Juneteenth celebrates what many refer to as a “second Independence Day” for our nation (Juneteenth Foundation), marking a mix of freedom, injustice, and progress.
People of color can do mighty things when we unite with each other, especially when our unity is in Christ.
By Tom Sugimura
T
o my children,
You have heard recently about Asian Americans being mocked or harmed because of their ethnic origin. This is not a new occurrence in our country’s history, but it may be new for you. So I want to share with you some truths to help you think rightly about it.
First, you are loved. Your mom and I love you (Psalm 127:3-5). Your siblings love you, though it may not always seem like it (Psalm 133:1). You have many friends and a church family that will love you at all times (Galatians 3:28).
Most importantly, God loves you so much that he gave his Son to die for you (John 3:16; 1 John 4:7-11) and he created you to reflect his image in your own unique way (Genesis 1:27). As such, you are fearfully and wonderfully made (Psalm 139:13-16). So remember that you are loved. Even when hateful people say or do things to harm you, it cannot change your identity or your value (Romans 8:35-39).
When people sin against you as they eventually will do, be wise in your response (Colossians 4:5-6). Sometimes it is best to ignore the fool and stay out of the mud (Proverbs 26:4). At other times, you might instruct the well-meaning person to see their ignorance (Proverbs 26:5). In some cases, ask for help from authorities (e.g., your teacher, your boss at work, the police) whom God grants the power to establish peace and justice (Romans 13:1-4).
The wisest response might even be to fight or to protest peacefully. This is especially true when you are defending those who cannot protect themselves (Proverbs 31:8-9). God does not permit you to sin against those who sin against you, but his Word grants us a variety of responses. This is the way (Proverbs 23:19).
When you face adversity, trust that God is both sovereign and good (Isaiah 46:9-10). Racism was a daily experience for grandma’s father. He lived through the Chinese Exclusion Act and had to take a stranger as his picture bride because Chinese women weren’t allowed to enter the country without being already married. He witnessed God’s love when Christians brought your grandma to church while she was just a child. Then he experienced it again when the pastor visited him in the hospital after surgery. Your great-grandpa put his faith in Jesus because that was the first act of real kindness ever shown to him by a White man.
We don’t know every reason behind our suffering, but we know our God is both sovereign and good. “And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose” (Romans 8:28). He will make all things right—if not in this life, then ultimately in the life to come (Revelation 21:1-5).
People sin (Romans 3:10-12) against you, perhaps for the color of your skin or the stereotype of your culture. Yet remember that you and I are also sinners, “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23). We cannot view their racism as more deserving of God’s judgment than our own pride or discrimination against others (Matthew 7:3-5; Romans 6:23). We all need a Savior who will forgive our sin (1 John 1:9; Proverbs 28:13) when we place our trust in him (Romans 10:9, 13).
Not only that, but Jesus can also heal you from any shame or scars resulting from racial hatred (Romans 10:11). He knows personally how much it hurts to suffer (Hebrews 4:15), yet he himself refused to respond in sinful anger against those who reviled him (1 Peter 2:21-24).
Finally, do not be anxious when you are tempted to avoid certain people or situations because you fear their opinion of you (Proverbs 29:25). Instead, put your trust in God (Proverbs 3:5-6; Philippians 4:4-6). Pray for his peace when you are afraid and his wisdom when you don’t know what to do (James 1:2-6). Pray that God will protect your heart (Proverbs 4:23) and grant you the right words to say (Luke 12:11-12). Pray for those who persecute you that they might turn to God themselves (Matthew 5:43-45).
Then pray that any who still suffer will find lasting hope in God (Lamentations 3:19-26). “And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 4:7).
* A version of this article first appeared at Sola Network
Photo by Kate Macate on Unsplash
Tom Sugimura pastors New Life Church in Woodland Hills, California, leads the Greenhouse Church Planting Residency, and trains counselors at The Master’s University. He and his wife, Amanda, are raising four rambunctious children whose stories can be found in Hope for New Dads. Tom also blogs regularly at Grace & Truth about the intersection between life and Scripture.
By Thomas Yee
T
he very day that the Atlanta Massacre story broke and millions nationwide cried out in lament, the social media heckling and gaslighting began. This article documents 10 common statements that people have used to deny the fact that the Atlanta Massacre was a racialized act along with examples, succinct rebuttals, and further resources.
