Majority and Minority Perspectives

I had a conversation with a friend the other night that made me pause for thought. Like many other times this year, I am posting about race, but perhaps with a slightly different perspective this time.

She and I were talking about her experiences listening to minorities talk about racism, and she was the first one to express the majority perspective in a way that made me capable of seeing how very similar the two reactions are, even though they are very different in their expressions. To my friend, it seems as though minority speakers are attempting to marginalize her when they speak out against the ways that minorities have been and continue to be marginalized by the Caucasian majority in the United States. When they speak about how the Caucasian majority should care about the minorities living within the borders of the country, they are passionate, perhaps angry, and almost always frustrated by the situation between the ethnic majority and ethnic minorities in this country. My friend reacted with anger and frustration to the minorities that she feels are marginalizing her in their efforts to raise awareness and compassion.

Her response raised my awareness that one of the big problems in this whole debate is that both sides feel marginalized by the other, and neither side has much of an awareness of how the other side feels. I have been caught in the middle for some time now, but I think my sympathies have tended to live with the minorities because I have felt like the majority groups tend to be the oppressors. While I still think that is true, I realize now in a much more powerful way, how minorities marginalize the majority by making them feel like they are worthless in the same way that they have been oppressed.

In light of my friend’s reaction, and in a desire to attempt to bridge the gap so that conversation on race and oppression can take place in a more fruitful way, let me offer a couple of stories that may help those of you who either are Caucasian or for some other reason don’t understand the importance of the race discussion. As you read each of these stories, place yourself in it and imagine what your reaction would be.

1) You are a white African in South Africa. Your family has lived there for generations, and you are a judge in the court system. You receive word that you are being removed from your post because you are a white African. You are therefore not fit to judge black Africans, so you will be replaced with a black African judge.
2) You live in Zimbabwe as a farmer on a small plot of land. The government decides to restructure the farming land, and your farm is being taken away from you because you are a white African instead of a black African. If you want to continue to farm, you need to leave the country, and you can’t find a job doing anything else because those jobs are now reserved for the black Africans. As a result, you are forced to leave Zimbabwe which has been your family’s home for years.
3) You have recently moved to Spain from England, and you run into people on the streets, in the marketplace, and even in your church who tell you that you need to return to England because you do not speak Spanish, which is the official language of that country. If you want to continue to speak English instead of Spanish, and if you want to teach your children English and speak it in your home, if you want to remember the British victories and celebrations, they you don’t belong in Spain, and you need to go back to England.
4) You are an English-speaking Canadian who moves to French-speaking Quebec. You are told that you are no longer allowed to speak English in your stores, advertise in English, have your children attend English-speaking schools, etc because it is against the law in Quebec.

Each of these stories comes out of the stories of what has been happening around the world lately, and if you can understand and feel the anger of each of these situations, then you understand what it feels like to be a minority living in the United States. I have been told that latinos are a different breed of humans who can’t have the same religion, same values, or same friends as Caucasian Americans. I can’t count the number of times that I have been told that all latinos need to go back to Mexico. The first issue with that is that a lot of latinos don’t come from Mexico in the first place. The second issue is that a lot of the latinos I know are in the US legally or are US citizens, either naturalized or natural-born. I have been told that I don’t have the capability to do certain tasks because of my race. I have been told that my (guy) friends’ parents would never let me marry them because of my race. I have been told by my (girl) friends that I should make sure that their parents don’t know my race because they wouldn’t like me any more. I have been told that I should just get over my feelings about these experiences. When you read the above stories, and if you were in those positions, would you want to be told to just get over it?

Two stories in the recent days have brought to the forefront the issues of race again. After the SOTU, I watched the Daily Show with the same friends. While I wasn’t sure that some of it was in good taste, I wasn’t that disturbed until they showed the response by the LA mayor who was speaking in Spanish as the response to the latino population. As he was telling the people to join in and stand up to work for a better country because we are all one people and all one nation, they voiced over his speech making fun of the fact that he was latino. If they reacted the same way to other responses, I might not have been so angry, but the response they gave to the white responders was based on what they were saying instead of on their race.

