Why Race Isn't A Problem

A man pulled out his beach chair and umbrella and sat down to enjoy the view in front of him.  A turquoise blue ocean, framed by palm trees, lay before him as far as his eyes could see.  He pulled his sunglasses onto his face and took a sip out of a straw stuck into a coconut and smacked his lips in satisfaction at the taste of the milk. He gave a contented sigh of happiness at his lot in life. 

He was disturbed from his reverie by the arrival of another man.  

“Why are you still here?” the visitor said.  “I told you, this is no place for you to live.  This place is deadly.”  

The man rolled his eyes at his visitor and grumbled.  “Don’t start rambling on and on about the past.  The past is gone and done.  I’m not responsible for the decisions of people who lived before me.  Now we are in the present and, right now, this place is beautiful and has everything I want in a home.  I’m not going to change anything.”

The visitor hung his head and left the man to enjoy his idyllic beach.  The man happily stayed in his place on the Bikini Atoll, the testing site for the detonation of 23 atomic blasts that left the water and soil and animals poisoned for generations.    The man took another sip of his cesium-contaminated coconut and closed his eyes to take a nap.  

………

Do you know what you see if you visit the location where the Civil War Battle of Gettysburg was fought?  A lovely field.  There are trees and flowers and tall grasses.  It doesn’t look like anything special.  Do you know what makes it important?  Cultural memory.  A group of people attach symbolic historical and cultural importance to the location.

  

If a different group of people moved into the area and decided it was a good location for a parking structure, what would stop them?  Without knowledge of the history, the culture, and the symbolism attached, it’s only a field.  


How many times do I walk through a field, a neighborhood, a city park and miss the symbolism attached to that location because I am an outsider to the battles fought and the identities forged there?  It’s only when I start digging that I find out what layers of meaning are buried deep in the soils of history or which locations are etymologically haunted by those who have walked there in the past.   


I’ve been on a long journey of excavating my own worldview and learning about what others see when we look at the same field.  It is not an easy journey, nor is it a complete one.  It’s a messy work-in-progress that I don’t think will ever fully be complete.  

Back in 2012, I accidentally attended a protest in Indianapolis.  Crowds of mourners donned hoodies and carried signs in solemn remembrance of the death of Trayvon Martin.    It was a somber affair and filled with layers of symbols, cultural memory, and shared griefs that I could only hope to scratch the surface on.  From the vantage point on which they stood, their eyes saw a field scattered waist deep with lives lost through unrestricted violence.  They keep a record of names, places-memories of tragedies and loss that are too often forgotten or erased from the cultural memories of those looking upon the same field from a different angle.  

I’ve spent the last few days mulling over the emotions the Ahmaud Arbery tragedy have elicited for me.  What stands out to me the most are the reactions people have on social media and in commentary around articles posted.  “Black people kill black people all the time”….or “white people get killed by shooters too”….or “the shooters thought they were protecting their community.”  What is being said (or hinted at) is still the same:

This wasn’t about race. 

I am not here to debate the details of this particular case or to prove/disprove if it was racially-motivated.  However, I can’t help but pause and wonder what evidence would prove that race played a factor?  How does one prove that an action is racially-motivated?  Especially in light of the reality that our views of race tend to mainly be unconscious (or a history of lynchings that were merely “punishments for social transgressions and not racially-motivated”).  

They weren’t racist.   

This is another thing I read a lot.  The shooters weren’t racist people therefore their actions weren’t racist either.  It’s a common sentiment I’ve read lately.  People proudly post, “I’m not racist” and share their own journeys with racial identity.  I appreciate the sentiment.  I mean, compared with the guys tatted up with swastikas and leading white supremacy groups that my husband sees in the jail, I guess it could be worse. 

But I think the sentiment fails to recognize one important fact:  Everyone in the U.S. is racist. 

Yes.  You heard me.  Everyone.  Black and white.  Brown or blue.  We are all part of the same flawed historical context.  It impacts us in different ways, but it still impacts us all.  

