No Model Minority, Part I: Invisible Asian Americans in the Midst of a Season of Apocalypse

The pandemic has revealed many hard truths. More than ever, the church needs the valuable cultural lens that Asian Americans can bring.

By Dr. Jordan Ryan

T

he COVID-19 pandemic is apocalyptic in the sense that it has revealed. It has peeled back the curtain and laid bare the brokenness of our systems, the injustices in our communities, and the inequities of our society. The watchdog website “Stop AAPI Hate” recorded 2,583 reported incidents of discrimination against Asians and Pacific Islanders in the United States between March 19 and August 5, 2020. However, as a recent study highlighted, less than half of hate crimes against Asian Americans are reported. It’s quite likely that this staggering number is only a portion of the total incidents of racism that Asian Americans have endured throughout the pandemic. The pandemic has laid bare how white America may really feel about so-called model minorities.

Though the pandemic is apocalyptic in having revealed things for the way that they truly are, it is not eschatological. This season lacks the proclamation and sense of hope for redemption and renewal that accompanies the end of the age.   

I am half-Filipino, born and raised in Toronto, now living in the American Midwest. No matter how often my Titas and Titos tell me I can pass for White, no matter how well I can act like a white Canadian, I will probably continue to be told to “go back to where I came from” by people who trace both sides of their ancestry back to Europe. My skin is too brown, my features too different, and my hair too dark. When they tell me to “go back,” I am reasonably confident that they are not thinking of Toronto. 

Perhaps hope is to be found in the prophetic voices crying out from the margins: no justice, no peace. No mishphat, no shalom. How should we who live in America and are of Asian descent respond to these voices on the margins in the nation that we call home?  

Through the prophet Amos, God delivered oracles of condemnation against ethnic violence carried out by various people groups against other groups: for three sins and for four, our God will not relent against acts of violence perpetrated by one ethnic group against another (Am. 1-2). We serve a God who was incensed when Damascus threshed Gilead with iron, when Edom pursued his brother with the sword, when Ammon ripped open the pregnant women of Gilead.  

So too, I believe, is the same God incensed that white settlers slaughtered the indigenous peoples of this land, that Black Americans were enslaved, are lynched and imprisoned, and that America threshed the First Philippine Republic with iron. He is incensed by the acts of racially motivated violence carried out against our ethnic minority communities now. 

The sin and injustice of racism can be confronted only if we are willing to confront them. As followers of the crucified Christ, Scripture offers us hope for that task in the form of its messages of liberation, of an upside-down kingdom in which the lowly are elevated, the oppressed are liberated, and the weak shame the strong (1 Cor. 1:27).  

We must, however, be willing to decolonize the way we read the Bible in order to free its lifegiving message of hope, salvation, and liberation from servitude to the powers that be. The Bible has far too often been weaponized against colonized and colored people. We must remember that it is for us, not against us.  

Rather than reading the Bible through the colonial lens all too common in the white American church, with its preoccupation on maintaining the status quo, we should instead be willing to read Scripture from our own context. We can bring our own history and experiences to the text, letting it speak to those experiences. In doing so, we are not manipulating Scripture by syncretizing the biblical text with our context. We are instead encountering Scripture from our context. We are letting it speak its intended message out of its ancient context, and then faithfully re-contextualizing that message for our own communities and circumstances. This process requires an understanding of the ancient context of Scripture, as is necessary in all good exegesis, and an understanding of our own contexts. 

As Asian American readers of Scripture, our contexts are significantly different, both personally and communally, from those of our white brothers and sisters. Unlike most other New Testament scholars in the US, I am only one generation removed from abject poverty. My mother grew up in the Philippines during the period of martial law under the Marcos regime.  

Unlike most New Testament scholars in the US, I am the grandson of a single-parent immigrant cleaning lady with a fourth-grade education. My Lola (grandmother) was the wisest person I’ve ever known, and I can only wish I possessed half of her faith in the God who uplifts the lowly.  