1. “This was sexism rather than racism.”
Example: "I feel this crazy tragedy was centered more around sex and people are missing the point."
Rebuttal: It was both – this tragedy existed at the intersection of sexism and racism. For AAPI women, the two cannot be disentangled. Starting from the Page Act of 1875 up through the 1987 film, Full Metal Jacket, to the 2021 Atlanta Massacre, especially insidious discrimination has been reserved for those who are both AAPI and women. The Atlanta Massacre was an intersectional hate crime precisely because it is both/and, *not* either/or. Racism and misogyny can and do co-exist – and each compounds the effect of the other.
Resources:
To be an Asian Woman in America: https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/17/opinions/to-be-an-asian-woman-in-america-ho/index.html?fbclid=IwAR1u266hEedWODqIfjWtJ6Q67JiHoIPbH7wzpzibgCT-X2GkyAXR646m-J0
America’s Sexualized Racism Problem: https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/atlanta-spa-shooting-suspect-s-bad-day-defense-america-s-ncna1261362
2. “This was a case of sex addiction gone wrong.”
Example: "Given this individual was from a religious family… I'd imagine it is more likely he was struggling with sin and shame."
Rebuttal: Harvey Weinstein. Ted Bundy. Ariel Castro. Each tried to justify their criminal actions by blaming a self-diagnosed sex or pornography addiction. The problem is that the clinical psychology community is skeptical about ‘sex addiction,’ as evidenced by the American Psychiatric Association, removing sex addiction from the DSM-5 as a legitimate diagnosis in 2012. A UCLA study found significant differences in the brain’s response to sex compared to narcotics or other addictive behaviors. Sociologist Samuel Perry’s research concludes that the rhetoric of ‘sex addiction’ obscures the core issue – shame and guilt, such as is cultivated in evangelical purity culture. Read Angie Hong’s story below for a poignant and powerful demonstration of how purity culture can breed harassment and abuse towards women.
Resources:
Science on ‘Sex Addiction’: https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/03/18/sex-addiction-atlanta-shooting-long/?fbclid=IwAR0kUL3TO1E-SZKSOCdxUc3URCKZzd60BDeFfmtySYfbHTBYSlu-CdH5ztc
TIME Interview w/Professor of Sociology: https://time.com/5948362/atlanta-shootings-sex-addiction/
The Flaw at the Center of Purity Culture: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/03/purity-culture-evangelical-church-harms-women/618438/?fbclid=IwAR3woygAR51D1_L1nT0tJAGUe77CdYmrh4e4PWO5QGWJmnbN2U8KSfNj6eU
3. “The murderer said it wasn’t racially-motivated.”
Example: "He said it wasn’t racially motivated. He’s a self-diagnosed addict and possibly emotionally disturbed."
Rebuttal: It is astounding how readily people will take the word of a mass murderer at face value if it waves away the broader reality of anti-AAPI violence. That Sheriff Captain Jay Baker blithely did so throws his qualifications into suspicion (to say nothing of his promoting the sale of t-shirts calling COVID-19 an “imported virus from CHY-NA”). Baker’s comments – and those taking the murderer’s words at face value – are textbook examples of what philosopher Kate Manne terms ‘himpathy,’ or the unearned empathy extended to men who commit misogynistic offenses. The perpetrator isn’t who gets to decide – naming the Atlanta Massacre a hate crime is to acknowledge that it is part of a broader wave of violence affecting not just an individual but a whole community.
Resources:
Are the Authorities Trustworthy?: https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/03/17/jay-baker-bad-day/
The Suspect Doesn’t Get to Decide: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/03/are-the-atlanta-spa-shootings-a-hate-crime.html
4. “This was a tragic, isolated incident” | “I’ve never heard about anti-Asian violence."
Example: “[If Atlanta was part of a larger trend,] this would have been happening since last March;” "I have never heard of anyone being threatened or bothered because they were Chinese.”