The construction of race in the U.S. precedes the Declaration of Independence by over a century.  Ideals of a racial hierarchy are older than ideals of democracy and freedom.  It’s so ingrained in our history, our laws, our values that we can’t even see it’s there.  It’s more integrally American than the Bill of Rights.  If you were born in or grew up in the U.S., you have been immersed in a cultural context that has a racial hierarchy as one of its cornerstones and defining elements.  Consciously or unconsciously, we know "our place" and the "places of others" within the hierarchy and this impacts how we see ourselves and others, whether we admit to it or not.  This classification by race is not global and is unique to polities with a history of slavery.

Soon-Chan Rah writes in The Next Evangelicalism that “racism is America’s original and most deeply rooted sin.”  From the petri dish of the American colonies, the construction of race grew and evolved until it contagiously spread on a global scale with more evangelical fervor and long-lasting repercussions than even our experiment with democracy. 

The only way to actually bring reconciliation and change is by recognizing both the shared heritage of and the evil of the concept of race.  Pretending it’s not there and maintaining taboos about speaking about it won’t fix it. 

Practically, on an individual level, unless you can list off all the ways race has impacted your worldview, your family line, the history of “your people,” and the ways you have been (intentionally and unintentionally) caught into the ideals of a racial hierarchy, then you are captive to the lies inherent in racial ideology.  Racial and ethnic identity have got to be redeemed by Christ and freed from lies just as much as every other part of our identity and without bringing it before the cross, it hasn’t been brought under Christ’s authority.  

Wait-the only way to stop being racist is to admit you are racist?  Ummm, yeah.  You can’t cure cancer until you first diagnose it and then seek the proper treatment.  

"Wounded people wound other people."  Even hidden wounds and hidden unforgiveness can have repercussions for generations.  Both those who have oppressed and those who are oppressors need repentance and to forgive and ask for forgiveness.  The Irish, who experienced such blatant racism as immigrants, then were outspoken in their attempts to disallow Chinese immigration.  African Americans can be blatant in their racism towards Africans.  And “white” people of European descent have been killed in retributive, racially motivated violence for the sin of their skin color as well.   

Innocence does not come from skin color and a history of oppression.  One is not exempt from racist thoughts or attitudes by having experienced racism.  One is not innately free of prejudice.  If you read this and say, “I am not prejudiced,” my answer is, “no, you have let your prejudice influence your actions freely and without you knowing it’s even there.”  

Until we all can sit down and excavate our own backgrounds, talk about what we all see when we look at that green, grassy field, and recognize the ways our history is still poisoning our coconuts, we won’t get anywhere. 

There was a time in my life when I never thought about race.  Now it’s a weekly, if not daily, topic of conversation.  I could go into an extended history lesson on this.  I could give facts, figures, and statistics.  I could speak about research I have personally conducted around race.  I could give personal anecdotes and first-hand experiences I have witnessed.  Do you know what I’ve found?  It’s not enough to prove to some people that racism exists and is still a problem.  There’s always a way around it.  The data is skewed, the population sampling inaccurate, the researcher was biased.  That person didn’t mean it.  They had a bad day.  They were not in their right mind.  It must have been a misinterpretation.  You don't have authority to speak on this.  

These still share the same common theme:  racism isn’t a problem anymore.

It’s really hard to prove something exists that “doesn’t exist.”  “That’s in our past,” they say.  As long as we believe it’s only “in our past,” I guarantee you, it will continue to be in our future too. 

In the Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis writes, “There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them. They themselves are equally pleased by both errors and hail a materialist or a magician with the same delight.”

I find this to be equally true in conversations people hold on race in the U.S.  On the one hand, some argue racism is a thing of the past, no longer relevant to modern conversations and they decry all others who use the irrelevant “race card”.  On the other hand, there are those who see racism in every word and deed, every action and mis-action and it holds them captive in fear and bitterness.  Both are just as equally right as they are wrong and both can be as equally as damaging to real healing until redeemed, forgiven, and forced to kneel to Truth.

People like to remind me that things are better now than they used to be.  Thank the Lord, they are.   I will admit, I am overjoyed that not only is my marriage currently legal in all fifty states.  I will neither lose my citizenship, my state of residence, nor my freedom through my marriage.   My children are no longer considered illegal and  classified as “abominable mixture and spurious issue” who will be taken from me and raised by the church, sold as slaves, or  forcefully sterilized. That is definitely improvement and I will not ever take it for granted or cease being thankful for how things have changed. 

