Beyond Colorblind

Redeeming Our Ethnic Journey

Sarah Shin

• Publisher: IVP
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780830888979
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Outreach Magazine Resource of the YearForeword INDIES Award FinalistFor a generation or so, society has tried to be colorblind. People say they don't see race. But this approach has limitations. In our broken world, ethnicity and racial identity are often points of pain and injustice. We can't ignore that God created us with our ethnic identities. We bring all of who we are, including our ethnicity and cultural background, to our identity and work as God's ambassadors.Ethnicity and evangelism specialist Sarah Shin reveals how our brokenness around ethnicity can be restored and redeemed, for our own wholeness and also for the good of others. When we experience internal transformation in our ethnic journeys, God propels us outward in a reconciling witness to the world. Ethnic healing can demonstrate God's power and goodness and bring good news to others. Showing us how to make space for God's healing of our ethnic stories, Shin helps us grow in our crosscultural skills, manage crosscultural conflict, pursue reconciliation and justice, and share the gospel as ethnicity-aware Christians.Jesus offers hope for healing, both for ourselves and for society. Discover how your ethnic story can be transformed for compelling witness and mission.

PART
ONE

REDEEMING OUR ETHNIC STORIES

1

BEYOND COLORBLIND

Michael, a twenty-four-year-old black man, was sharing with his small group about some hurtful experiences with racism that he had endured in the past year.

An elderly white woman tried to respond to his sharing with grandmotherly kindness.

“Oh Michael, when I see you, I see you. I don’t see your color.”

Michael didn’t know what to say, so he said nothing. But internally he thought, I’m a black man from Los Angeles. If you don’t see my color, you might as well not see me at all.

Using the paradigm of colorblindness, the woman was trying her best to affirm Michael’s humanity and dignity. She was trying to say, “I’m not one of those racist people who thought color was a reason to degrade you.”

But what Michael heard was invalidation: I don’t see you.

Why did they miss each other?

THE LIMITS OF COLORBLINDNESS

In the past, seeing color meant believing that society should be unevenly and unjustly divided by color. Today, many see colorblindness as a corrective to the problems of racism and prejudice. People who are eager to separate themselves from overt racists like to declare themselves colorblind.

You might have picked up this book for one of two reasons: you believe in colorblindness, or you’re disenchanted by it. If you’re the former, you might see our present diversity in the United States and across the world as the triumph of a diverse, colorblind society. Colorblindness and diversity are celebrated in universities, workplaces, and churches alike. We elected a black president, not once, but twice. Surely these are signs of a post-racial society.

However, in 2015, a twenty-one-year-old white man killed nine parishioners and pastors that had welcomed and prayed with him at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, a historic black church in Charleston, South Carolina. When he was apprehended, the man confessed to wanting to start a race war between white and black. He was a self-proclaimed white supremacist.

This massacre is only one of the many stories of heartbreak and injustice affecting the black community. Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, and Sandra Bland have become the known names of black men, women, and children who died at the hands of white men and law enforcement officials who were not indicted. The public outcry against these and many other deaths of black Americans at the hands of police led to the Black Lives Matter movement. Some insist that education is the answer to eliminating racism, but our universities don’t seem any better. In recent years, students vandalized Northwestern University’s interfaith chapel with ethnic and homophobic slurs. Harvard Law School students placed strips of tape across display photographs of black professors. White dorm-mates at San Jose State bullied a black student, calling him the N-word and three-fifths of a person while repeatedly forcing a bike-lock chain around his neck. If education is the answer to racism, why do even our top schools seemed plagued by racial brokenness?

On top of this, Muslim Middle Eastern students at North Carolina State University were shot and killed in an altercation with a white neighbor in 2015. An Asian couple and a Puerto Rican man were gunned down by a white neighbor in Milwaukee for “not speaking English.” The election campaign of 2016 exposed all sorts of rhetoric against Mexicans, immigrants, Muslims, and more. White nationalist movements are more visibly public. Similar nationalist, anti-immigrant, and anti-refugee mantras reverberate through Europe and the rest of the world.

