Over the last few years, the number of immigrants coming to the United States from Mexico has become an increasingly contentious political issue.  Politicians have flirted with comprehensive immigration reform at times, but the explosive nature of the issue in the public’s mind has mostly kept politicians from doing anything substantial at a Federal level.  Now states like Arizona have passed new laws to combat the problem.  Other politicians, like a Republican candidate in Alabama, has used the issue to rile his constituents when he promised only to offer driver’s license tests in English.  This has left illegal immigrants who have lived here for years in a difficult position.  They feel at home in the US, and to send them back to Mexico would feel like exile.  It would tear families apart and even hurt our economy.  Recently, President Obama and Mexican President Calderon met to discuss among other things immigration reform.  I hope it went well.  Our country needs immigration reform at this systemic level.

As a Christian, I feel it is important for me to talk about this polarizing political issue.  I’ve witnessed what appears to be an increasing hostility and even bitter resentment towards Mexican immigrants, and this sort of attitude has no place in the church.  Here are a few reasons why, we as the church should value, speak up for, and seek to be in relationship with immigrants, Mexican or otherwise:

1. Jesus was an immigrant. While Jesus was just a small child, Joseph and Mary were forced to flee from Palestine to Egypt because of the genocidal decree issued by Herod.  He spent many years in Egypt, and then his family finally returned to Palestine after Herod died.  When God deigned to put on humanity, it was in the cultural dressings of an illegal immigrant.  Not only is God not far from those on the margins of society, he himself was on the margins of society in the person of Jesus.

2.  All humans are created in the image of God. Jesus exhibited an incredible ability to cut through the prejudices of society.  He loved the people that no one else seemed to be able to love.  Paul said the gospel tears down every dividing wall that keeps people at odds with one another, whether racial, social, gender, or economic.

3.  Ancient Israel was meant to be a place hospitable to the alien, sojourner, and immigrant. After Israel entered Palestine, God commanded them to care for immigrants and wanderers, because that’s what they themselves had been for so many years.  (Ex. 23:9; Lev. 19:33-34)

4.  We are all immigrants and sojourners in the world. As Christians, our primary allegiance is to God and to God’s kingdom.  We are first and foremost citizens of heaven.  Often times immigrants understand this intuitively because they are outside the dominant power culture in the country to which they come.  White Christians living in the suburbs of America (like myself) are wise to recognize this implicit advantage immigrants have in living as though they are aliens and sojourners in the world.  There is much we can learn from them. (1 Peter 1)

Immigration reform is complicated.  I get that we need laws that govern our borders.  We need rules for how people enter our country, and they need to be enforced.  Currently, those laws do not work well, and that’s why immigration reform is so crucial.  The system is broken and it needs to be fixed.  I hope it includes some pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants who have lived here for many years and are more at home in this country than their country of origin.

In the meantime, I plan to love and welcome anyone and everyone, regardless of legal status.  My allegiance is first and foremost to the Kingdom of God, and in God’s government acceptance is preeminent.  Join me in loving immigrants and learning from them as we hope for immigration reform that results in a more just and equitable treatment of all people in this country.

We went to the MLK Holiday Breakfast this past Monday.  This was the 20th year of the event, and this year’s speaker was the Rev. Dr. Joseph Lowery.  The 88-year-old Dr. Lowery has been a pillar in the civil rights movement, a friend of Dr. King, and he delivered the Benediction at President Obama’s Inauguration.

I enjoyed hearing him speak.  He was funny.  He was direct.  He was challenging.  But more inspiring than his rhetoric, was his personal presence.  His story is compelling.  He has  given his life to fighting against injustice.  He has fought for the oppressed, and done his best to seek out the voiceless in our society and speak on their behalf.  He has spoken on behalf of the poor, the sick, those marginalized for their sexual orientation, people of color, and people stuck in schools and neighbors where the educational system fails to educate.  The primary challenge of his message was for us to see these people.  These are the people that MLK fought for, and he challenged us not to celebrate Dr. King while we forget the people he spoke for.  He urged, even scolded us, not to embrace the missionary but forget his message.