The second instance that has disturbed me was an article in Duke’s newspaper about a musical group from sunny Bakersfield, CA (yes, CA, so think twice before you say that racism is no longer a problem in the West). They are targeting 11-12 year olds with the message of White Nationalism because they know that is one of the most influential ages. They have racially based songs, and they model for White Nationalist clothes lines. Do me a favor, and read the entire article and think about how you would feel if you were one of the many non-white people reading this article. Here are a couple of notable quotes for you:

”The name of the band is derived from the family's white Prussian ancestry along with the color of the girls' eyes. The girls have also said the name references a chemical that they say was not found at concentration camp sites. "We think it might make people question some of the inaccuracies of the 'Holocaust' myth," the girls told Viceland.com.”
"I don't think that we wouldn't have criminals, although I believe that black people are more likely to be criminals, but I would just want the races to be separate, and I'd like this to happen peacefully.”
“April said that the media is mistakenly interpreting white nationalist beliefs as racist. "We don't necessarily think that we are the best race," she said. "Asians, for example, are generally smarter than us. They score higher on tests. However, white people are more capable and live better lives. We believe the white population is shrinking, and that we're losing autonomy. We've already lost it here in the state of California. The Mexicans are the plurality here, and it's disappointing to see the majority of a population going to a race that is clearly inferior to almost all other races."
“I laugh whenever people get really mad about us, because I think it just makes the anti-racists look kind of ridiculous."

Someone explain to me how this is not racist?

The one good thing that came out of this article was that it gave me a new perspective on the South. When I told a friend here who grew up in the South about this, she asked me if there were really people in California that needed to hear this message. I said yes, it comes up multiple times a year in the Westmont newspaper, and the two responses are usually broken down into people who are minorities or have close friends who are minorities versus everyone else. The minorities and their friends argue that race is still an issue, and everyone else argues that we have moved past racism and the minorities should get over their feelings and overreactions. She said that it seems strange to her because you cannot grow up with that framework in the South. Race is something you have to deal with because you are confronted with it all the time, and for that, I’m glad.

I guess in conclusion I want to say that yes, minorities should welcome in Caucasians and learn to live in and love their culture. They should learn to communicate with them and be patient enough to sit through their cultural ceremonies, even when they don’t care, in order to understand. But this is a two way street. If that is what the Caucasian population expects from the minorities, then the minorities have every right to expect it of them as well. That means that they need to make an effort to live in and love minority cultures, to learn about the languages and customs of the people, and to make an effort to sit through and learn about the ceremonies and traditions of other cultures, even when they don’t care about that culture, in order to understand those around them.

Reflections on the SOTU

I know that the State of the Union is long over for most people by know, but there were two distinct things that came up for me in the course of watching it and the show afterwards. The first was that I don't care quite as much about politics as some other people do. I watched it with 3 friends, one of whom is extremely passionate in his hatred for George W. Bush. I understand that there are distinct reasons for his passion, and I have heard enough of his personal story to understand some of the causes. At the same time, I am not willing to completely write people off when I don't agree with them. There are plenty of things in Bush's speech that I don't like. I wish he wouldn't distort Scripture for one, or conflate Christianity and politics and allegiance to the country for another. I listened to the speech thinking that some of the things he was saying were out and out lies. At the same time, I was thrilled with a couple of things that he said. The emphasis on more responsible uses of energy makes me happy, in spite of the fact that I wish he would drop the Yucca Mountain/Nuclear energy thing unless he is willing to commit the country to the responsible yet expensive adapting of radioactive waste, so it is no longer harmful to the environment or to humans. As I was watching the speech, I was analyzing various points and agreed with some and disagreed with others. I think that the gentleman I was watching with disagreed with everything Bush said. I realized that I am not so wrapped into politics that I cannot agree with anything a person says. I am capable of analyzing the points and agreeing or disagreeing without simply responding emotionally to the person on stage.

This man is able to disagree with Bush; however, I was disturbed by his characterization of Bush as evil. I have been trained well by Westmont, and I can't say that anymore. First of all, do I think that Bush is intentionally acting poorly? No. I think he is genuinely, and if he acts the way he preaches, probably prayerfully working his way through his presidency. Do I think that means he's done everything right? Not by a long shot. Still, the characterization of Bush as evil seems to assume that he (and half of the country) are not seeking to do good (whether we agree that they are doing good or not!). It also reduces humans as created in the image of God.

Whether we agree with politicians, or anyone else, or not, they are icons to God. Icons function as windows to God. They reveal to us something about our creator. They ARE the image of God for us as they are made in his image. I am reminded of Stan Gaede's chapel talk where he answered the question, "Is it alright if I call you Stan?" In that talk, Stan tells us that we need to remember that all humans are made in the image of God and therefore that should govern how we approach all humans. He read the passage below from C.S. Lewis:

The load, or weight, or burden of my neighbour’s glory should be laid on my back, a load so heavy that only humility can carry it, and the backs of the proud will be broken. It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations–these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit–immortal horrors or everlasting splendours. This does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn. We must play. But our merriment must be of the kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously–no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption.