We are not a colorblind society. These issues are not colorblind. They are racially and ethnically charged.

In a documentary about racial peace, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Dr. John Hope Franklin discuss the colorblind issue. Franklin says there are people who think “we don’t need to do anything about the problems that we have” and “just think colorblind and the problems will themselves disappear.”1 Tutu and Franklin assert that colorblind people have a hard time seeing the existing racial inequality and injustice. Individuals claiming colorblindness cannot address racial issues that they cannot see.

Naomi Murakawa, a professor in African American history, writes, “If the problem of the twentieth century was, in W. E. B. Du Bois’s famous words, ‘the problem of the color line,’ then the problem of the twenty-first century is the problem of colorblindness, the refusal to acknowledge the causes and consequences of enduring racial stratification.”2 This might be why you are in the second camp of being disenchanted with colorblindness, because you’ve found that colorblindness does little to help dismantle existing injustice. In The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander helps document the reality that today the United States holds more black adults in correctional control (prison, jail, probation, or parole) than the total number of slaves that existed before the abolition of slavery.3 It’s slavery in the twenty-first century by another name. If you are part of an ethnic community that is struggling with the lasting effects of racism on your personal life and family, colorblindness isn’t much comfort in your time of need.

The second point that Tutu and Franklin raise is that differences are not inherently bad. In fact, according to Tutu, “differences are not intended to separate, to alienate. We are different precisely in order to realize our need of one another.”4 Colorblindness seems to deny the beautiful variations and cultural differences in our stories. How would you feel if you shared something that’s part of your Chinese, black, Irish, or Colombian background, and someone replied, “I’m colorblind!”? Blind to what? The food, stories, and cultural values that make up the valid and wonderful parts of who we are?

Colorblindness, though well intentioned, is inhospitable. Colorblindness assumes that we are similar enough and that we all only have good intentions, so we can avoid our differences. Given the ethnic tensions exposed by the 2016 election, we’re seeing instead that our stories are different, and those differences cannot be avoided. Racially charged, ethnically divisive comments flood our social media outlets and news screens. Good intentions alone are ineffective medicine for such scars. The idea that we have transcended ethnic difference has been exposed as a mirage.

We don’t live in a world that is in need of colorblind diversity because diversity that rests on colorblindness seems to lead to chaos. We need something beyond colorblindness, something that both values beauty in our cultures and also addresses real problems that still exist in our society decades after the civil rights movement.

THE SILENCE OF OUR WELL-INTENTIONED CHURCHES

Our churches often avoid the topic of ethnicity and race because we don’t think it’s relevant to our faith, or we’re afraid of offending people and trying to avoid being “political.” More often than not, we don’t know how to talk about it and withdraw from conversations about race or ethnicity. We lack the skills, language, and understanding to be able to share the gospel in our diverse and divided contexts.

Perhaps the reason Christians have little to say is that, for a time, we bought into the secular world’s gospel of colorblind diversity as the answer to our problems of ethnic division. Colorblindness often meant polite avoidance or silence, inside and outside the church.

Problems with Colorblind Diversity in the Church

• ■ Lack of biblical literacy on ethnicity
• ■ Lack of understanding self
• ■ Lack of understanding others
• ■ Irrelevant, harmful witness and stewardship that causes more harm and pushes people away from the gospel and from trusting Jesus
• ■ A distant, ineffective church

Instead of being a prophetic voice, many churches also opted for colorblindness (see figure). In buying into colorblindness, we did not examine the Scriptures’ rich depth of insight into God’s creation and intent for ethnicity, and we lacked biblical literacy on the issue, leading to lack of theological reflection, formation, and repentance. Scripture formed no foundation for ourselves as ethnic beings. We either denied ethnicity as valuable or bought into the secular world’s understanding of ethnicity. This robbed us of the opportunity to hear the stories of people who are ethnically different than us. We are shocked and unsure of how to engage when we hear of things such as a race-related incident or hate crime. Our lack of ethnic identity understanding for ourselves and those around us led to a proclamation of a gospel that is irrelevant or powerless in addressing real aches, pains, and questions. Racially and culturally unaware witness and involvement in our communities caused distrust; we sometimes did more harm than good and pushed people away from us—away from opportunities to hear the gospel and away from trusting Jesus. What resulted was and is a distant and often irrelevant, unaffected church.