It was an inspiring event.  Dr. Lowery is an impressive figure.  I’m glad I went.  But I’m also a little bit disappointed.  The whole thing was entirely too palatable.  General Mills was the sponsor, and the first half of the breakfast felt a bit like one long advertisement for how great they were for hosting this breakfast.  I got the feeling like part of the reason they host this breakfast is for the positive PR they get out of it.  Also, the response that the organizers called for was very weak.  The push was for everyone to engage in service, to volunteer.   There was a card on our table that said something like, “I pledge to volunteer….” and then a number of volunteer opportunities were available to be checked off.  They were just ambiguous suggestions like, “rake leaves” or “visit a nursing home.”  While these are good things to do, they aren’t really in the spirit of living the dream of MLK.  These seem like weak applications when you have 2000 people gathered to celebrate the legacy of MLK.  I think it would have been more helpful to promote organizations doing the work of bringing MLK’s dream to fruition in Minneapolis.  If just 10 organizations would have been highlighted, they could have received countless new volunteers.  Plus there were all the people viewing the program on TV that would have been connect to these organizations.

Because of the large scale, corporate feel, and the vague call for “volunteering,” I came away from the event feeling a little bit let down.  Part of this probably also has to do with my belief that so much of our hope for racial reconciliation will take place in the context of the church.  Really powerful racial reconciliation happens in more intimate spaces where people are allowed to tell stories, confess sins, and empathize with the other.  This is hard to accomplish at a breakfast with 2000 attendees.

I still appreciated the event, and I would consider attending again next year.  The event adequately celebrated Dr. King, and his non-violent methods of civil disobedience.  I left reminded of how radical non-violence is, and how it was first exhibited in the person of Jesus.  He defeated evil not through retaliation to it, but by absorbing it by dying on the cross.  This is the same thing Dr. King did, and that’s why the civil rights movement was so effective.  The event was a great reminder and celebration of him.

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One of the biggest mistakes white evangelicals make when thinking or talking about race is to assume that it is a personal issue.  We often think that because we don’t believe people of color are inferior to white people that we aren’t racist.  We believe that racism is a personal sin issue that should be addressed by helping people individually become less racist.  It happens when someone makes a racist comment.  But the reality is that racism is ultimately a systemic evil.  I recently read a parable that helps explain this:

Both Maridel and Parker were overweight, to the point of being unnealthy.  They decided it was the time to do something drastic.  Responding to an ad for a Fat-Away program, they drove to a rural area in their state, where they were taken to separate areas of the woods.  For six weeks, they would be locked into these “compounds,” as they were called.  In each compound, according to the ad, were the perfect ingredients needed to lose weight.  Their goal was to each lose forty pounds.  What they did not know is that the less-than-ethical Fat-Away organization was really a research laboratory studying the effects of various diets, exercise programs, and weight-loss expectations on people’s weight change.  Whithout a word to Maridel and Parker, they placed Maridel in a compound designed to help her lose weight, but they placed Parker i a compund designed for Parker to gain weight.

In Maridel’s compound were running trails, a swimming pool, state-of-the-art exercise equipment, a basketball court, and a sauna.  In her cabin were magazines on proper nutrition, instructional videos on how to lose weight, an abundance of natural, healthy, low-fat, low-calorie foods, and no sweets.  Each day she was greeted early by fit and trim people who asked Maridel to go on a run with them, talked about how much they loved being thin, and encouraged her that she too can be thin — wonderful conditions for losing weight.

In Parker’s compound was only a tiny cabin.  No exercise equipment was available whatsoever, but there were plenty of videos and movies that showed high-calorie foods looking sumptuous, more high-calorie goodies than even a sumo wrestler could desire, and just a few fruits and vegetables.  The only other people Parker saw were also obese, and though they talked about losing weight, they seemed not to really care about their weight–not good conditions for losing weight.

The program called for each participant to weigh in at the start, and then every two weeks thereafter.  At the end of two weeks, with neither aware of what was inside the other’s compound, Maridel and Parker were taken to the weighing room.  They each took their turn on the scale.  Maridel stepped on the scale first.  She had lost nineteen pounds! Parker’s turn produced far less excitement.  He actually gained two pounds.

Maridel, who assumed that both she and Parker had the same type of compound, was irritated with Parker.  ”We paid good money to be here, Parker.  How can you waste it?  You have to exercise, you have to eat right!”  Parker tried to make his case, but it only made Maridel more irritated.  Maridel told Parker he needed to try harder.  Parker, though he was depressed about his weight gain and the difficulty in exercising adequately and eating right, resolved to do so.

Divided by Faith, pg. 110-111

According to the authors, white evangelicals blame the discrepancies in results between Parker and Maridel primarily in terms of personal effort and responsibility, but fail to take into account the system-level or structural elements that both constrain and shape the differing results.