However, a partial recession of cancer is different from a full recovery and I want to see my children and their children and their children be able to say:  Look at how things have changed. I’m so glad I live when I do.  I’m thankful for the battles my ancestors fought on my behalf.

The construction of race, like the testing of atomic bombs in the Bikini Atoll, has seeped into our national soil and poisoned our water.  Before we can seek to cleanse our land and heal our brokenness, we first have to honestly face the ways our past impacts our present (even if we can’t see it or recognize it now).  We also have to recognize how two people can look at the field of Gettysburg and see completely different pictures.  One sees a field of grass.  Another sees a field of fallen soldiers. 

It’s both. 

…….

“We can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us”.

—Abraham Lincoln Gettysburg Address

For more on this, check out the articles our mighty ministry team compiled last year: here and here...and a side note I won't go more into here-I think ethnicity is a much healthier, more sound concept to work with than the hopelessly flawed, intrinsically evil concept of race. 

One more article I came across that I found useful is on the concept of microagression here.

Bridges

There is a Swahili proverb that says, “A bridge is not where you dwell[i].” 

It’s good advice.  But some of us try anyways. 

In the liminal walkway between places, the “Wood Between the Worlds”[ii], the place that is neither here nor there, we try to pitch our tents. 

I used to have both feet firmly rooted in one place.  The tan, sandy soils of decomposed limestone flavored with sage and old oaks gave me a solid place to stand, all in one, small, somehow comprehensible world. 

Now I look back over my shoulder and see dusty footprints leading back miles and miles away from where I once was to where I now am. 

I knew when I married my husband that I was not only marrying him, I was marrying the Alur culture, his extended family, his social network in Uganda, and the unique cultural context that created the spectacular being that is my husband. 

He knew when he married me that he was not only marrying me, but marrying the complicated red, white, and blue mess that is my American background and history, my messy family of origin, my social network sprawled across the concrete rivers of Los Angeles, and the unique cultural context that somehow forged me into being.  

But neither of us really knew what we were marrying into. 

It is impossible to walk through the fires of culture shock completely unscourged.  When uprooted and unanchored from all the myriad of relationships, symbols, and places that made you into who you are as a person and violently submerged into an alien world, one’s sense of self must be changed.  It has to.  And there is no way to predict who will come out of the other end. 

Our combined experiences taught us how to be Ugandan and how to be American.  Neither of our combined experiences prepared us for being Ugandan in America. 

It’s not the same thing…and my cultural context prefers Ugandans to stay in Uganda. 

Our marriage lashed two worlds together, but our nest making has added two more.  And we have both experienced the never ending, continually reoccurring cycles of culture shock.

 As the emotions ebb and flow, I am reminded again and again how similar the stages of culture shock are to the stages of grief-the denial, the anger, the grief, the depression, the small adjustments that can be made to accommodate one’s new reality. 

In a lot of ways, culture shock is a grief.  It’s learning to mourn for the loss of one’s world-physical and social, and the loss of one’s place in the world.  It’s learning to grieve that one’s natal identity and the deep, internal sense of self that has been buried in one’s native soil, to be reincarnated as something new and somehow both familiar and foreign.  That person who once was is no longer and will never fully be again.  They’ve been unworlded, unmade, untethered, uprooted, and cast adrift on the transnational reality that never quite feels like reality.  

“A bird may love a fish, but where will they live?”

 “Then we shall have to build you wings.[iii]” 

It’s not enough.  The bird also needs scuba gear.  And their children will need to be ducks or flying fish-creatures capable of traversing worlds and changing their identities with the same flurry of a two year old changing clothes.

But those are the ones who understand bridge-building-those who live it out on a daily basis.  They are intimately acquainted with the challenges of forging distinct elements into steel in the high heated pressure of daily life.[iv]  The end result is stronger than the original materials, but only after passing through the inferno.  And nobody likes to be burned and melted.  

