In the Now and Not Yet

An ally’s reflection on what white Christian communities can learn from the #AAC March.

By Brian Howell

At the risk of falling into virtue signaling, I can say that I’ve been to a bunch of demonstrations in the past month. My mostly white, evangelical suburb has held several protests in support of racial justice, police reform, and black lives. Each was a bit different from the others—one being organized by high school students, others by various church groups in town. All were mostly attended by white folks. I was glad to see these moments. Several thousand white Christians stood together to proclaim that all of us who believe in God’s justice—who have passively or actively maintained the constructions of whiteness—needed to repent and stand in solidarity with our Black brothers and sisters who have suffered in this system.

But on June 28, I left my suburban town to drive into the city to a very different neighborhood. At Ping Tom Park, in Chicago’s Chinatown neighborhood, I joined the Asian American Christian March for Black Lives and Dignity. It was remarkable in many ways. According to historian Jane Hong, it was one of the largest anti-racism protests organized by an Asian/Asian-American group to stand in solidarity with another minoritized population. From the park, the march moved to the historic Chinese Christian Union Church, then across various neighborhood lines. Passing through deeply segregated parts of the city, we ended at an equally historic, predominantly Black church, Progressive Baptist in the Bronzeville neighborhood.

I came partly as a colleague and friend to one of the key organizers. I was further intrigued because of my own personal and professional connections to the Asian American community. But I found myself inspired to reflect more deeply on this struggle God has called us all to engage in these days. Asian American Christians came together to cry out for God’s justice and voice their own repentance in upholding hierarchies of race. This march became a witness to the intersection of race and culture in the kingdom from which I hope the white church can draw deep lessons.

The racialized category of Asian is complicated and, to some extent, relatively new in our lexicon. I’m old enough to remember as our culture shifted from “Oriental” to “Asian” in the 1970s and 80s. I’ve observed our collective wrestling with the dimensions of the category, which can be expansive, including those with ancestry in Turkey, Iran, and the Indian subcontinent, while sometimes being drawn more narrowly, limited to the Korean-Japanese-Chinese East Asian triumvirate. My Philippines-born wife has joked that she didn’t know she was Asian until she went to high school in Colorado. In her Southern California world, “Filipino” always got its own box to check. Like all racialized identities, the category of Asian is dynamic and fluid, adapting to a changing social world. Regardless of its dimensions, in Ping Tom Park, it was clear that the identity of Asian had drawn people together in solidarity.

There’s no doubt that the trauma of our current moment has underscored the importance of the community coming together with a single purpose. Spurred on by racist references to the “Chinese flu” (and worse), hegemonic whiteness continues to frame Asian-ness as foreign, other, dangerous. Foregrounding any collective racialized and stigmatized identity, whether it’s Asian, Latino/a, Black, or indigenous, serves as a way for those excluded from whiteness to resist a political and social hierarchy, pulling together in common cause.

Yet, around the crowd, I saw signs—literal and figurative— of the diversity within this racialized unity. The literal representation were signs written in Korean Hangul script, Chinese and Japanese characters, Thai script, and more. Flags from the Philippines, Hong Kong, India, and Taiwan waved above the crowd. I have no doubt many other national and cultural identities were part of this racialized Asian collective.

There is something beautifully right about the ways an Asian identity, as a racialized community, can hold that together with cultural distinctions. We know the vision of a redeemed world is one of embodied reality and cultural diversity (Rev. 7:9). “Race,” as the socially-constructed and biologically arbitrary divisions of a global hierarchy, surely will have no power in the realized Kingdom, yet we will have bodies, and, presumably, those bodies will have the same features of skin, hair, eye, and face that characterize human diversity now. “Culture,” as the beautiful creativity of language, aesthetic, movement, and practice, will continue to be manifest. To see the Asian community come together, then, with a recognition and reflection of cultural distinctions, standing resolutely against the hierarchies constructed in racialization, struck me as deeply reflective of God’s purposes for the redemption of this world, while pointing to the world to come.

In facing the brokenness of this world, the speakers and signs of the march rejected the work of division that has been historically forced on racialized minorities in the United States. There were explicit rejections, in signs and speeches, of the “model minority myth” foisted on Asian immigrants to the US, to offer a thin veneer of security in a trap of racial oppression. Foregrounding this racial identity, Asian/Asian-American Christians stood in solidarity against the violence facing the Black community. My Asian brothers and sisters called us forth, declaring that we would not accept a racial hierarchy into which we had all been forced. They turned that racialized identity against oppression and dehumanization, towards the long moral arc of God’s justice. Moreover, they would not accept any homogenizing, or leveling of the God-ordained cultural diversity even while subverting the constructions of race. They proclaimed the diversity of God’s kingdom and the unity of the body—the presence of God in the now and the not yet.

What might it mean for those of us racialized as white to strive toward this cultural jiu jitsu, turning the power of race on its head by facing it head on, while celebrating cultural distinctions and diversity within a racial category? As a white person, I know we must not deny, as too often happens, the realities of racialization in which identities like mine are normalized, privileged, and invisiblized in the service of an unjust order. At the same time, I do not want to construct or assert something called “white culture” as an unproblematic identity, a tangled vine of amorphous internet memes without roots in time or place.

I do not think that, for many of us, reclaiming connections to a European context is the right option. The forgetting and erasure have been too thorough and effective. We have traded our European cultural birthrights for a pottage of whiteness. At the same time, like my Asian friends who witness to the diversity within their racialized community, we white Christians need to hold together the multiple truths of racialization, cultural heritage, and life in Christ, not as equal in strength or value, but as each reflecting part of what is true in our lives and our world.

 This demonstration against racial injustice became a demonstration of cultural remembering and Christian unity for the sake of others. In the gospel, we are a holy people of one blood, yet we are still of our families, our languages, our cultures. Our human collectives, those that reflect the purposes of God in human diversity, are not to be dissolved into the identities of race, or even religion. What we are called to do is bring our particularity to the cross for the sake of the whole gospel. I saw, in their desire to stand with Black brothers and sisters, my Asian brethren bring their whole selves, in their particularity, for the love of others.

By coming together as those racialized as Asian, the marchers spoke into the social context where minoritized races have been pitted against one another as the hegemony of whiteness seeks to divide and conquer. No more, declared the collective, would we take up some meager privilege at the expense of another. Simultaneously, the cultural diversity and particularity marched with them. Identities of Chinese, Filipino, Indian, and Korean did not compete with the solidarity of the whole but spoke to the common purpose from diverse parts of the body.

I cannot yet quite answer the question of what this will look like for us European Americans to divest ourselves of whiteness, rejecting the privilege and dismantling the hierarchy, while embracing cultural distinctiveness. For now, we may need to simply focus on the former. But I find inspiration within the Asian American church. I saw this at Ping Tom Park, on the move to Chinese Union Church, and collected at Progressive Baptist. This is where God’s people, in the power of his spirit, find ways to recognize the political present and confront it in a prophetic witness, hold to cultural distinctiveness, and, above all, put on love. Because the greatest of these is love.

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Brian Howell is professor of anthropology at Wheaton College (IL). He has published several books on topics such as Protestantism in the Philippines, short-term missions, and on the discipline of anthropology. He lives in Wheaton, IL, with his wife, Marissa. They have three adult children, for whom they pray for a more just world. Follow him on Twitter.