The same holds true with racial inequality.  By not seeing the structures that impact on individual initiative — such as unequal access to quality education, segregated neighborhoods that concentrate the already higher black poverty rate and lead to further social problems, and other forms of discrimination — the structures are allowed to continue unimpeded.  pg. 112

To say to Parker that he failed to loss weight because he didn’t try hard enough, because he isn’t motivated, or because he wasn’t taking advantage of the opportunities presented to him seems naive at best.  As white evangelicals, we need to talk about system-level sin issues.  We need to see the structural difference available to people.  We need to confess the brokenness of our system, not just our personal faculties.

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But as I’ve processed it, I believe that Soong-Chan’s response was essentially right, and that issues like these need to be dealt with in a public matter because racism is primarily a systemic evil and not a personal one.

I think the best way to understand this is to adopt counseling lingo here.  In family systems theory the person who has problems, the one who comes to a counselor for help, is called the identified patient.  Parents may bring a child in for counseling because she is acting out in school.  A spouse may come in for counselling because he is stressed out and exhausted from the toll his marriage is taking on him.  A woman may come in and complain about anxiety.  In each of these cases, the family system’s counsellor will look at the system in which the individual resides.  They will recognize that the maladies this person is manifesting are a product of the system not some isolated, independent individual.  The system is sick, and not necessarily the identified patient.

The child may be struggling in school because her parents’ marriage is falling apart.  The spouse may be exhausted in his marriage because he takes on all the responsibility in the family — he’s not sick, he’s too healthy!  The woman may be struggling with anxiety because of the way she relates to her mother who struggled in her relationship with her own mother.  Her solution will be found in standing up to her mom and not necessarily in trying to calm down when she’s in stressful situations.  In each of these cases, the sick person has been formed by the interconnected relationships he or she has.  Fixing the person is virtually impossible without changing the system.  Fixing the system is what really matters.

Racism is really a sickness of a system, and ‘the racist’ is the identified patient.  American culture is racially sick.  When two white males do something racially ignorant like what happened with this deadlyvipers incident, they are the identified patients.  Their sin is a reflection of the sickness of the overall system.  The issue isn’t so much with them as it is with the system in which we all live.

So, when Soong-Chan goes public with email correspondence and he writes blog posts that link to their books and criticizes their videos, he can do it as one who is challenging the system.  It’s not really about the two guys.  He’s not out to show what big jerks they are, because they aren’t (at least it seems like they aren’t).  They were just ignorant and unaware.  They are like the teenage girls who gossip about their friends because that’s the way they see mom talk about her friends.  The girls are steeped in a way of relating and they don’t even know that they are hurting other people when they casually bring up someone’s foibles to their friends on the phone.

This way of thinking about racism is helpful for me because I’ve done things that are racist in the past.  If I would have gotten called out like this, it would have been very hurtful.  Being called a racist is just about the worst thing that you can call a person, and if it happens to you the first thing I imagine you want to do is deny it.  You want to justify your behaviour.  You want to explain that you don’t really think white people are better than everyone else.

But if we see racism as a systemic sin, this changes the guilt level.  It’s still a matter of ignorance, but the problem is really with the system.  The system is sick and my racial sin makes me the identified patient.  I’m reflecting the sickness of the system.  So if I say or do something unintentionally racist and someone points it out to me, I can confess my sin knowing  that it’s an issue of ignorance not ontological deficiency.  I can also allow my screw up to fuel a desire to change the system.  I don’t want other people to make a similar mistake and perpetuate the pain of racial insensitivity.  Seeing racism as a sickness of the system and the racially insensitive person (the racist) as the identified patient seems to make confession and dialogue easier.  And dialogue is our best hope for changing the system for the future.

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Soong Chan Rah’s Blog

Eugene Cho’s post

Here’s a quote from Eugene’s blog that sums it up for me:

Folks may think the reactions of some are over-reactive but not the case. But having said that, there are seasons and situations you have to shout…how else will people listen especially when hardly anyone fears or respects the voice of Asians and Asian-Americans. You know what I’m talking about, right? Our image of passivity is something we collectively as Asian Americans must confront.

The blunt truth is that these kinds of caricatures simply won’t fly with some other ethnicities. Let me keep it real: Can you imagine the media letting Miley Cyrus go had she painted her face brown or black and mimicked caricatures of an African American?  If the publishers of this book chose to title the book in a way to capture the words and media images of  Urban Hip-Hop African American culture, would it be accepted, defended, and celebrated?