Unlike most New Testament scholars in the US, my skin is brown, because unlike most New Testament scholars in the US, I am a mixed-race person of color. 

Filipino Americans are the third largest Asian American ethnic group in the United States, behind Chinese Americans and Indian Americans. Almost one in five Asian Americans are Filipino, numbering over 4 million in total. But the experience of Filipinos in Asian America is far too often characterized by invisibility. They are disproportionately underrepresented and marginalized across the various facets of American society. We are “forgotten Asian Americans.” This underrepresentation extends to higher education and is acute in my own field. Only a handful of scholars with Filipino heritage hold PhDs or permanent positions in colleges and universities, and even fewer work in Christian confessional settings. Based on my unsuccessful attempts to find others like me, I estimate that there may be fewer than five. This is despite the fact that 89 percent of Filipino Americans are Christian, with 65 percent being Catholic and 21 percent being Protestant. 

While Filipino Americans are well represented in the kingdom of God, we have not been given a voice or a seat at the table when it comes to interpreting Scripture. In our reading of Scripture, we subconsciously carry this invisibility with us in our reading of the text, and the experiences of marginalization that come with it. A Filipino American hermeneutic involves identification with the representation of marginality, marginalization, and marginalized people in Scripture. It means that we can look and listen carefully to the New Testament’s depiction of the marginality of the people to whom Jesus ministered, of his earliest followers, of the Jewish communities of the Mediterranean diaspora, and to the person of Jesus himself in order to gain theological insight into how we might deal with the marginalization that we face as Filipino Americans in the church, in America, and in the academy. 

That’s why the apocalyptic “revelation” of the pandemic that has helped Asian Americans better understand our context within the American church is so crucial. This time has provided us with an opportunity to reflect on who we are, both as Asians in America and as followers of Jesus.  

As we continue to wrestle with the evils of anti-Asian racism, we must also listen to the cries for justice from our Black brothers and sisters who experience marginalization, discrimination, violence, and hatred. For Filipino Americans, it is time to recognize and confront our experiences of invisibility and remember that we are citizens of a kingdom in which the first are last, and the last are first. It is time for us to take up a little more space by taking up our crosses and following the crucified Messiah who uplifts the lowly, who has set the oppressed free, and who refused to stay dead. 

Additional resources about the Filipino American experience:

• Erwin S. de Leon & Gem P. Daus, “Filipino American political participation,” Politics, Groups, and Identities 6, no. 3 (2018): 435-452.

• Allan Aquino, “Filipino Americans,” in Encyclopedia of Asian American Issues Today, ed. Edith Wen-Chu and Grace J. Yoo (Santa Barbara: Greenwood Press, 2010), 25-30.

• James A. Tyner, “Filipinos: The Invisible Ethnic Community,” in Contemporary Ethnic Geographies in America, ed. Ines M Miyares and Christopher A. Airriess (Lanham: Roman & Littlefield, 2007), 251-270.

• Rick Bonus, Locating Filipino Americans: Ethnicity and the Cultural Politics of Space (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000), 1-2.

• Fred Cordova, Filipinos: Forgotten Asian Americans (Demonstration Project for Asian Americans, 1983), esp. Cordova’s prologue on p. xiii.

This article is adapted from a talk given at a recent webinar hosted by The Center for Asian/Asian American Ministry at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary, titled, “That Thing Called Pandemya: PINOYS Reflecting Theologically on COVID-19 and Anti-Asian Violence.”

To read part II: No Model Minority, Part II: Filipino Americans, the Bible, and Resisting Racism

Photo by Mike Von on Unsplash

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Dr. Jordan Ryan is a half-Filipino New Testament scholar, hailing from the multicultural city of Toronto, Canada. His parents worked with the street youth population in the inner city, and he grew up in the heart of the city in community with some of its most marginalized people. He is assistant professor of New Testament at Wheaton College, IL, where he teaches courses in biblical studies and in archaeology.