escapingbabylon.com

I’ve often talked about the problem of race, bigotry and discrimination, so I figure if you’re still reading you are at least interested in the issue (or at best tolerant of my rants).  Asif (I would link to his livejournal but he rarely posts anymore) pointed me to an article on CNN that talks about racially segregated churches. There’s one quote that I thought was particularly interesting.

Via CNN: “Why many Americans prefer their Sundays segregated.”

The people in the pews must also do their share of adapting, scholars and ministers say. Only when ethnic groups no longer feel compelled to abandon their entire culture on Sunday morning can a church claim to be interracial, Brelsford says.

…

Interracial churches resist “taking one dominant identity and forcing everyone to fit into it,” Brelsford says.

I think this is the probably the hardest temptation to overcome when trying to create a church or other organization of mixed ethnicity, particularly if one is of the majority culture, you think that certain things are universal, as opposed to being part of your unique identity. It took me a very long time to get over the idea that if people just stripped away their American-ness/African-ness/Indian-ness/Whatever-ness then deep down inside they’ll be more or less Jamaican. This is often the error of people who say “why can’t we all get along” or “why do we have to talk about race/ethnicity”. They think that deep down, if you strip away all that “ethnicness” that you’ll be just like them.

It’s pretty easy to say that that’s not true. Speaking as someone who was born into an ethnic majority, it’s much harder to live it. There’s always that voice that says that ways that my culture have taught me to act, think and relate are “correct” or even just “normal” and that everything else is wrong or a distortion from the baseline of myself. I think that we start to silence that voice by deliberately being open to, and seeking to understand the spectrum of culture. I think that we also need to deliberately put ourselves in a situation where we are the minority, and we seek to learn from the culture in which we immerse ourselves. It’s always easy to jump into a culture from a position of “rightness”. We’ve seen lot’s of people do it, including some missionaries. The challenge is to jump in to a culture in a learning position.

Now, with all this being said, the advice that I’ve given above is for the individual from a majority culture. Some of it is probably applicable for people from a minority culture as well, but I suspect that a lot is different. And as the article talks about, members of minority cultures can have as many issues dealing with racial/ethnic integration as the majority. I do not mean to imply that those that are members of minority cultures have no responsibility in this pursuit, and may post some of my thoughts on that later. Their embracing or rejecting of the pursuit has absolutely no bearing on our responsibility to pursue equity.

Another from the Star Tribune:

… It demonstrates more than anything the American capacity to turn even the most unruly and chaotic moments in our history into something orderly, manageable and culminating in a gift shop.

 On a semi-related note, I know I haven’t really been posting lately. Consider these smaller posts as a warm up, or at least fishing around for inspiration. I know I don’t have a ton of readers, but definitely feel free to suggest a topic for me to blog on, or to ask me a question that I can answer.