Rebuttal: Anti-AAPI violence has been happening since last March – Stop AAPI Hate has reported 3,800 hate incidents since last March, and those are only the incidents reported. Anti-AAPI hatred, discrimination, and violence has a long history in the United States, with a marked resurgence in 2020-2021. As Dr. Michelle Reyes, VP of the AACC, said, “We were verbally insulted. Then we were coughed on. Then we were spit at. Then we were shoved and kicked. Then we were slashed and stabbed. Then we were doused with acid and fire. Now Asian bodies have been shot and murdered.” If you have not heard of this before, that is on you; take it upon yourself to learn, starting with the resources below.
Resources:
Stop AAPI Hate Report: https://stopaapihate.org/national-report-through-december-31-2021/
History of anti-AAPI Racism: https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2021/03/18/history-anti-asian-violence-racism/?fbclid=IwAR1PNVV4SXTJ7Qheaeejt9EycoWfT_RkhqDGDLdjPtWG2bzZ-PLWfU4GQO4
On the Continued Rise of Anti-Asian Violence: https://www.asianamericanchristiancollaborative.com/article/anti-asian-violence
5. “These were sex workers in a dangerous industry.”
Example: "The three massage parlors attacked were well-known to the police and “Johns” as fronts for prostitution."
Rebuttal: This line of gaslighting is at best a red herring and at worst (and more likely) blaming the victim. A person’s profession in no way lessens the intrinsic value of their life nor justifies murdering them. Also, we must be crystal clear about what we know and what we do not know concerning the facts of the case. We do not know whether or to what extent full service was solicited or offered at these locations. Given that one victim was at Young’s for a couples massage on date night and the massage therapists killed were licensed massage therapists, the assumption that these spas were merely fronts for prostitution is far too sweeping. Clients and friends of Young’s owner, Xiaojie Tan, strongly denied any sexual services being offered. Furthermore, a segment of the massage industry is itself built on hate crimes against AAPI women, so this heckler line merely kicks “the racism can” down the road.
Resources:
Who are the Victims?: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-56446771
Massage Industry Built on Hate Crimes: https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/03/22/illegal-massage-business-asian-women/
6. “Some of the victims were non-Asian.”
Example: "He killed people from three different races, so how could it be racially motivated?"
Rebuttal: Factually, this heckling line completely misses the mark, looking more closely at the three non-AAPI victims at Young’s – Delaina Yaun was a client, Elcias Hernandez-Ortiz a bystander caught in the crossfire, and Paul Andre Michels a maintenance technician. In other words, all the owners and massage therapists murdered were AAPI women, so the incidental presence of these non-AAPI individuals is irrelevant to the employees and owners who the murderer was likely targeting. Additionally, this line implies that hatred is diluted when multiple communities are harmed, when in reality “an attack on one is an attack on all” (Derrick Johnson, NAACP). This can also be seen in the story of Mario González, husband of one of the victims who was wrongly suspected and detained by police for hours, possibly on account of his race.
Resources:
Mario González’s Story: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/21/us/atlanta-spa-attacks-mario-gonzalez.html
NAACP President: https://naacp.org/latest/naacp-president-and-ceo-derrick-johnson-releases-statement-on-atlanta-shooting/
7. “Why not instead target an Asian restaurant/grocery store/church?”
Example: "If he hated Chinese (or Asians in general), why didn’t he target a mall, restaurant, grocery store, or church? Those are where a man intent on killing Asians would go."
Rebuttal: See #1 – this type of intersectional violence reserves special hatred for AAPI women, so it is unsurprising the murderer would target a location likely to contain AAPI women in particular. Besides, it’s not about the numbers – attacking or murdering even one person is sufficient for a hate crime conviction, and most recent incidents of anti-AAPI violence have been one-on-one. Additionally, the brand of anti-AAPI violence in the Atlanta Massacre exemplifies the history of anti-AAPI tropes generally. Dr. Catherine Ceniza Choy at UC Berkeley said, “Killing Asian American women to eliminate a man’s temptation speaks to the history of the objectification of Asian and Asian American women as variations of the Asian temptress, the dragon ladies and the lotus blossoms, whose value is only in relation to men’s fantasies and desires.”
Resource:
Racism and Sexism Must Be Considered: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/racism-sexism-must-be-considered-atlanta-case-involving-killing-six-n1261347?fbclid=IwAR2UEUy2rKXsylvicQ-_nbmY1FdMlrCq6-rIbN39o5qQbZGRl1NZO_jKfBY
8. “Not all men are like that."