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The following is an excerpt from a recent ordination paper that I wrote which sought to answer the following question: Explain the effect of power and privilege in areas of race, economic class and gender upon your life and ministry.

If racism is a “system of advantage based on race,” (Tatum, Beverly Why are all the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria) then I am a person of significant privilege.  I experience privilege beyond just the sociological categories of race though.  I am a tall, relatively fit, well-educated, socially upper-class, heterosexual, white male who was raised in an affluent suburb of Minneapolis.  Growing up I was always a part of the dominant group, and because I was always a part of this in group, I struggled to see the presence of difference.  I saw my cultural experience as normal.  I was never overtly bigoted and neither were my parents, but I always understood my manner of life as the right way.  It was the American way.  It was the successful way of life.

Throughout a variety of experiences, I came to see the world from a different perspective.  I spent one year living in Africa as a missionary.  I had a very positive experience serving there.  It was here that I was first introduced to cultural differences embodied by the colonial style missions work that was ubiquitous there.  I spent a summer in Thailand doing an ethnography on an “unreached people group” that spanned the Laotian, Burmese and Thai borders.  Through this experience, I came to see the value and diversity of culture.  We tried to understand their culture first and foremost in our research.  I also spent a summer in Beijing where similar culture encounters helped to deepen my appreciation for a way of life different from my own.

These mission trips provided helpful cross-cultural experiences but they did not do much to help me understand my position of privilege in America.  I could talk about the rich beauty of cultures around the world, but I was still relatively naive about my own cultural position at home.  I mostly assumed that my culture was America’s culture.  Then I got married to my wife, Mary, who is a second generation Korean American.  Her parents moved here when they were in their late twenties from South Korea and Mary was born in Jersey City, NJ.  She grew up in a home where Korean was the primary language spoken and her dad planted a Korean-speaking church.  When I married my wife I became one flesh with a cultural outsider, and myself became something of an outsider.  When Mary acts or speaks on behalf of our family she is not given the same treatment that I received from society.  I experience racism through her continued encounters with a racist world.

Jesus was an outsider.  He grew up as the quintessentially powerless pariah.  He was a Jew in a Roman dominated country.  He was poor.  He was homeless.  He was even rejected by his own people.  He was thrown out of his hometown for being too religious.  He was rejected by the religious for not being religious enough because as a friend of sinners, he socialized with all the unclean people.  Even crucified criminals mocked him.

Christians are called to follow this Jesus who lived on the margins of society.  Throughout much of the New Testament we are repeatedly warned not to fall in love with the world, but to fix our eyes on Jesus, to think of heaven, and to live as citizens of the coming Kingdom.  But this is virtually impossible for white Christians who enjoy unprecedented power on the global stage.  How can we understand what it means to follow a man who lived on the margins of society when we hold such positions of power?  How can the church teach us to live on the margins of society when it reflects the power structure and the dominant culture of the world around it?

My wife and her family get this intuitively.  I’ve seen the way she lives.  I’ve experienced the churches that her parents lead.  Immigrants and ethnic outsiders are eager to embrace their place in an alternative world because their place in this world is repeatedly maligned.  They are told by the culture in a myriad of ways that they do not matter and that they do not belong in this world.

The world in which I grew up always told me I belonged.  It told me I was important and valuable.  I did not need a God or a gospel to do that.  Why would I want to be a citizen of heaven when being a white male in America was such a good place to hold my citizenship and have my identity?  I am now united to my non-white other half, and I see the way this world that worked for me also works against her.  I’ve come to appreciate the character that is formed in my wife because of the marginal experience she has in this world.  We worked together at a church in Boston that was predominantly Asian-American, and I recognized the same richness of character in other non-white Christians.  I have seen the value in becoming an outsider.  Being so intimately attached to Asian-American cultures puts me in a position of significant privilege.  It has helped me understand what it means to live as an alien and an exile in the world.  I have grown in my ability to understand my own identity as a heavenly resident, and now I hope to lead a church that likewise strives to define itself by it’s allegiance to heaven and not this world — no matter how beneficial allegiance to this world promises to be.  I hope we live as citizens of our coming kingdom, and I hope that causes us to feel out of place within the world in which we live.

