Hi, I’m Marcie. I was born in Hawaii in the 1970’s to parents whose ancestors came from China. I was raised to be independent, competitive, resourceful, and maybe a little bit selfish. I have many cognitive biases and mental frameworks that were embedded in there from a young age. Many of them happen to be really helpful at getting along in 21st century American life. Here’s a sampling:
- If something scares you, conquer and crush it. Preferably with your bare hands.
- Love and health are found in food.
- There are winners and losers. Be sure you’re an honest winner.
This series of posts
is a way for me to capture my own journey through my own racist attitudes and biases, and provides some accountability for me too. I’m so thankful for the timing of the way racism has been coming to the forefront in the mainstream over the last several years. However it pans out, and I don’t know how it will honestly, I pray that my struggles and victories bring hope and movement into my own world and sphere and maybe into yours too.
I long for true discourse, multiple face to face conversations where you and I can be honest, vulnerable, and bounce ideas off one another. Or sometimes just listen. Obviously the problem of racism in the United States is not going to be solved on social media. It will be dealt with person to person as hearts are changed, moved, and reminded through compassion, hope, taking the right things seriously, and caring about one another.
Today is just a stone-skipping-across-the-surface overview of what I feel must be some key memories and moments that have revealed my heart and thinking about racial identity and racism. I hope you will also take some time to think about what makes you who you are and what difference race and ethnicity make in your life and the lives of others to whom you are connected.
Hawaii is a beautiful meld of cultures and thinking.
With many cultures coming together (Japanese, Chinese, Filipino, Portuguese, White, Hispanic, Native Hawaiian) and joined by a large US military presence, the 50th state is really a fascinating place. I grew up eating foods from all over the world and being used to a mix of languages when it came to the names of streets, military installations, foods, and people! We had our own ethnic jokes that were even used from the pulpit.
During my formative years, I was heavily influenced by my quiet but steady entrepreneurial, straight-ticket-Republican, stock-market-watching grandfather whose bold wife killed bugs with her bare hands and knew no fear. She was dead set on naming my dad with an American name, partially ashamed of her own history as an orphan, but also driven by success and forward progress. I do not remember feeling different about other peoples, but was struck with the Hawaiian terms for white people: Haole, and the word for half: “hapa,” which was used for children who are half white and half Hawaiian, or really just those cute kids who you couldn’t really identify their ancestry by looking and listening.
We ate everything. This much I remember.
Whether a question of mobility or “color blindness” (which I will address in a later post), it’s interesting that the majority of my aunts and uncles “married Chinese” (I remember my grandma talking about finding “a good Chinese boy”) but I and the majority of my cousins now are progenitors to a bunch of hapa kids.
I remember visiting Indiana for the first time at age 16 and an older student telling me I had an accent. I said, “I’m pretty sure you’re the one with the accent.” To which he replied, “I’m from the heartland of America. This is how English is spoken.” (We both laugh.) Another friend from Florida said the same thing, “You say ‘yah.'”
I met my husband, The Engineer, at that same college in Indiana a couple of years later.
And when we first became friends, he said that he noticed my laugh (loud and fake-sounding) and that I was small (more than a foot shorter than him) and that I was always having fun with my people (always in the cafeteria.) As we learned about each other’s history and ways of thinking, it struck me that although we come from very different cultures and geographies, our ethnicity/race never really seemed to define our differences. It has been that way with many of my adult best friends who are (predominantly today) white. Our pasts, our families of origin, we took for granted as being handed down either genetically or by generational blessing or curse, and those factors just became a part of that person to love. There was no overt metadata labeled “race” that came to play in our relationships, at least none that we knew of or talked about. But I was also aware of my ancestry and they really weren’t, which feels like a big deal in thinking about race and ethnicity.
I remember thinking in my early 20’s, “Why do my black friends worship so passionately?” “Why is their music so much better than mine?” and “Why are my black friends so . . . flashy?”
These were some of the questions and thoughts I had that I figured were attached to their culture of origin, or something having to do with freedom in Christ that I didn’t understand, because my people were never indentured the way theirs were. Some of these questions remain outstanding.
Fast forward several decades and the Engineer and I were delivering a training session called Money, The Kingdom, and You for a student conference with Intervarsity Christian Fellowship. During one of the meal breaks, I sat next to a young black student, Travis. We talked chit chat for a few minutes about the worship, about the sessions and small groups, and then, being honestly curious and somewhat audacious, I just blurted out,
“So, what’s it like to be black?”