Example: "Not all men are violent. I feel like we're all painted with the same brush."
Rebuttal: Nobody is saying all men are violent. At the same time, others may be complicit with or contribute to hegemonic culture without themselves perpetrating violence. Additionally, the “not all men” line disrupts and derails what could be a productive conversation. As (Kelsey McKinney at Vox writes, “Instead of contributing to the dialogue, they become the center of it, excluding themselves from any responsibility or blame.” Ask not whether you are the same as the perpetrator; ask what you can do today to foster safe, diverse culture in your context.
Resources:
To All the Men Who Get Defensive: https://www.elle.com.au/news/not-all-men-response-24856
History of “Not All Men”: https://www.vox.com/2014/5/15/5720332/heres-why-women-have-turned-the-not-all-men-objection-into-a-meme
9. “Social justice divides rather than unites."
Example: "Marxism however tries to divide a country’s citizens by race to divide them… This is what it sounds like is happening here."
Rebuttal: Social justice seems divisive only from the perspective of power and privilege. To communities and allies crying out in shared grief and rage, social justice unites us in solidarity. For many of us in the AAPI community, we have never experienced such an outpouring of support from friends and allies as in the past few weeks. Solidarity and allyship is what is needed, and what I believe is coalescing. In the words of the NAACP, “the recent acts of hate makes it even more apparent that we need a comprehensive set of actions that actualizes a commitment to dismantling the decades of systematic and structural racism that has upheld white supremacy and allowed for the reoccurrence of violence and hate toward Asian Americans and other marginalized communities.” If you are worried about Critical Race Theories, check out the Be the Bridge resource below, which thoroughly details the history of racial justice scholarship/activism and answers common concerns.
Resource:
Be the Bridge, Critical Race Theory: https://bethebridge.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Full-Statement-Aug-7.pdf
Understanding Critical Race Theory Part 1 (Missio Alliance):
https://www.missioalliance.org/understanding-critical-race-theory-part-1/
Understanding Critical Race Theory Part 2 (Missio Alliance):
https://www.missioalliance.org/understanding-critical-race-theory-part-2/
NAACP Statement: https://naacp.org/latest/civil-rights-and-racial-justice-organizations-denounce-abhorrent-rise-in-anti-asian-hate-crimes/
10. “Just a bad day."
Example: “He had a bad day, and this is what he did."
Rebuttal: Millions of AAPI individuals and their allies had a bad day, a bad week, a bad year – but we didn’t commit mass murder. This is gaslighting at its worst. When an AAPI person hears murdering eight people explained away as “a bad day,” we hear echoes of the 1871 Chinese Massacre, in which the lynching of 18 Chinese was never brought to justice. We hear Vincent Chin’s murderers let off with a slap on the wrist saying they “weren’t the kind of men you send to jail.” No more excuses. It is past time for anti-AAPI hate to stop.
Resources:
The 1871 Chinese Massacre: https://www.lapl.org/collections-resources/blogs/lapl/chinese-massacre-1871
Vincent Chin: https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2021/03/27/981718272/how-vincent-chins-death-gave-others-a-voice
#StopAsianHate – A Call for Solidarity: https://youtu.be/RKd7Xoxf3JE
Photo by RODNAE Productions from Pexels
Some composers found their love of music at the symphony hearing Brahms or Beethoven — Thomas B. Yee discovered his from the beeps and boops of the family Super Nintendo. As a composer, his artistic mission is to transmute meaningful human stories into immersive, transformative musical works. Blending the roles of composer and music theorist, his scholarship has appeared in the United States and internationally in journals, conferences, and a forthcoming monograph on musical meaning in video game soundtracks. Thomas completed his DMA at the University of Texas at Austin and is Lecturer of Music Theory at the University of Texas at San Antonio. Thomas lives in Austin, Texas and can often be found cooking gourmet cuisine from the "Yee Bistro" with his wife Tori or on walks with their affectionate dog, Cassie the Kelpie. Learn more at thomasbyee.com.
