questions for a person born of…

There’s this tendency I noticed we have- a tendency to mock relatively minor aspects of white culture. For example:

“Haha, look at the fellow white person set out their dinner table! Meat, potatoes, and vegetables! Seasoned with only salt and pepper! We white people are uncreative. Haha, I’m such a racially aware ally!!!”

And I think I get why we do this-- since white people tend to trample all over other cultures, we try to counteract that by devaluing our own. We acknowledge that white people do this thing, and we feel like if we make fun of it, somehow we’re being helpful. We think tearing down our culture = lifting others up.

But mocking white culture doesn’t actually mean I value others any more. It doesn’t mean I take on an attitude of serving and learning. Making fun of how my family cooks food doesn’t mean I have magically gained the ability to respect other cultures.

Oh, but it’s so much easier. It’s easier to make fun of my family eating plain salted green beans than it is to acknowledge that my skin color privileges me in ways I never have to think about. Throwing out a “White people, am I right?!?” makes me feel like I’ve made myself an ally without actually ever having done the hard, uncomfortable work of examining my own privilege, learning how to relinquish said privilege, and submitting myself to others. 

That’s all very uncomfortable for us to practice. We’re afraid we’re going to mess up and say the wrong thing. It’s awkward, and we don’t like it. So we cop out by mocking mashed potatoes because it’s just enough to ease our internal conflict.

If we truly want to pursue justice, not just as a trend or political leaning, but as a part of our lives that we live out we’ve got to grow beyond mocking our dinner dishes. We’ve got to be okay talking about the really uncomfortable parts of being white. We’ve got to practice silence, practice learning, and practice submission. And all the discomfort that comes with it.

It’s only been a few years that I really started to care about the ways that my ethnicity intersects with my spirituality. For the longest time I believed that to be Christian meant you had to leave all aspects of your old identity behind. And that’s true to a point. There are certain aspects of one’s life that one should give up. Culture and ethnicity are not one of those however. 

The more I thought about it, the less it made sense. If I had to give up my old culture, what was the new culture I was stepping into? The Christian culture? As I analyzed what it meant to step into “Christian culture”, I realized that it came from a very WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) perspective. Men had to cut their hair short and women had to wear skirts. You had to sing hymns at church. The U.S.A and capitalism were your new best friends. 

In high school as I discovered the ideology of socialism, I started to come into conflict with my beliefs. Didn’t Jesus help those who helped themselves? Wasn’t America a blessed country because it believed in God? As I started to delve deeper into the Scriptures, I started to see that there was something the church I had grown up in had been missing all along. Jesus truly and deeply cared about the poor. The early Church acted on a model where everybody helped those who were in need. They shared their lives and made sure all had enough to live. This impacted me deeply. I had a new way to view Scripture. I just had nobody to share it with and nobody to help guide me in my new understanding. 

When I showed up to that first LaFe Bible study, I had no idea of the bigger picture I was stepping into. I had no idea that there was a staff team that had been praying for an ethnic specific ministry to start up. I had no idea that there had been a former Bible study for students of color which had failed. I had no idea I would end up being called to work for InterVarsity because God would instill a heart for LaFe in me. I was just a junior in college who was looking for some Christian community, something I had never truly had. 

As I kept coming out to the LaFe Bible study and eventually joined leadership within it, there was a healing process that God took me through. I learned that God had created culture. I learned that each culture brought a small fragment of God with them. Together, all of us would create a bigger picture of who God is.For the first time in my life, I was hearing that my culture had something of value to offer. Christianity became a whole lot bigger. I was in a room with people who understood where I was coming from. Who encouraged me to embrace how God created me. God was doing something amazing in my heart. And over the next few years, God started working in the hearts of a lot of Latin@s on campus. 

This past week, UCSD had their Spring Retreat. I got a chance to teach the first half of the Gospel of Mark.  It was amazing. What was also amazing was that there were a good number of LaFe students in both the Mark 1 class. By good number, I mean 3-4. This lead to an interesting dynamic. 

Many of the LaFe Bible studies tend to focus on the ways that Jesus is at work both in our own spiritual lives, but also in the oppressive systems around us. Jesus was truly an advocate for bringing justice into the world around him. He sought out those on the margins of society and brought them into His Kingdom. He denounced the hypocritical religious figures of the time. He broke a lot of rules. As Latin@s we live in a system that works against us. To be able to see how Jesus wants to heal a broken system is something new to many of us. As I said earlier, many of us grew up in churches where Jesus, capitalism and patriotism are one and the same. 

This last week taught the staff team at UCSD that you can’t just pray for a more diverse fellowship without expecting anything to change in the culture as well, as Jason Belcher said. As we delved deeper into figuring out who Jesus was and how he came to change the world, it was obvious to many of the LaFe students that there was one vital piece missing. We, the staff team, weren’t always addressing that beyond Jesus coming to transform individual lives, he was also coming to challenge systems. The LaFe students felt like everybody except them was missing this. They weren’t wrong. Even as I compared teaching notes with another teacher, I realized that I had focused on the oppression felt by the bleeding woman more closely than their notes. It was an interesting position to be in. This created several different conversations over the week with both the students and the staff about how to best tackle this issue.

I praise God though, that the staff team at UCSD truly and deeply cares about multiethnicity. Everybody was open to opening up the conversation to the ways that Jesus wants to also bring change to the systems we live in. They also decided to rethink about ways that we could teach Mark next year. It was a really cool moment to be in. 

This came through on my fandom blog but as it was personal and interested in the evolution of my identity I copied here for later. I am mainly: Russian/German, Choctaw Native American, a small part Jewish and Irish through adoption. 

epochryphal replied to your post:epochryphal said: you’re multiracial? :0 *hopes is...

hm interesting! how has that changed yr self-perception and interactions with others? sounds like you don’t id as white, then. mm & i’m french canadian / w.european; my great-granma’s fixed on this teensy bit of portuguese, & my dad’s fam spoke french

Long reply ahoy!

It's made me take notice, generally. I love cultures and histories and I'm very proud of the peoples in my family. But knowing what I know, and taking those things into myself, has definitely made the biases around me more glaring. The casual racism, I guess you could say. 

It's also brought up another problem where, well, at first glance most (all) people assume I'm only 'white', and there's a lot attached to that (just like there is to every other ethnic label), and I find that a lot of the time because I look a particular way I experience a lot of guilt over claiming other things, or that I'm not allowed to belong to these other groups because I look like the one group that - in my personal experience - is set apart/regarded with suspicion/never included in discussions of 'ethnicity'. 

hm interesting! how has that changed yr self-perception and interactions with others? sounds like you don’t id as white, then. mm & i’m french canadian / w.european; my great-granma’s fixed on this teensy bit of portuguese, & my dad’s fam spoke french

Long reply ahoy!