-C.S. Lewis The Weight of Glory

How right Lewis is. How right the view of the Orthodox Church that humans are icons becacuse they are made in the image and likeness of God. We have a lot to learn.

Theology IS Practical

I had a discussion tonight that made me think that there is another reason that I am at Duke was this: Another student in the Div School was telling me that the theology we learn in the classroom is theoretical, and there is a disconnect between that and what happens in the church. She also informed me that she doesn't like professors who preach about moral issues in class because she can't stand that. (Granted, this was in reference to a professor who is rumored to speak against homosexuality, and that is a hot button issue, but still....)

I am so tired of people who tell me that theology isn't practical and who think that it is acceptable to express their own morals but is not permissible for others to express theirs. Granted, it was Telford Work at Westmont who challenged me to accept the non-modern paradigm, but he accomplished it through discussions on the writings of others, and many times those people were Duke professors. For those people who took Telford's classes, these books (with chapters written by Duke profs) may sound familiar: Practicing Theology, The Art of Reading Scripture, Knowing the Triune God, and The Theological Interpretation of Scripture. I don't believe that theology can be unpractical. It can be good theology or bad, but theology is never unpractical.

Our lives are governed by our beliefs, whether we acknowledge that or not. Perhaps that is why I was frustrated by the conversation at church. This student disagrees with the professors morals, so she says that it is inappropriate for him to preach those morals. At the same time, she enrolls in classes in feminist theology and refuses to recognize that those professors are preaching their morals in the same way. They research the topics that are interesting to them, and their approach to those topics is governed by their beliefs. We witness the ways that beliefs determine actions in the church as well. For example, pastors who do not believe that the Eucharist is a vital practice of the church where we glimpse the eternal God will not worry when the Eucharist is left out of the church. Scholars who do not believe that Christian faith is necessary for the proper understanding of Scripture will give priority to secular scholars.

I chose Duke because of the scholars who teach here, but I was looking for non-modern scholars who refuse to divide faith and reason, theory and practice, and the academy and the church. Thus far, I have been completely satisfied with the level of scholarship that has been available here. I have been pushed by professors who are not afraid to tell us that it is important to learn the history of the church councils because you can hear heresies preached from many church pulpits in America every Sunday. They teach us how belief in the doctrine of the Trinity governs the way we pray. Likewise, disbelief in the Trinity also governs the way we pray, preach, baptize, deal with sickness and death; the list is infinite. Perhaps this is the real reason why I love Duke; it is certainly the reason I came here in the beginning.

Culture Shock Continued...

I mentioned that the incidents with the Westmont College Gospel Choir shirts were a transition to some of the larger issues that have been causing me culture shock here in the South. The larger related issue is over the types of music that can be allowed in church. The Westmont Gospel Choir sings a wide variety of music. Our songs include everything from old time slave songs to modern hip-hop to mainstream songs. We performed the gospel medley which includes a large selection of African-American spirituals like other pieces included an Avalon piece (The Glory of the Blood), Hezekiah Walker (Let's Dance), I'll Fly Away (we chose the Spanish version of the old spiritual), and O Sifuni Mungu (a piece in Swahili). If my classmates sat through a Gospel Choir concert, I am guessing that they would be appalled by "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" by U2 and "Where Is The Love" by Black Eyed Peas. This is popular music (and the Black Eyed Peas piece is even rap), and you absolutely do not sing it in a worship setting. The fact that the U2 piece was actually a request from our campus pastor would be unthinable. Several debates have been started in my class by the question of what kind of music is acceptable, and the consensus seems to be that the old spirituals and the "classic" gospel, which I think is along the lines of BeBe Winans, but I'm not entirely sure, are acceptable in church, but you are probably crossing the line if you sing hip-hop, rap, or any other type of music in church. Apparently that kind of music can't be baptized by the church. I am thankful for the tradition of the Gospel Choir which has specifically chosen not to limit its music to one type of gospel. The church has a long history of baptizing the songs of the culture for use in church. This tradition reaches back into classical music and continues through the hymns of Charles Wesley and the musicians of the Great Awakenings to today. If the church can baptize rock and sing it in church, which is what we did every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at Westmont chapel, then it can also baptize the various forms of music popular with the Southern Black community.