By Amar Peterman
N
ews broke on March 16th, 2021 of a racially motivated shooting that took place in Atlanta, targeting Asian women. For the AAPI community, this news re-opened a wound that has never fully healed — a deep and lasting injury sustained by the trauma endured, the hate inflicted, the fear propagated, and the lives lost in the past year.
While anti-Asian racism and violence have long existed in our country, they have significantly increased since March of 2020. What began as the rhetoric of a “China Virus” and the “Kung-Flu” has grown into the murder of Asian Americans across our nation. Recently, Vilma Kari, a Filipino-American mother, was beaten outside a store in Queens while the assailant told her she “didn’t belong here.” This past weekend Mohammad Anwar, a Pakistani immigrant, was murdered by two teenage girls in Washington, D.C. Every week new videos flood our newsfeeds documenting the horrific violence against Asians and Asian Americans. It is physically and spiritually exhausting.
National reporters covering the March 16th attacks were hesitant to comment on the racialized motivations of Long’s actions. Instead, headlines brought attention to Long’s self-proclaimed “sex addiction” and local law enforcement’s statement that Long was “having a really bad day.” This journalistic narrative fuels a social and theological imagination that perceives racial violence as coincidental—mere happenstance. In the wake of these acts of violence is an often-heard dismissal: “They just happened to be Asian.”
As an Indian adoptee raised in Northeast Wisconsin, I hear this excuse frequently from friends, teachers, and even pastors. Yet, what my peers and educators cannot comprehend is that Asian Americans identify these acts of terror as anti-Asian violence because they align with our own lived reality.
For those who are part of an ethnic minority, we have lived the reality of anti-Asian racism our entire lives — the bias, the hatred, the perception of threat, the silencing of our voices, the lack of representation, the appropriation of our culture, the mispronunciation of our names, the simple existence within social and theological constructions of Whiteness. Surviving as a community is a burden our souls have carried far longer than headlines have reported.
For Asian Americans who reside and worship in white evangelical spaces, even those that claim to be multi-ethnic, our churches often minimize and dismiss our experience and concerns. As Kori Edwards writes, the hope that the American church might understand these underlying and overt racial motivations in our nation and even serve as a catalyst towards justice feels like an “elusive dream.”
One of the primary reasons that Asian American marginalization is ignored and unrecognized is because it does not align with an assumed perception of what racism and discrimination look like. Yet, anti-Asian racism often looks different from anti-Black violence. This is because Asian Americans experience the process of racialization differently than Black folk. The markers of racism for Asian Americans often do not lie on an axis of color, but on an axis of citizenship. It is not the color of our skin that signifies a perceived threat, but our assumed “foreign-ness.” We are the “perpetual foreigner.”
As Tat-Song Benny Liew clarifies the Asian American experience, this is still about race and assumed normativity. Put another way, the presence of Asian “foreignness” questions and challenges an established white normativity. While Asian Americans, as an act of survival, have sought to assimilate into American society, our perpetual foreignness remains. We may be racially typed as a “model minority,” yet we are no less a threat.
This is exactly what it means to be an ethnic minority. We are a living representation of the “other.” Our bodies, language, food, culture, philosophy, and theology all push against an unquestioned assumption about what it looks like to be “American.” This is why we must continually justify and explain why we too are America—that many of us were born here, raised in your neighborhoods, educated in your schools, and seated in your pews. Mihee Kim-Kort brilliantly summarizes our struggle: “Proximity to whiteness is seen as our saving grace, but we are still dying.”
It is abundantly clear that racial bias marks the history of our nation and continues to fuel racially motivated attacks today. Whether it was the “Yellow Peril” of the nineteenth century or the “Kung-Flu” rhetoric surrounding the outbreak of the Coronavirus, Asian Americans are spoken of as a disease-carrying people. Whether it is planned attacks against Asian places of business or acts of public violence on subways, city streets, and community parks, Asian Americans are often the target of violence and aggression. Whether it is the fetishization of our aunts and daughters or the emasculation of our brothers and cousins, Asian Americans have been categorized as docile, weak, and passive.
Michelle Reyes points out, however, that our struggle goes even deeper: “Asian Americans experience a double threat in this country: we are the victims of racial violence and our experiences are continually erased.” While our country rightly has addressed and highlighted issues of racism, oppression, and violence towards the Black community, we have often forgotten the simultaneous plight of AAPI folk who also face rampant discrimination and marginalization.