Where would the world be without bridges?  They unite peoples and create vulnerable spaces for attack.  They are dangerous and they are powerful, as all liminal stages[v] and things are. 

It’s learning to live between worlds, belonging neither here nor there, and yet everywhere.  It’s trying to build one’s house on a bridge.  And there’s not a lot of other houses there. 

I would not exchange my small, comprehensible, hand-held world for this expanded, shattered, byzantine version.  Sometimes, brokenness is a gift.  

“Blessed are the peacemakers,
for they will be called children of God.” Matthew 5:9

The bridge builders between God and people, people and each other, those who actively seek “shalom” or God’s full, holistic, all-encompassing kind of peace-these ones will always have a place of belonging. They are blessed even in their isolation from their worlds and when they make people crazy in their cries for the dissolution of injustice and conflict. They are claimed by God as His own. I find that comforting.

God knew a lot about bridges…and pitching of tents[vi] between worlds and peoples and the challenges of being both/and.

Sometimes, I look over the edge of the bridge on which I dwell and wonder what it would be like if I still lived in one place, with my sandaled feet all on one side.  Yet, here on my bridge, I can look out and see the waters beneath me glisten and reflect the sun’s golden rays in their turquoise depths.  My eyes can look to either side and show me the paths my footprints have taken me and the incredible views that can only be seen by someone who has decided to build a house on a bridge. 

So, I close my eyes, inhale deeply, and thank God again for the liminal space He’s currently called me to pitch my tent, with my feet stretched worlds. 

---

[i] Daraja si maskani

[ii] C.S. Lewis, the Magician’s Nephew

[iii] Lines from the movie Ever After-scene where “Cinderella” and Leonardo Da Vinci are discussing bringing her to the ball to meet the prince. 

[iv] Thanks to the Novo prophetic prayer team for the concept of bridges and steel and peacemaking.  It resonated. 

[v] The concept of liminality comes from anthropologist Victor Turner in his brilliant work on stages of ritual. 

[vi][vi] Incarnation-“taking on flesh” or “pitched his tent and dwelt among us”-the word choice is seen throughout the Bible.

American Blood American Soil

First generation American.

Spent your whole life overseas.

You married right.  You married well.

Happy wife, your land can be changed.

Now you have become an American.

First generation un-American

Spent your whole life in the States.

You married wrong.  What have you done?

Unhappy wife, your land can be changed.

You can no longer be an American.[1]

*************************************

First generation to come to America,

The unwanted refuse of the earth.

Spit out from your native land,

Came on ships as chattel.

We don’t want you here, you Irish,

Your blood won’t make this land American.

First generation to come to America,

The precious cargo of the earth.

Stolen from your native land,

Came on ships as chattel.

We want you here, in chains.

This land won’t make your blood American.[2]

**************************************

Second generation born overseas,

Your parents move and travel.

You’ve never lived on the land,

But blood is stronger.

You will remain an American.

Second generation born in America,

Your parents move and travel.

You’ve lived on the land all your life,

But blood is stronger.

You will never be an American.[3]

*******************************

Three generations born in Mexico,

Now you live in the U.S.A.

You’ve never once moved or shifted.

You’ll have to if you want to stay Mexican,

Your land has become American.

Three generations born in America,

Now you live in Mexico.

You’re always moving, always shifting.

Your blood expands, pours across borders,

Forcing this land to become American.[4]

*********************************

Four generations born in America,

Builders of the nation, built with your own two hands.

Architects of freedom, masterminds of democracy.

With your blood, sweat, and tears

You have made this land American

Four generations born in America

Builders of the nation, built with your own two hands.

Freedom and democracy aren’t your birthright.

Your blood, sweat, and tears,

Will not make you American.[5]

*******************************************

Five generations welcomed to America:

Dutch, German, English, Swedish

Welcome: Pure, unadulterated, Anglo-Saxon stock.

All others: Shut the door.  No more.

We want to keep our blood American.

Five generations shut out from America:

Italian, Jewish, Indian, Japanese.

Unwelcome: Impure, adulterated, tainted blood.

Our Nordic brothers, welcome!  Bring us more!