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Early in my Christian experience I spent some time at a church that would have been categorized as Evangelical and fundamentalist. We were people of the Book, and we lived our lives by its teachings. I remember the earnestness with which we studied and argued over the scriptures in our Tuesday night Bible studies. The ultimate trump card in any argument was to accuse your adversary of being liberal. Liberals were that evil, amorphous group who didn’t believe the Bible, didn’t spend much time reading it, and certainly did not do what it said. They just promulgated their personal pontifications from the pulpit without concern for scriptural authority. In contrast, we were the faithful, living our lives under the authority of the Bible’s true teachings.

What I didn’t understand at the time was my own inability to get directly to what the Bible taught without some sort of interpretive lens. I allowed its teachings to have authority in my life, but they were the teachings I read with my eyes or the ones I received from my white, suburban pastor. Even when I went to Africa as a missionary, my continued theological education came in the form of the books I brought with me from the United States. I was respectful of other expressions of the Christian faith, and I even sought to steer clear of colonial-type missions. However, I didn’t strive to learn from African theologians. I didn’t think non-whites had much to teach me about the gospel – we, white westerners, were the authorities. We understood what biblical faith was, and we went out to the nations to teach others.

Then I met my wife’s parents. For the first time I read the Bible though non-white eyes. They are first-generation Korean immigrants who work as pastors in an immigrant church, and coming into their family meant sitting under their spiritual authority. In family devotions, when they offered guidance, and when I visited their church services, I learned from them. I learned about new ways to express biblical authority in church.

Their church experience looked radically different from the one in which I had participated, and their interpretations of the Bible led them to significantly different emphases. The first difference I noticed was in the way they prayed. Rarely did they engage in the “popcorn” style to which I was accustomed, where every person prays for a peremptory minute or two. Rather, they gathered in large numbers and all prayed simultaneously – each person in the room crying out to God at the same time in his or her own voice.

I was also shocked at the amount of time they spent together as a church. They would have all-night prayer meetings, fasting retreats, and revivals, and every Sunday they shared a meal after the service. I couldn’t imagine the congregation of my youth staying at church for 4+ hours every Sunday. My in-laws represented the core of Evangelical belief in their unwavering commitment to the authority of the Bible, but their faith led them to do church and experience God in different and frequently richer ways than I had previously experienced.

Since my early encounter with my wife’s family, I have grown to appreciate their perspective on the church and the Bible. Their dedication to serving the broken has humbled me. Their commitment to prayer has challenged me. And their willingness to suffer in the service of others has been a living example of the life of Christ. I am fortunate to have been given a glimpse into this cultural expression of biblical authority.

But I wonder if most of my white Evangelical friends have had the same experience. Soong-Chan Rah raises this exact question in a recent book,The Next Evangelicalism, suggesting that Evangelicals are held captive to western, white expressions of biblical teaching. For example, the majority of conferences and publications put out by Evangelical leaders and institutions prominently feature the voices of white males who lead large churches in North American suburbs. Since their voices are projected from the largest platform, we might assume that they have authority to speak for Evangelicals.

The good news is that immigrant and multi-ethnic churches aren’t listening. They aren’t captivated by mainstream Evangelical teachings, whether writings or conferences, because they find them largely irrelevant to their context. Yet many of these immigrant and multi-ethnic churches are growing by leaps and bounds. They represent a disproportionately high percentage of the vital and growing congregations in Evangelical denominations. Apart from their numerical contribution, I wonder if the decline witnessed in many mainline denominations over the past fifteen years will be replicated in Evangelical groups as well.

So while Evangelicals claim that their only authority is the Bible, I hope and pray that future leaders will free the Bible from its captivity to white, suburban, North American teachings. I hope space on the platform will be made for leaders like my father-in-law. We have much to learn from him about what the Bible teaches.

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But the reality of being multi-cultural is much harder than just talking about it.  It’s not nearly as much fun to implement a dream than to just dream about it.  This came through loud and clear in the presentations today.  Each of the speakers spoke from years of experience in pursuing this dream, and they shared stories of hurt and misunderstanding.  Being multi-cultural means listening to and valuing the experience of those outside our own faith traditions.   It doesn’t mean asking those who look different than us to assimilate into our culture.  There is a lot of mutual learning that is required as we go forward.

For those of you interested in doing some more reading and learning on the subject.  Here are some books that featured prominently in the discussions today.

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Soong-Chan Rah argues powerfully that the evangelical church in America is held captive to Western (he means white) culture.  He points to the models of ministry held up as ‘successful’ at conferences and in publishers’ catalogs as evidence that American evangelicalism glorifies the white suburban church as the epitome of what church should look like.