The Christian story is one that acknowledges that we are fundamentally broken. Why would the realm of ethnicity and race be exempt from the influence of sin? Colorblindness mutes Christian voice and thought from speaking into ethnic brokenness. In holding onto colorblindness as the solution, we as Christians are trying to doggy-paddle when we actually need to learn how to swim. We might sink in our attempts to stay afloat or cause others to drown as we thrash about in our good intentions.

Our world is in need of the gospel, a good news that goes beyond colorblindness that is not afraid of addressing ethnic differences. When it comes to ethnicity, our world needs Christian voices to call for change and reform with Jesus as the transforming center of it all. How can we relevantly live out the gospel in such a hotbed of emotions, scars, division, and chaos? If we avoid this topic now, we withdraw into ineffectual witness in word and deed. And we leave a broken and hurting world, friends and strangers, in chaos.

Figure 1. The colorblind gap

GOING BEYOND COLORBLINDNESS

When Michael was told “I don’t see your color” by the older woman in his small group, he heard something like this: “I don’t want to hear about or acknowledge some of the most beautiful parts of who you are ethnically and culturally, and I don’t want to walk with you in the pain of what you have experienced racially.”

This was a Christian-to-Christian interaction that yielded invalidation and distrust. How much more harm might have been done if this had been a conversation between a Christian and nonbeliever?

Suppose you find out that a friend was sexually assaulted or harassed. As you speak with the friend, you say, “I care about you and you’re my friend, but talking about what happened to you makes me uncomfortable. So can we talk about all the other things we have in common and avoid this painful part of your life because it’s awkward and uncomfortable for me? Thanks.” What would your friend say? That’s probably the end of the friendship because you’re clearly not acting as a real friend. You’re conveying that this friendship is about your own convenience and comfort—an act of selfishness and self-protection that bruises Christians and non-Christians alike.

Oscar Wilde writes,

If a friend of mine gave a feast, and did not invite me to it, I should not mind a bit. But if a friend of mine had a sorrow and refused to allow me to share it, I should feel it most bitterly. If he shut the doors of the house of mourning against me, I would move back again and again and beg to be admitted. . . . If he found me unworthy, unfit to weep with him, I should feel it as the most poignant humiliation.5

Real friends aren’t afraid of looking at a friend’s real scars. And the scars that people experience in their culture, ethnicity, and race are places that need the gospel. Evangelism without real friendship and community without real concern for the needs of others is a hollow-sounding, empty gong.

Our ethnic scars are not always racial. Sometimes they are from idolizing things that our ethnic cultures prize. For example, in Asian cultures that emphasize family honor, honoring parents has often meant unequivocal obedience to the parents’ dreams of financial success and prestige for their children, often at the cost of a child’s dreams and desires. Language, worldview, and generational differences exacerbate some of the relational difficulties between parent and child. This, combined with something akin to the mentality of “saving face” for the family’s reputation, can lead to broken family relationships, resentment, or mental health issues such as depression and anxiety. Non-Asian friends and pastors often try to counsel Asian Americans by giving them suggestions that are distinctly non-Asian, and these solutions end up causing more problems. Our ability to love and live out the gospel relevantly involves engaging the reality of ethnicity.

Instead of being colorblind, we need to become ethnicity aware in order to address the beauty and brokenness in our ethnic stories and the stories of others (see figure). But this is a road with treacherous ditches and potential roadblocks, and conversations full of tension, confusion, accusation, pain, and shame. Some of us represent the oppressed or the oppressor, ethnic enemies, strangers. We’ve seen conversations about race and ethnicity go south, real fas...