Indeed, the work of racial justice requires us to understand how the malicious and evil effects of white supremacy are manifest differently in various minority communities. Whereas First Nations people today face geographic displacement and Black folk continue to suffer under mass incarceration and police brutality, Asian Americans face a different kind of marginalization at the hands of white supremacy. Whether it is the Chinese massacre of 1871 in Los Angeles, the Page Exclusion Act of 1875 and Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, Japanese internment camps following the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the stigmatization of South Asians following the 9/11 attacks, or slander and violence against AAPI folk following the COVID-19 outbreak, Asian Americans have been welcomed into America until we are perceived as a hindrance or threat to American prosperity.
If there is any hope of achieving this elusive dream of restoring the ecclesial vision and prophetic witness that God has called us into, then our white brothers and sisters must truly hear the cries and lamentations of the Asian American community today and move towards costly, power-divesting action.
While vocal solidarity and corporate lamentation are good and holy things, we must go further.
If we seek to bear witness to the unifying and reconciliatory work of Jesus Christ in our world today, we must all refuse to participate in the project of upholding white hegemony, and instead elevate the voices of minoritized voices in the church.
If we desire to disciple our congregants out of patterns of Christian nationalism, racism, and sexism, then we must empathically listen to the gut-wrenching stories of terror told by Asian Americans in our nation.
If we hope to move from diverse, white evangelical churches to true multi-ethnic worshiping communities, then we must place equity and decision-making power in the hands of marginalized men and women who serve faithfully in our pews.
If we want to truly acknowledge the pervasiveness of anti-Asian racism in America and the damage of false AAPI stereotypes, we must remember and speak the names of those whom white supremacy seeks to erase: Xiaojie Tan, Delaina Ashley Yaun Gonzalez, Daoyou Feng, Paul Andre Michels, Soon Chung Park, Hyun-Jung Grant, Yong Ae Yue, Suncha Kim, and so many more.
This costly work rejects the notion that the relationship between Asian-ness and hate crimes is a coincidence, and instead meets weeping with weeping, lamentation with lamentation. In return, calls the Church to affirm the teachings of Scripture which proclaim difference and diversity are not only created but ordained by God.
The Holy Spirit is at work today shaping diverse communities and is calling us into learning new patterns, new cultures, new ways of inhabiting space and land together, new ways of loving our neighbor. This is the possibility of, to use Soong-Chan Rah’s language, “the next Evangelicalism.”
As we celebrate the resurrection of our Lord, we remember that Jesus has broken down the dividing wall of hostility and invites us into a shared community as co-heirs with Christ. May we begin to live into this reality today.
Photo by Nuno Alberto on Unsplash
Amar D. Peterman is Director of the Ideos Center for Empathy in Christian and Public Life. He is also a graduate student at Princeton Theological Seminary, focusing his studies on American religious history. His writing and research have been published in Christianity Today, the Christian Century, Sojourners, Faithfully Magazine, and more. Amar also holds a degree in Theology from Moody Bible Institute. You can follow his work on Twitter: @amarpeterman
Do you know why the Atlanta Massacre was racially motivated? Here are 3 reasons that explains it clearly.
By Dr. Michelle Ami Reyes
O
n the evening of March 16, 2020, a 21-year-old white male shot and killed eight people at Asian-owned spas in Atlanta, Georgia. Six of the people killed were Asian, all of whom were women in their 60s and 70s. The effects of this massacre on the Asian American community has been visceral. Many of us didn’t sleep last night, thinking about how it could have been our own mothers or grandmothers. Others have taken to social media to share a collective fear, grief, lament, rage even over escalating anti-Asian violence and trauma that now feels overwhelming.
We are so tired of waking up to the news of yet another Asian man or woman being attacked, assaulted, murdered. Recently Asian Americans throughout the country have been targeted at skyrocketing rates. In the early weeks of February, there was a string of attacks against Asian elders. This included Vicha Ratanapakdee, an 84-year-old Thai American man who was killed in an unprovoked attack, a 64-year-old Vietnamese American woman who was attacked and robbed in broad daylight in San Jose, and Noel Quintana, a 61-year-old Filipino American, who was slashed in the face with a box cutter as he rode the subway. On Tuesday, February 16, two Asian women were randomly attacked in New York City; one was punched in the face, the other in the back of the head.
