Getting Race Right

The first Thanksgiving in Massachusetts was 400 years ago this year in 1621.

I like Thanksgiving. I like the fact that sitting down to virtually the same meal I had as a kid brings back all kinds of memories: my childhood, my children’s childhoods, now my grandchildren’s childhoods. I envision the childhoods of my parents and grandparents, too, imagining what it was like for them.

我的两位祖先，威廉·汤恩和乔安娜·布莱斯·汤恩，于1635年从英国诺福克的大雅茅斯驶出，在马萨诸塞殖民地登陆。他们错过了第一个感恩节，但也没错过多少。我不知道他们是否会在第一次收获后庆祝感恩节，如果是的话，那是什么样子的。

Continue reading“Gratitude and Grief at Thanksgiving”

如果不至少在一定程度上了解反亚裔种族主义，就很难知道如何最好地解决这个问题。(SeePart 1andPart 2.) But understanding by itself isn’t enough, of course. Here are some possible ways to address Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) hate. At least one of them should be a good option for you.

Believe Asians When They Tell You They Experience Racism

In an opinion piece for the Religion News Service, Raymond Chang and Michelle Ami Reyes of theAsian American Christian Collaborativedescribe how many people dismiss the idea of anti-AAPI attitudes:

It is exhausting to appeal over and again to the commonalities we have as image bearers of God (Gen. 1:27). When we ask others to care for us, we are often met with logical arguments minimizing our factually based, lived experiences. We can’t tell you how many times we’ve shared instances where someone has called us a racist Asian slur or treated us in patterns consistent with how other Asian Americans have experienced life in America (in and out of the church), only to find someone say, “That couldn’t be true. I’m sure you’ve misheard that. That’s hard to believe it actually happened.”

Continue reading“A Pet and a Threat, Part 3: What Can We Do?”

InPart 1, we examined the rise of overt bigotry against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPI) during the pandemic, including terrible, terrible violence, often aimed at women and older people. In Part 2, we will examine why.

The answer begins in our history, in the role people of Asian descent have played in this country for nearly 200 years. There is a ready-made narrative about Asians in the U.S., sometimes kept in the background, but always available when it would be useful—or emotionally satisfying—to find a scapegoat to punish.

Prof. Soong-Chan Rah of Fuller Theological Seminary wrote some years backthat in the U.S., Asians are viewed both as a “pet” and a “threat.” They are seen as a pet, for example, when Asian women are fetishized, or when held up as a “model minority” in order to shame other people of color and argue that racism is dead. But they are perceived as a threat when others consider them inscrutable, sinister, untrustworthy, clannish, and—in particular—perpetually foreign.

Continue reading“A Pet and a Threat, Part 2: Stereotypes at the Ready”

Anti-Asian hate crimes have been all over the news for a year now and, if anything, seem to be getting worse. They’re not new, of course, but they are on the rise, driven, almost certainly, by the pandemic and the pre-existing condition of racism. Why is that? And what does it tell us about race in the U.S.?

On February 11, 2021,USA Todayreported

“Police in Oakland, California, announced this week that theyarrested a suspect in connection with a brutal attack of a 91-year-old man in Chinatownthat was caught on camera. In less than a week, a Thai man was attacked and killed in San Francisco, a Vietnamese woman was assaulted and robbed of $1,000 in San Jose, and a Filipino man was attacked with a box cutter on the subway in New York City.”

More recently,A 65-year-old woman was hit and kickedrepeatedly near Times Square in New York City while bystanders did nothing.Several elderly Asians have been attacked在湾区。Someone even stole 700 whistles志愿者们正在募集捐款给亚裔美国老人，以便他们在必要时可以打电话求助。

Continue reading“A Pet and a Threat, Part 1: Anti-Asian Violence During the Pandemic”

There is a lot of resistance to the idea that we should tell the truth about the racism embedded in our nation’s history. Part of that resistance is motivated by a desire to deny the power of racism today. Just bring up the topic and you’ll see how many people get over-the-top angry, a sign they sense have something deeply personal at stake. On the other hand, some genuinely believe that events from 50 or 150 or 500 years ago couldn’t possibly make a difference today. They think the past is dead.

Faulkner was right, of course, about the past not being dead, and there is a boatload of data on the intergenerational effects of wealth and poverty to support his argument that the past is always present. (See selected references at the bottom of this page.) I think we should be data-driven when possible, to keep our thinking grounded in the facts rather than assumptions, myths, or ideology. But every data point represents a story. This is mine.

Continue reading“The Past is Always Present: How Jim Crow Helped Shape My Life”

From Zach Beauchamp, in Vox:

“The Golden Calf is one of the most famous stories in the Old Testament. The Israelites, newly freed from Egyptian slavery, have a crisis of faith while God is speaking with Moses on Mount Sinai. They melt down the golden jewelry to construct a physical god — a statue in the shape of a calf — to worship in place of their abstract, invisible deity. It’s a story about the allure of idolatry, how easy it is to abandon one’s commitments to principle in favor of shiny, easy falsehoods.

Continue reading“The (literal) Idolotry of White Supremacy: A Golden Calf for our Time”

I learned some years back about land acknowledgements fromLowa BeebeandChip Colwell.

我从来没有想过我住在谁的土地上，直到我从2005年到2009年与一群印第安人一起在一系列的仪式上工作。其中一个有一个梦想——一个实实在在的梦想——向希望学院提供一场仪式，作为和解的礼物。世界杯荷兰vs厄瓜多尔走地The settlers who founded the city and the college drove nearly all Natives from this place shortly after they arrived, and yethewas offering this gift tous. His gesture moved me deeply. It still does.

Continue reading“Acknowledge the land. Acknowledge the facts.”

One of our students told me recently that she is reading Isaiah 1 in light of the murder of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. Here are some selected verses from that chapter, from a section entitled “The Wickedness of Judah” in the New Revised Standard Version.

²Hear, O heavens, and listen, O earth;
for the Lord has spoken:
I reared children and brought them up,
but they have rebelled against me.
³The ox knows its owner,
and the donkey its master’s crib;
but Israel does not know,
我的人民不明白。

Continue reading“Prayer of Repentance for White Supremacy”