Throughout the first few chapters of the book he deconstructs the way this church works. He points out the secular and sinful foundations of much of what it does in chapters on individualism, consumerism, and racism. He then points to a way forward—something he calls the Next Evangelicalism—found in the immigrant and ethnic minority churches.

As a Korean American immigrant at the age of 6-years old Soong-Chan writes of the immigrant church with a depth of personal experience and insight. He provides a thoughtful assessment of why the Korean American church has grown, and why it intuitively lives out some of the biblical models for the church more effectively than the majority culture churches in America. The resulting question that emerges from his assessment is:

“in the next evangelicalism, is there a possibility of seeing the immigrant church, not as a place of need, but a church community from whom the dominant culture could learn?” (pg. 178)

I think the answer to this question is a resounding “Yes and amen!” Recent statistics alone are enough to warrant further exploration into the immigrant church model—these minority culture churches are growing while the rest of evangelicalism is stagnating. However for me I answer yes to this question more because of anecdotal experience. My father-in-law and my mother-in-law both work as pastors in a Korean American church. I’ve seen the passion with which they serve their community, and I’ve witnessed their community’s subsequent devotion to the church.

I’ve been woken up at 4:30 am when staying at their house because they have to get to church for early morning prayer. I’ve seen their willingness to endure political battles with leaders in the church for the sake of the broader community. I’ve seen my in-laws love for their community spill over into concern for the physical health and well-being of their parishioners. As someone who has grown up in white evangelicalism, I can say without hesitation we all, both pastors and parishioners, have much to learn from my in-laws’ community.

This book attempts to start this process. He calls the white evangelical community to start listening to and learning from the fast growing but often neglected immigrant and multi-ethnic church communities. This has been tremendously encouraging for me. It reminded me of many of the things I learned while working in a predominantly Asian American church in Boston. This book reminded me of the good to be found in that community experience, and it challenged me to think about how these lessons can be shared with my white evangelical community.

My only frustration comes from the fact that he fails to provide any critical assessment of the immigrant church. For all his harsh rhetoric for white evangelicalism, there is not a single qualifier on his praise or any words of caution for how we learn from the immigrant church. For those of us who have seen some of the maladies of the immigrant church (veneration of pastors, fundamentalism, and the frequent schisms and splits), we have questions about how to learn from them. What parts do we appropriate? What parts of its make-up lead to the beautiful community he praises and what parts lead to these less attractive aspects?

I do not think this diminishes the main point of the book, which is the need for white evangelical America to listen to the voice of outsiders, particularly non-white and multi-ethnic church communities. The Next Evangelicalism makes the need for this undeniably clear. This book is fantastic, and I highly recommend it to people of every color and those serving in every role within the church. This is a message that needs to be heard.

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This is a helpful book for anyone wanting to grow in their understanding of race and racism in America.  In the book Dr. Tatum defines racism as a “system of advantage based on race”.  She differentiates between racism and bigotry by emphasizing the systemic nature of racism.  She then calls on people to be those who resist the systemic current of racism.  She challenges us to be people who fight against the cultural powers that oppress people of color.

She writes out of a wealth of personal experience.  As a “light-skinned black women,” she shares personally and vulnerably about what her childhood was like as she explored her own racial identity.  She also shares a wealth of information from the many classes on racism she has taught at the college level.  She shares about the struggles students of color and white students experience as they come face-to-face with the ugly realities of racism.

Her primary focus is on the experience of Blacks in America, but she also touches on the experience of other races in America.  In one chapter she highlights some of the experiences of these different groups in America.  She details unjust laws targeted at American Indians.  She recounts stories of interracial marriage bans.  And she talks about the immigration experience of Asian Americans.  She also delves into the topic of multi-racial children and the struggles they may face as they grow up in a culture that desire to racially categorize everyone.  

I enjoyed this book, and it helped me think about race in new ways.  It served as a helpful reminder of the position of privilege white people experience in America.  It also stimulated my thinking on how a Christian community is called to fight against the powers and principalities of this world, of which racism is certainly one.  It also challenged me to talk more openly with my kids about race–both because it’s a primary way to de-tabooize it, and because as children of a mixed race marriage, I want to help them develop a healthy self-image in categories of race.

I encourage anyone wanting to think more deeply about their own race or the reality of systemic racism to read this book.  It’s a thoughtful book that has the potential to generate a lot of good conversation.

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