We want to keep our blood American. [6]

****************************************

Six generations born in Europe:

Germany, Ireland, England, Sweden.

Newly planted immigrants,

You are welcome here.

This land will make you American.

Land is stronger than blood

Six generations born in America:

Cherokee, Iroquois, Pottawatomi, Hopi.

You’ve been here long enough,

It’s time to go away.

This land does not make you American

Blood is stronger than land.[7]

*****************************

All generations to become American:

You write your story on this land,

You write your story through your children.

You redefine both blood and land.

You decide what it means to be an American. [8]

***********************************

Citizenship:

Jus soli:  Defined by the land you are born on.

Jus sanguinis:  Defined by your genes, your people, your blood.[9]

---

[1] 1940:  The year white American women could no longer lose their citizenship for marrying foreign men.

1855: the year white foreign women could gain citizenship by marrying an American man. https://www.pri.org/stories/2016-07-04/us-has-come-long-way-its-first-highly-restrictive-naturalization-law

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/stripping-naturalized-immigrants-their-citizenship-isnt-new-180969733/

[2] 1845: The Great Hunger-Potato famine begins in Ireland through both natural and man-made causes.  Half the population of Ireland died.  A quarter came as refugees to the U.S.  The U.S. fought vehemently against them because their religion, culture, and way of life was “incompatible with American values.”  By the 1890’s, Irish Americans were accepted into mainstream society and began to fight against “those immigrants” who flooding the U.S. from Southern and Eastern Europe.  https://www.history.com/news/when-america-despised-the-irish-the-19th-centurys-refugee-crisis

1868/1870:  Africans and those of African descent allowed birth citizenship and naturalization. 

https://americanhistory.si.edu/democracy-exhibition/creating-citizens/defining-citizenship

[3]1790: The year children born to Americans living outside of the U.S. also granted U.S. citizenship (unless their father is foreign) http://www.indiana.edu/~kdhist/H105-documents-web/week08/naturalization1790.html.

1898:  The year American-born people of Chinese descent could become American citizens.  Those born in China (Japan, Korea) could not become naturalized citizens until 1943.

https://americanhistory.si.edu/democracy-exhibition/creating-citizens/defining-citizenship

[4] 1848:  Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ended Mexican-American War and Mexico gave states from Texas to California to the United States.  Current residents could choose to move to Mexico or take on American citizenship.  http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/disp_textbook.cfm?smtID=3&psid=1141 

[5] 1868/1870:  Africans and those of African descent allowed birth citizenship and naturalization. 

https://americanhistory.si.edu/democracy-exhibition/creating-citizens/defining-citizenship

[6] 1924:  Wording taken from speech to congress by Ellison Durant Smith. Laws passed in 1921 and 1924 drastically limited immigration to ensure that 86% of immigrants came only from N/W Europe, 11% came from S/E Europe, and 2% came from the rest of the world.  Most Asians (and much of the rest of the world) were not allowed at all. 

http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5080

http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5078

http://immigrationtounitedstates.org/590-immigration-act-of-1924.html

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/us-government-turned-away-thousands-jewish-refugees-fearing-they-were-nazi-spies-180957324/

1923:  naturalized Indian citizens have citizenship revoked due to Supreme court deciding they are “not white”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Bhagat_Singh_Thind

[7] 1790/1795: The U.S. passes first laws on naturalization and defining citizenship.  Any “free white person” who has lived in the U.S. for two years, is of “good moral character”, and swears an oath to uphold the constitution can become a citizen.  Their children also automatically gained citizenship…unless their father was foreign.

http://www.indiana.edu/~kdhist/H105-documents-web/week08/naturalization1790.html

1924:  Native Americans granted U.S. citizenship.  https://www.pri.org/stories/2016-07-04/us-has-come-long-way-its-first-highly-restrictive-naturalization-law

[8] 1965:  New laws passed that allowed immigration to be determined on skills/family ties and not on race, religion, gender, or marital status.  By the 1990’s, only 16% of immigrants came from Europe.  The other 84% came from the rest of the world.  https://www.history.com/topics/immigration/us-immigration-since-1965

1967:  Interracial marriage allowed everywhere in the U.S. 

https://www.history.com/topics/immigration/immigration-united-states-timeline

[9] All countries use one, the other, or a combination to define citizenship.  Europe tends to go by blood.  The Americas tend to go by land.  https://www.history.com/news/birthright-citizenship-history-united-states

The Skin, The History, and the Stereotype: Translating Identity Across Cultures

Boot and bonnet.  Chemist.  Trolley.  Nappie.  Serviette.  Centre.  Saviour.  Aeroplane. 

