Angry Impoliteness? The Possibility of an Asian American Theology

I’ve not kept up with my blogging over the past few weeks due to extreme busy-ness on my part.  It has been amazingly hectic, with 3 papers and a final exam.  One of the things I’ve learned during my M.A. program at the University of Illinois at Chicago from Deirdre McCloskey is to take every paper as a publishing opportunity; while you’re at it, why not try writing something that’s as original as possible, that few people have written about? But unfortunately, this makes papers harder to write, although more exciting.  

This past semester I took a class on critical race theory.  Critical race theory is a relatively nascent field with its genesis in law – Yale Law School, to be exact.  There, supposedly, a few black law students criticized the curriculum, arguing that so much of constitutional law was rooted in white racism.  But what is white racism?  And how do the effects of white racism persist in social, political, economic, and even religious structures today?  At its base, critical race theory (CRT) seeks to answer these questions.

But this class is not just any CRT class.  The general thesis of the course is that white racism constitutes a theological challenge.  And because it is a theological challenge, pastors and theologians need to respond to it.  How do pastors and theologians do just that?  How do we address the problem of white racism?  What steps can we take to reverse it? 

I cannot possibly convince you of the pervasiveness of racism.  Not long ago on campus there was a discussion on racism, and the effort was made for people to be able to express diverse points of view without fear of rejection.  Unfortunately, in the end, people left the discussion angry.  In my view, racism is something you see it, or you need to placed in a situation where you can see it.  Otherwise, you will write it off as being "angry".  White racism is not something you can criticize from without; when you read books by theologians who provide theological interventions against white racism, much of it is based on their experiences of being on the receiving end of white racism.  James H. Cone is one prominent example; he grew up in the Deep South where every night he waited until his dad returned home from work before feeling any semblance of security; black lynchings were commonplace, and his dad would protect the family with a shotgun in hand. 

Yet, Cone went to a church that was half white, and half black. For most of his growing years, he sought to reconcile how half of his church could be silent against such lynchings.  His spiritual journey took him to Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary in Evanston, IL, after which he completed a Ph.D. in religious studies at next-door Northwestern University with a dissertation on Karl Barth. But not long thereafter, Cone realized that there’s no use for Barth so long as Christians remained silent about lynchings, about racial injustice.  Theology, for Cone, is not some abstract field.  It is not, as Mark Lewis Taylor puts it, “guild theology,” a musing over theological matters for the sake of theology, as if theology itself is a study worth pursuing by its own merit. 

I think Cone is right on this mark.  Theology, after all, is useless if it does not speak to God, to humanity, and to the interactive space between God and humanity.  Because of that, theology always indicts the evils of this world.  Barth’s theology was written from the backdrop of the rise of Nazi Germany. Had Bonhoeffer indeed stayed in the United States, he would’ve no doubt ventured into discussions on race; one of his first observations during his postdoctoral fellowship at Union Theological Seminary in New York is the pervasiveness of racism in the country.  

Even if you are not familiar with critical race theory, I suspect many of you actually are, if you’ve read works on Asian American theology, or any other ethnic theologies (e.g. Latino/a theologies, black theology).  Asian American theology seeks to reconcile two oppositional facets of life: racism against the Asian American community and the fact that the Gospel calls us to love our neighbors as ourselves.  Of course, many of you might be thinking, “racism against Asian Americans? Where?”  Well, it exists, but you need to put away your preconceptions concerning “racism.”  Many of us are probably thinking of lynchings or racially segregated water fountains.  That’s not what I’m referring to.

By “racism”, I refer to any social, political, economic, or religious system that seeks to unfairly discriminate peoples based on criteria that are completely artificial.  The racism I'm thinking about is one that is foisted upon Asian America, and so pervasive is this racism that even Asian America is using this discriminatory system to enforce discrimination among Asian Americans!  Consider the stereotype that Asians are supposed to be doctors, lawyers, engineers, and maybe businesspeople.  On the surface it sounds very much laudatory; these are positive stereotypes!  But the positivity behind these stereotypes hides the fact that Asians who are not doctors, lawyers, engineers, and businesspeople, are somehow un-Asian.  

Perhaps, looking back, that is why Jeremy Lin was such a sensation among Asian Americans.  Finally!  Someone who is not a doctor/lawyer/engineer/businessperson can be truly Asian!  But Linsanity died quickly. The doctors/lawyers/engineers/businesspeople in our midst are revered for posterity.  What will inevitably result is that Asians can't be Asian unless they are doctors, lawyers, engineers, and businesspeople.  Asian American Christians can't be salt and light of the world, because the world is not comprised of doctors, lawyers, engineers, and businesspeople.  In a sense, Asian American churches undermine their own God-called mission by reinforcing stereotypes created by humanity.

There is only one stereotype we can tolerate, and that is the stereotype given to all humanity by God: children of God.  We fail to understand this glorious title, and because we fail to understand it, we become insular.  We hang out with only those we know and are comfortable with.  We are afraid to risk by reaching our hands out to others.  This degenerates into bigotry, because when we're comfortable in our own little ghettos, we see the outside world as always hostile to us, and we build up structures of injustice to keep the outside world at bay.  

We are afraid to risk our lives and our family name to do radical things for Christ.  So we make marriage somehow obligatory, and reinforce it with our practices.  And when we are confronted with stories of men or women dying for Jesus and leaving their families behind, we weep and leave unchanged, thinking that, "Thank God for them," but muttering, "At least it's not me."  We are afraid to create a truly biblical vision for our churches, and so we make success somehow a barometer of faith, measuring our churches by budgets, attendance, and by measures of human creation.  And as we watch other churches decline, we fold our arms smugly, thinking, "Well, thank God we're not them!"

Asian American theology seeks to reverse this theological timidity among many Asian churches.  Its goal is to slap Asian Americans out of the stupor of the American Dream, to take Asian Americans by their lappels and shake them so they realize that it is only a dream.  It seeks to reclaim a theology where original sin is taken seriously, and salvation even more seriously.  Because salvation is not a personal "thing".  It's not a matter of making sure I, myself, and moi are right with God.  It's a matter of making sure that my neighbors, my neighborhood, my city, my country, my world is right with God. And it's not a matter of "getting them to know Jesus."  It's a matter of getting them to live with Jesus.  And it is not a matter of preaching a "reformed" theology, but a theology that reforms whole structures.  

In a sense, my paper was a baby crawl forward towards this task.  Asians are known for being "not angry" and very polite in the United States.  And I like being nice and polite.  But I wish to commit my theology to being anything but nice and polite, because the Scriptures are full of God's people being un-nice and impolite.  If all goes well, I hope to expand the paper into an M.Div. thesis.  From there, we'll see how far this angry impoliteness can go!