In addition, race in the South is defined by black or white. After leaving Westmont, even after leaving Carson City, race was defined as Native American, Asian, Latino, African, but it certainly was not limited to Black or White. Here it is, and if you do not fit into those two labels, then the people here do not know what to do with you, nor do they seem to care. I would expect that the Divinity School would be sensative to issues of ethnicity; however, I have been disappointed. I sat through a lecture by another one of the theology and ethics professors last week where the topic was Race and Immanuel Kant. His premise was that race is a modern construction appearing when Europe began to see itself as Enlightened in contrast to the rest of the world. He sees Immanuel Kant and Max Weber as instrumental in the construction of the concept of race. I actually agree with this analysis. The problem was how he spoke about race. His whole argument was constructed on the notions of race inherent to the history of slavery and segregation in the South. I left the lecture feeling like I had never been so marginalized by a person of another minority before. It was simply assumed that my experience must match his and that of other African-Americans in the South. Well, I'm not African-American, and I'm not from the South. While I have experienced plenty of racism in conversations, my experience is distinctly different from his. When I hear him talk about how we need to be one church and understand one another, and then know that he really doesn't have an interest in hearing my story because it doesn't fit with his, I know that he hasn't provided a solution for the church either.

Labeling race as a modern construction does not change the fact that racism exists, in the South and in L.A. I, and every other ethnic minority in California, can tell you that racism still exists in the west. The difference is that it is more implicit at home. Those rare occassions where it becomes explicit shock and concern the entire community. There were two attacks in the Carson area a while back against a mosque and a synagoge. The whole community stood against those attacks - even people who would make less obvious racist comments in the car with me. The Rodney King Riots have become a symbol of the harm that racism can do. Here in North Carolina, the people do not even know about the riots. A professor used them as an example, but he did not know the name of Rodney King, and the other students did not know what he was talking about. Those acts of violence are the exception though, not the rule. The rule has been the story of my life. I have had to listen to friends' parents tell me that "Mexicans are a different breed." "We have nothing in common with each other." "The Native Americans in Carson are a large part of the gang problem." " No hispanics want to work in America. They are just a drain on the American economy." "Hispanics want to destory the American culture, and they don't care about learning English." Do those statements shock you, or are they similar to things you have said yourself? It is both a blessing and a curse that I do not look Mexican or Navajo. I was given the looks of my Irish and British ancestors, so I am not usually discriminated against because of my looks. At the same time, I am discriminated against because I do not look like a minority, so I don't fit in those communities. I also have the great burden of listening to people talk about my ethinicity without knowing that "one of them" is sitting in their company. It is not acceptable in the West to make those comments to someone's face, but I can attest to the fact that they are said often when the speakers do not think they can be heard.

Life is different here. I was shocked by an article in Durham's newspaper, the Herald Sun about White Supremecists active in the area. A White Supremecist newspaper, the Aryan Alternative ( View other articles about the paper) was thrown into the yard of an interracial couple in Durham. The paper has no formal links to the KKK, but the director of distribution, Glenn Miller, was quoted. "We don't have problems with the Ku Klux Klan, they are good people." He also said that the paper was "against legal abortion, promotion of race mixing and the flooding of America with tens of millions of non-white aliens." (Let's set aside the fact that all whites in America are descendents of immigrants who flooded the country and pushed out the Native American tribes and forced the Mexicans to leave and give their land to the US government.) The paper's front page displayed "a picture of armed soldiers on top of a military truck and black people on a street below. Beside the picture was a headlinie reading, 'White troops battle looting Africans unleashed by Katrina!' and a big headline that said, 'New Orleans: The End Result of a Multi-Racial America. SAVAGES IN THE STREET.'" The paper comes on the hills of the spray-painting of a van owned by a Jewish couple with the letters KKK and three cross burnings in the area.

I am tired of racism, and I am tired of the way the church is perpetuating these divisions. Why do we have Black churches, and White churches, and Latino churches and Chinese churches, and Korean churches, and on and on? The church is the one place where these divisions should not exist. In spite of the fact that our differences are not washed away when we enter a church, we should be worshipping together. "After this I looked, and there before me was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and in front of the Lamb. they were wearing white robes and were holding palm branches in their hands." -Revelation 7:9-10 (TNIV) Those divisions which are a result of human sin in the Garden of Eden and the Tower of Bable are washed away in the blood of the lamb who makes us a new creation. "So in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith, for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus." -Galatians 3:26-28 (TNIV). Once we join the church, our citizenship is in heaven, not in the kingdoms of this world. Our allegiance is to Jesus Christ, not to our nationality, our ethnicity, our sports teams, or anything else. If, like the church in Rwanda, we allow our other allegiances to take priority over our common citizenship in the blood of Christ, we are caught in idolatry. "For he himself is our peace, who ahs made the two one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility, by setting aside in his flesh the law with its commands and regulations. His purpose was to create in himself one new humanity out of th etwo, thus making peace, and in one body to reconcile both of them to God through the cross, by which he put to death their hostility. Consequently, you are no longer foreigners and strangers, but fellow citizens with God's people and also members of his household, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, which Christ jesus himself as the chief cornerstone. In him the whole building is joined together and rises to become a holy temple in teh Lord. And in him you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit." -Ephesians 2:14-16, 19-22 (TNIV).