 

One thing I learned in East Africa is that I not only had to learn functional Kiswahili but I also needed to learn English.  Sure, I spoke English, but I spoke American English.  I spoke too fast, didn’t pronounce my letters properly, and I didn’t even know the right words or how to spell.  I needed to learn British English.  I needed to slow down my flow of words and actually pronounce the letters that are in the words (ki-tt-en not ki-in, wa-T-er not wadder) or I would not be understood.  My audience would struggle to understand me, not because they were not capable of speaking English, but because I spoke a “different” English.    

I quickly learned it wasn’t only my language that needed to be translated.  It was me, my self, my body, what I represent through my biologically embodied representation of my particular slice of humanity.

Growing up, I didn’t think too much stereotypes, especially not my own.  I struggled to understand my identity as Tara, as myself as an individual, but I didn’t spend an ounce of energy trying to understand my ethnic identity, racial identity, collective identity, or the identity that others see what they look at me. When I looked in a mirror, I didn’t think about the layers of history written in my genetic code.  I just saw me and my immediate family (i.e. my aunt’s jaw, my grandmother’s nose, my mother’s curl, my dad’s hair) but not traits that said “Swedish,” “Dutch,” “German,” and “English”.  But then again, I never had to.  I’d never been looked down upon or insulted because of the labels of identity that people attribute to me when they see me. 

My first weeks in Kenya, I quickly learned I had acquired new labels.  

Mzungu.

“Mzungu” (plural wazungu) now branded me.  I didn’t know what it meant, but I did know that I was no longer invisible.  I couldn’t pass down the street unnoticed or be seen as “normal” but I stood out like a scarlet macaw in a flock of penguins.  My appearance branded me as “other” and I found myself wading through a sludge of symbols so deep I couldn’t lift a tennis shoe without finding myself dripping with the expectations of those around me.

I didn’t understand my interpretation.  Kenyans saw me and labeled me in their framework, reading symbols that I did not know were there, let alone their meaning.  And I discovered I needed to translate what my appearance communicated in my new context.  I needed to understand what it meant to be “me” in their worldview.   

Mzungu comes from the same Kiswahili root word as the words kizunguzungu ( dizziness) and kuzunguka (to turn around in a circle).  It basically means “a person who wanders aimlessly” or “one who is lost” (coined by Swahili inhabitants of the first European explorers based on the actions of the Europeans wandering around “discovering” things the natives already knew were there).  (check it out on Wikipedia for more details).

The term has changed in meaning over time and has history has unfurled.  It can be a noun or an adjective.  It can describe a person, an object, or a behavior.  Still, the overall ideas that emerge from the term are something wealthy, powerful, and/or foreign.  It is often used to describe something (or someone) of European descent and takes on the racial undertone of whiteness (which in the East African historical framework are inextricably interwoven with concepts of power, wealth, beauty, and status). 

Wazungu are never poor and wazungu are always “other”. 

I quickly learned that my appearance led to being given the best place in church, on the bus, and in the line at the bank.  It meant the marriage proposals, dinner invitations, ministry opportunities, and business partnerships sought me out faster than the mosquitos.   I didn’t have to prove my qualifications or my worthiness.  People automatically presumed my competence based on my physical appearance.

This also meant I was a walking target.  It meant I was robbed by those I’d never met and those I considered my closest friends.  It meant being sought because of what I represented and not who I was.  Everyone wanted a piece of my pie and tried to convince me to support their cause, their need, their ministry, or their business.  My power and wealth were contagious to those in my sphere of relationships (and so I was uninvited from certain ministries and relationships because I would lead to heightened expectations and "scare away" potential donors).   

