I'm ready to give up...

...on life in the South.

I love Dr. Amy Laura Hall. I think that she is doing a wonderful job of calling us to examine the narratives that the world is giving us in order to live as faithful followers of Christ. But today she missed the point. She told us that she has heard from some of us about the Black-White dialogue in the South. She said that she is aware that life here includes more than just those who are Black or White, but that when we start arguing over who is more oppressed, then evil has won. I actually agree with that point. When we compete over our oppression, we give in to Satan and stop living into the church we are. I don't want to convince her that I'm more oppressed. I'm certainly less oppressed than many people in my classes. My problem was that after Dr. Hall told us that she knows there are Asians and latino/as in the area, she proceeded to talk about race and oppression in Black and White terms. It appeared that she was simply subsuming all non-Western European people groups into African-Americans and their oppression.

Dr. J. Kameron Carter was the guest lecturer in Ethics today. You may recognize his name from some of my other posts on race. This is the professor who told us that salvation comes from Africa. I tend to dread all of his lectures because he usually makes me cry. Today, he defined October 12, 1492 as the exact time when theology got off track and started to be a discourse of race and of culture. It was Columbus' landing in the Caribbean which allowed modernity to occur. I'm not sure I'm convinced, but even more, I'm disturbed by his narration which is, again, very American-centric. He brought all stories in the world into the story of the American South and the African-American community here.

I don't want to negate the experiences of those in the South. I know that the history of the American South is incredibly horrible. I know that American slavery was especially oppressive. And I'm not trying to initiate escapism. I know that life in Nevada, California, Oregon, Idaho, Washington, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Utah is not perfect. Racism certainly still exists in the West, in different forms perhaps, but it is there nonetheless. Don't think I'm avoiding these problems. I have been told by a boyfriend that his parents would never allow him to marry a Mexican woman, while I looked back at him wondering if he realized I was Mexican. I have been told by my friends' parents that they hate Hispanics, and then lived in the fear that they might see me with my dad or grandparents and forbid me from spending time with their children. I've lived in the racism of the West.

No, I'm not trying to escape racism. I'm trying to escape the concept that all minorities are African-American, that all stories are the same. If you want to write a narrative of all humans living under the curse of sin, of all humans being redeemable, of all humans living only by the grace of God, then I will get on board immediately. There are ways that we are all the same. My history is not one of them. When Carter recalls Oct. 12, 1492, I don't hear the inauguration of slavery in the South. I hear echoes of massacres and the removal of peoples from their tribal lands to reservations. I hear the story of the US government forcing the Navajo people to reduce the size of their flocks, resulting in the starvation of the people come winter. My narrative is different, and I want out. I want out of the land where my narrative has to be one of either slavery or slaveowner. I want out of the story where I am forced to fit into a preconceived notion of what it means to be a theologian or a Christian. I want out of the classes where I am told to tell a different narrative than that of the world, and then told that the new narrative is defined by Black and White. I'm ready to give up on life in the South.