Culture Shock

When I moved to North Carolina, I was expecting some level of culture shock thanks to warnings from some of my friends who had moved across the country for undergrad. When I arrived here, I was actually suprised to that I was not experiencing much culture shock. What I have come to realize is that the culture of the South is subtlely different than the West coast. Instead of the immediate culture shock that I experienced on Europe Semester when I entered Germany or France and could not speak the language and was overwhelmed by the different history, the culture shock that I am experiencing in this place has hit me piece by piece.

I am learning that my presuppositions from Nevada and California are radically different than the presuppositions that come from growing up in the South. The minor differences caught my attention first.

The South still lives is a semi-Constantinian world, where Christianity can be assumed of almost all of the population. The reality may not hold true to that assumption, but I think it is still made. At any rate, I have seen clearly the differences in a couple of situations. On the bus awhile ago, a man started preaching to the riders. He was telling us that he can disprove any religious book with that same book, and he can disprove the Bible with the rest of the Bible. We dismissed him as crazy and didn't worry much about what he was saying, but that didn't stop him from preaching to us anyway. His message: 1) Song of Solomon says that all women should be lesbians but the books of law command that homosexuality is evil, and 2) Genesis says that they were naked and not ashamed, but the New Testament says to wear clothes, so really shouldn't we all be walking the streets without clothes on? Aside from the fact that Christians read the whole story of scripture and assume that it all fits together into one coherent picture, the very subject of his discourse revealed a difference from back home. At my church in Carson, we have a gentleman who has attended for several years. Any member of the church can tell you the he has lost his mental faculties, and he preaches to us often. The difference is that on the West Coast, he and others like him preach about crop circles and aliens and, for the gentleman in my church, Area 51 and UFO's (it comes with the territory when you live in Nevada).

The second situation was when I went to Wal-Mart with a friend who had to buy flannel sheets. As we walked past the book section, I was astounded to see a large selection of Christian books. The Purpose Driven Life was the focus of a large display in the center aisle. There was a whole row devoted to different types of Bibles and below them a row of different styles of Bible covers. Instead of the magazines and romance novels that you see in a Wal-Mart at home, I felt like I was standing in a Christian bookstore.

Another relatively small difference is the complete lack of education about Mormonism. In a seminar last week, I was privileged to hear one of the theology and ethics professors speak about Designer Babies and Designer families, and a student asked a question about Mormon practices. He wanted to know how her research would interact with the Fundamentalist Mormon practices of the enclaves in Utah and Arizona. In those communities, Fundamentalist Mormons practice polygamy and give birth to many children, sometimes making sure than not a year goes by without a child being born in the family. The professors response was that she wasn't sure it even happened. I can say with certainty that it does. Polygamous Mormon marriages show up in the news from time to time, and Christians have to be educated about Mormonism. I knew that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints was a rarity in the east because they had been forced west by legalized persecution; however, I also know that they are focusing on evangelizing the South because my cousin was sent to Georgia for his mission. I suppose the lack of Mormons out here had never crossed my mind, but I am beginning to understand that it actually presents a challenge for evangelism in the West, Southwest and Mountain regions that will not be addressed here. Even the professors do not know much about the Mormon Church.

The last minor difference that I have noticed actually involves Gospel music, and it will serve as a transition to a post for tomorrow that will explain some of the major differences. I have worn my gospel choir shirt for several years at home and at Westmont, and no one thinks a thing about it. Participation in a gospel choir does not mark your stance on any major issue. I underestimated the effect that my shirt would have when I wore it to school here one day though. As I left the Divinity School, two Black (and yes, that is what they want to be called here. Apparently the South doesn't feel the need to be as politically correct as California.) students caught me and asked if I was part of a Gospel Choir. I told them that I had been and continued on my way. As I walked through one of the predominantly Black neighborhoods, students began cheering for me out of school bus windows. I did not understand that participation in a gospel choir is support of the Black community here, as opposed to the racism of another segment of the population.