Adding the label of “female” made me even more complicated.  I represented free sex (thanks to globalized porn industry) and access to status.  I could give visas, job opportunities, cash, cars, and “add value” to those around me.  I was a free ticket to the “heaven” that is the mzungu world.  I represented the colonizer who could be colonized and the unattainable brought within grasp.  

A stereotype doesn't have to be true to be powerful.

It’s very few people who see below the skin, the history, and the stereotype.  

Hood and trunk.  Pharmacist.  Cart.  Diaper.  Napkin.  Center.  Savior.  Airplane. 

When my husband came to the U.S. from Uganda, he also had to adjust his English.  He’s tried to slur certain words, force his “r” in words like dirt, bird, and water, and not pronounce all the letters in mosquito, leopard, and juice.  His English has had to adjust to include more American slang and idioms.  It’s been part of the process of helping his audience understand him and not consider his fluent English as "broken".

He’s also had to relearn what it means to be him.  He has always experienced people interpreting his appearance.  It happened all the time back home.  Other Ugandans, at one glance, read the tall, lean frame and  deep fudge-colored skin and immediately labeled him as “northern Ugandan” or “Nilotic” as opposed to “Bantu”.  These labels carried an army of stereotypes that he shed like a snake sheds skin when he landed in the U.S. he was interpreted according to those stereotypes.  

African.

It didn’t take a week in the U.S. before Ivan found himself mired in a swamp of symbols he didn’t understand.  In the American context, he has been forced to translate his appearance into the American labels of “Black” and “African” and renegotiate what it means to be him based on how he is interpreted. 

“Black” does not refer to a physical description of aesthetic appearance, but a long, complicated racial history that puts people on a ladder from least desirable to most desirable based on a socially constructed idea of immutable origins.  His skin means he is called n****r, slave, dangerous, and dirty. 

People read his appearance and cross to the other side of the street to avoid walking too close.  The police follow him in their police car and frisk him just to make sure he isn’t causing problems.  His appearance means people interpret his “standing politely and listening” as “threatening” them and will report him to his supervisors for hostility.

Yet his label of “Black” is sometimes countered with “African”.  He is often rejected by African Americans as being “not Black” and told to go back to where he is from.  His status as “African” also means he is exotic and is sought out by “White” Americans to share about what it’s like to be African and poor. 

Africans are always poor and Africans are always “other”.    

Ivan thought he was Ugandan and from the “Pearl of Africa,” the “Source of the Nile,” and he came proud of his heritage.  He quickly learned he should say he is Jamaican.  African is associated with deranged dictators, child soldiers, famine, civil war, AIDS, and poverty.  To be African means to be incompetent and inferior to an American in all things.  To be African means he must have lived with a pet lion, hunted with a spear, clothed in a loin cloth, and only experienced literacy, English, electricity, and automobiles upon U.S. soil.  He is congratulated on finally making it to the "heaven" that is America and freed from the "hell" of Africa.

As an African in America, he learned it means he is wrong.  His English is wrong, his education is wrong, his job experiences are wrong, and his culture is wrong.  He needs to go back to zero, relearn everything, redo everything until he can be reborn “American” and know how to do things “right”.  Until he throws off everything “African” about him, he will just be another “unskilled worker from a s***hole country”(source), no matter how many skills, degrees, and doctorates he possesses.  

A stereotype doesn't have to be true to be powerful.  A jug labeled milk will be treated differently than a jug labeled paint, regardless of contents.  

It’s very few people who see below the skin, the history, and the stereotype. 

We were born into bodies that we did not choose, into ethnicities we did not intend, and into nationalities that were chosen for us.  Yet these markers of identity still communicate to our audience deeply powerful symbols that influence how we are understood and perceived.  

In cross-cultural interactions, it’s not only the language we speak and way we greet that needs to be translated.  There’s a long process of renegotiating identity: who am I?  Who do other people think I am?  What does it mean to be me?  How do I interact with the world around me based on how this world understands me? Who should I become in future? 

Sometimes we do not know what we communicate through perceptions of our skin, history, or stereotype.  And sometimes we are forced to learn, unlearn, and relearn our own embodied symbols in order to understand how our identity translates across cultures.