FUI always brings up questions of ethnic identity. Always. Generally at FUI it is the first time many of the white students have thought about the importance and significance of ethnic identity in general and in relation to their faith and witness, and the minority students are challenged to press in to who they are and all the complications and joys that come along with that. Here in the inner city where the majority are minorities and the discrepancy between those with wealth and power and those without generally correlate along ethnic lines, it is bound to bring up tension. And at FUI not only are there a mix of ethnicities amongst the students, which brings up cultural differences and tensions, but issues of ethnicity come up in every single one of our urban ministry classes, because here in the inner city it just cannot be avoided. Pretty much every single day I have a conversation with a student that has to do with their wrestling with their own ethnic identity, or with the idea of ethnic identity in general.
And funny enough, last week Nancy Donat, a family friend who is a missionary with youth here in inner city Fresno asked me to come speak to her youth group last Friday about ethnic identity. It was quite a fun challenge to figure out how to convey such a complicated but important topic to a bunch of 12-18 year olds, the majority of whom were Latino, especially when I'm used to working with college students. But I think what I shared is a pretty good taste of the conundrum of ethnic identity and faith. Its a good conundrum. I'll share a synopsis of what I spoke on.
-How many of you have heard that your faith and your ethnicity can connect? That ethnicity matters to God?
-We know the ethnicity of every single person in the Bible! Obviously, God's not afraid to talk about it, so why should we?
-Think about Moses from the Bible. Born a Hebrew, but raised after age 8 in the dominant Egyptian culture. He comes to an ethnic crises and wants to hang out with his people. He sees how they are mistreated, gets carried away, and kills an Egyptian. Then he gets scared and runs off to a whole other culture- Midian.
-Then God confronts Moses in the burning bush that he needs to go back to his Hebrew people. Moses doesn't want to because he's afraid he'll be shunned and he'll fail. God tells him he needs to go anyways, and that He will be with Moses.
-God used a Hebrew man who knew his way around Egyptian culture to free God's people! Ethnicity is all over Moses' story, and God uses it in big ways.
-Acts 17:26-27: "From one man He made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and He marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands. God did this so that they would seek Him and perhaps reach out for Him and find Him, though He is not far from any one of us."
-God put you in your family, your neighborhood, your skin color, and your ethnicity on purpose, and for a reason. Why? So that we would reach for Him! Ethnic identity is a complicated and confusion thing, and that means we have to seek out the God who made ethnicity about it!
-Being a biracial person who grew up in the dominant culture, but pretty much forced by God to confront my ethnic identity, has meant that I need to keep seeking out God about it. There are times where I feel that I'm not white, but I'm not really black either, so I say "just forget them both, I'm going to go hang out with Latinos." But God has to call me back to the fact that He made me white, and I can't ignore that, and He made me black, and I can't ignore that, because then I would not be acting out of the beautiful biracial person He made me to be! I can't ignore or try to downplay God's workmanship. He made each ethnicity, and He called them all good.
For minority students, rarely does it need to be explained to them the importance of ethnic identity, since they live in a world where their ethnicity is made obvious to them and those around them. For white students, they are often shocked to learn that they have an ethnic identity, and struggle with why it is so important. My favorite is to talk to bi and multi-racial students, because I understand the tension and the confusion of figuring out not just one ethnicity, but 2 or more, and all the fun complications that come with that. Last weekend I hung out with Lani, a biracial white and Latina, who came up to me after our urban ministry class on ethnicity and said, "I'm confused about myself! Can we talk?" What we ended up talking about was a lot of what I had shared with the youth on Friday, but also that as biracial people, our ethnic identity journey tends to be a spiral, not a straight line. We go back and forth between being comfortable with who we are, to leaning more towards one ethnicity, then the other, to being confused, to being comfortable again. We kind of have a one up on other people because the confusion pushes us to God. I encouraged her to keep pressing in to the tension, because it is there that we find more of God and of life.
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