Many of us also recently learned about the attack of 30-year-old Filipino veteran, Angelo Quinto, who was murdered by the police in December 2020. One officer knelt on his neck for at least five minutes, as Quinto pleaded, “Please don’t kill me.” A horrifying video recorded by his mother shows police flipping over an unmoving Quinto after they detained him, with blood smeared on his mouth and pooling on the floor.
Despite all of this, and while the Asian American community continues to suffer under the weight of these incidents, almost every time I mention this kind of violence in person or online, too often the response is, “I’m so sorry. I didn’t know.”
Media outlets have only loosely covered issues related to anti-Asian racism and often not right away. Civil rights activist, Amanda Nguyen, called on “cnn, msnbc, journalists with massive platforms like @maddowshow, @andersoncooper” to cover the death of Vicha Ratanapakdee. Nguyen went on to say, “our community is being attacked. We are dying to be heard.”
Asian Americans experience a double threat in this country: we are the victims of racial violence and our experiences are continually erased. In the face of this reality the Asian American Christian community is choosing to respond as we have done so historically. We are responding to our own erasure with creativity from the margins.
But first, where does silence around anti-Asian violence and racism come from? Our society doesn’t place a high value on the Asian American experience and voice. We are considered a second class issue and not worthy of mainstream attention. Much of this has to do with the stereotypes that people consciously or subconsciously hold about us. Historically, two of the forces that have caused Asian Americans to be overlooked are the perpetual foreigner syndrome (i.e., that Asians are assumed foreigners until proven otherwise) and model minority myth (i.e., that Asian Americans are smarter and more successful than other minority groups). These two stereotypes cause Asian Americans to perpetually live on the margins of both the Asian And American worlds, living in the “in-between” world (neither Asian nor American) and the “in-both” world (both Asian and American). We are caught between the perception that we are inevitably foreign and the temptation that we can be allied with white people in a country built on white supremacy.
From these struggles for identity and integrity an Asian American theology of marginality was born. Vietnamese American Catholic theologian Peter C. Phan articulates that Asian Americans are “betwixt and between” as a marginalized demographic in the U.S. We are like Uriah the Hittite in 1 Samuel 11. Uriah, a non-Israelite who was a native of Jerusalem and a faithful Yahwist, is in-between the Israelite and non-Isrelite worlds, creating in the words of Korean American biblical scholar Uriah Yong-Hwan Kim “an ambiguous situation where he was simultaneously accepted (insofar as he was permitted to serve in the Israelite army as long as he was “wanted” by or “useful to Israel) and yet rejected when he was no longer needed (he was branded a “Hittite”).” Similarly, Asian Americans oscillate between pet and threat as Dr. Soong-Chan Rah has argued. We are welcomed in this country when we are economically useful and vilified when we threaten entrenched interests. This is evident throughout Asian American history, including the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII, xenophobia and violence against South Asians after 9/11 and now anti-Asian racism during the time of Covid-19.
Sociologist, Everett Stonequist, defines the marginal person as “one who is poised in psychological uncertainty between two (or more) social worlds, reflecting in his soul the discords and harmonies, repulsions and attractions of these worlds.” In our marginal status Asian Americans experience suffering, rejection, discrimination, and oppression and yet our stereotypes as both perpetual foreigners and model minorities lead to our erasure and the invisibility of our challenges around identity, racism and discrimination, immigration, refugee experiences, mental health, care for our elders, access to culturally sensitive resources and more.
What are Asian Americans to do?
Asian American theologians have long argued that the first step to countering our own erasure is acknowledging our marginality. It is, after all, a permanent predicament, Paul Nagona argues. Contrary to Robert E. Park’s highly contested melting pot theory, our marginality should not simply be viewed as a way station to becoming assimilated. Instead of fighting our liminality, we must embrace it and declare divine intent in our “in-betweenes.” We can say, “This is where God has placed us and though others intended our marginalization for harm, God will empower us with strength from the margins.” We can certainly be angry over our own oppression and erasure, but we can also learn to use our experiences and marginal position as a means to humanize ourselves and others.