And just like that, I broke through the hardest part: starting. I honestly had never asked someone point blank to tell me about his experience based on race. It was a great conversation. This wasn’t a funny conversation about being a “country boy” or a “redneck” like the things The Engineer and I had talked about. It was more like me being appalled at Travis’ experience which was completely and utterly different than mine based solely on his outer appearance. It wasn’t really family culture. Yet, he lived in fear, that he would be targeted, that he was always being watched. That was just the way he grew up.
I had never thought about perspective and reality that way I started to that day.
I think when we’re kids, things smooth over. We notice wrinkles and bumps but don’t so much question them or try to understand them. We have flashes of memory as adults, and our minds try to fill in the gaps with story.
My dad, an entrepreneur and “sauce mogul,” often hired second-chancers into his co-packing and food incubator business. He recounted for me working with men and women with criminal records, and told me amazing stories about them as people, what made them great employees and what sometimes caused them to fall back into crime. These too, were just people with an “x” in a different set of boxes on a standardized form.
All along the way, my heart was beginning to soak in this idea: that we are all human, born into places and times and families NOT of our choosing.
Several years later, this was baked in when I met a dear (white) family in church who was caught in the cycle of generational poverty. I am still friends with one of the sisters and occasionally we check in with one another and pray over the phone. Seeing the cultural, legislative, and societal causes of poverty up close opened my eyes to people and needs even more. I became increasingly aware of the way human thought varies based on past perspective and experience. I slowly was moved toward Jesus’ words about doing to the least of these not out of a sense of duty, but that it is his heart.
Then, on a recommendation, I listened to Michelle Obama’s autobiography, Becoming. I listened to it because she was black and because she read it herself on the audiobook.
This was followed by a homeschool unit study on Hawaii, which spent a good portion of the time talking and thinking about indigenous people and how they were affected with the arrival of James Cook (hello infectious diseases!), and how we feel about the history of the world. The children and I all learned together, thinking and talking about Native Hawaiians and their plight and future. Again, all unique people who didn’t choose their place or time in which to exist.
At around the same time, it struck me profoundly that the Land promised to Abraham and his descendants was actually land.
I know this sounds really strange, but I tend to think so heavily in analogies and come to the Bible with such Western bias, that I think about the Promised Land as this symbol for heaven, or a way for God to make a lot of really good points about obedience, provision, wandering, and war.
Despite the dozen times I had read the entirety of the Bible and the 20 years I had studied it and considered the genealogies and accounts of the way the land was split up between tribes, it dawned on me that this was actual land that was being promised. This was actual land that would be fought over. This was actual land on which families would raise crops and graze animals and reap and sow within. This mattered! The Abrahamic Covenant was about God’s delight in providing livelihood through land stewardship to a particular ethnic group descended from one man. Yes, it would lead to more. It would ultimately lead to Jesus Christ. But in the moment, the way it affected people was to promise them life and land.
Several other small, imperceptible but meaningful transactions added up to my heart moving and softening about real racism and what it is. Race used to be something I ignored. Or, at most, I only thought about the shiny parts, the positive parts, the joy-bearing parts.
I tried to lump and ignore all of the negative parts of race and ethnicity because I didn’t know how to deal with it.
I didn’t think it would make a difference so I didn’t spend any time thinking about it. And in reality,
I wasn’t mature enough to enter into the hurt of another person.
But God has brought me through a series of events to be ready for this time and place, to be a learner about racism and to make a difference not for the sake of appearing a certain way or having a response, but for the glory of God. I’m just starting out. I’m learning that racism isn’t about me, and it is about me at the same time.
It’s about people’s stories.
It’s about factors over which we have no control that deeply affect our lives.
It’s about loving well.
It’s about getting outside of myself enough to love well.
It’s about actual land, actual money, actual laws, the reality of life and livelihood that are related to race.
I feel like I’ve been, by my own choosing, “color blind” for so long and now I want to see the world in color. I want to appreciate the diversity of peoples that was a part of God’s plan all along. I want to think about and participate in the reconciliation of every tribe and tongue and nation, and all of their genetic information too, in a new heaven and a new earth. With God as our God and us as His people.
Somehow the Promised Land is going to play out in this technicolor journey. I don’t know how but it will. Stay tuned.