Being in the in-between means we have the ability to transform the margins. As Asian American Christians, our response shouldn’t be to simply abandon the margins or remove ourselves from them, but rather to replace the margins of power and oppression we’ve experienced with the margins of love and service. The great example of this is Jesus. Jesus was a hapa, a person who lived in the in-between. He was a celestial immigrant who left the realms of heaven to pitch his tent among men, a brown-skinned disenfranchised Jew in a Roman world as well as a refugee (Matt. 2:13). Jesus knows more than anyone the feelings of being an outsider with no one to fully understand his personal experiences. Luke 9:58 tells us, "Foxes have dens and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head." Jesus knew how it felt to be misunderstood, to not ever feel at home in this world, and to be rejected. But for Jesus, living in the in-between was worth it. Jesus’ embrace of and embodied marginality enables him to break cycles of racial, spiritual, and social violence. Despite the pain and the hardships he endured, he embraced marginality in order to meet us where we are. In fact, it is through his death on a cross and resurrection that Jesus embraced the way of suffering, the taunts, the pains of rejection, and even death so that we could be invited into his family and find a space among equals.
It is an out-of-the-box idea to pursue faithful, creative engagement in response to violence from the margins. Historically, inspired by our own in-betweeness, Asian Americans have learned to raise our voices through the arts, music, and more to creatively educate people to our own history and experiences. We’ve begun to report violence against our communities and raise our voices within organizations to spotlight the Asian American experience. Under the leadership of Dr. Russell Jeung, Dr. Manjusha P. Kulkarni, and Dr. Cynthia Choi, the Stop AAPI Hate reporting center was founded on March 19, 2020 and since then over 3,800 hate incidents have been reported. We’ve also learned how to mobilize and connect with the Asian American community in the digital space, hosting twitter conversations and launching campaigns that equip and empower our own people.
The more we study the lives, stories, and theologies of marginality from Asian American Christians that came before us, the more we can see the ways their history can and should repeat itself within our own lives in different ways. For example, inspired in part by the activism of Yuri Kochiyama, Kamaladevi Chattopadhya and more, the Asian American Christian Collaborative organized a march during Summer 2020 to raise awareness to both anti-Asian and anti-Black racism. Organized and led by President of the AACC, Raymond Chang, in partnership with two historic Chicago churches, the Chinese Christian Union Church and Progressive Baptist Church, between 1000-2000 people attended the march for “Asian Americans for Black Dignity and Lives.”
I recognize that the task of self-advocacy is in many ways unfair. It is unfair for anti-Asian violence to go unnoticed in the midst of a racially divided country and to ask the Asian American community to do the hard work of speaking up for ourselves. It’s unfair to demand oppressed peoples continue to suffer their own marginality in the hopes that their oppressors will relinquish power and control. It is unfair that the liberation of Asian Americans as a marginal people can only come about when we actively work to liberate people at the center from their own exclusivist and discriminatory worldviews. Nevertheless that is the model of Jesus.
Through Jesus’ life and ministry we can have a positive take on marginality. As theologian Jung Young Lee writes, “The margin...requires continuous creativity, and acknowledgment that one is not, nor need be, bound by another world or another way of living. The “in-beyond” person is not merely looking to survive; such a one is committed to being a healer and reconciler in a multicultural world, in which many other people’s confusion or complacency needs to be encountered.” The reality is that violence against Asian Americans isn’t going to end on its own. But there is still a hope that we can live and thrive in this land. We, as Asian Americans, have to be active agents, working to end our own oppression. We can do this by playing a unique role in sharing the American dream of equality and justice for all people and we can do so creatively and powerfully through the margins.
Photo by Ronny Sison on Unsplash
Dr. Michelle Reyes is the vice president of AACC as well as a church planter, pastor’s wife, author, speaker, and activist in Austin, TX. In 2014, Michelle and her husband co-planted Hope Community Church, a minority-led multicultural church that serves low-income and disadvantaged communities in East Austin. She also serves as the local CCDA Austin Networker. Michelle has a forthcoming book with Zondervan on cross-cultural relationships. Her writings on faith and culture have appeared in Christianity Today Women, ERLC, Missio Alliance, Faithfully Magazine, and Patheos, among other publications. She and her husband have two young kids aged four and one.
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