"At the time of this writing, my wife and I (Brandon) just adopted our first child. We have learned a lot about ourselves and God and the Christian community through this journey. But one lesson that has been driven home time and again is how deeply entrenched racial prejudice is in the United States.
This fact was reinforced in our adoption training. Because we pursued a domestic adoption (i.e., a child from the United States) and were happy to adopt a child of any ethnicity, our licensing and preparation involved learning to be a 'conspicuous' family: one that can't hide the fact that a child is adopted because he or she is ethnically different than the adoptive parents. We've taken classes on how to respond to insensitive comments from strangers and family, such as 'Is that your real baby?' or 'Does he speak English?' or 'She's so lucky to have you,' which implies that the child would be less fortunate to be raised by parents of her own ethnic background. We've even learned to anticipate the question 'Is that one of those crack babies?' which implies that the biological parents of a minority child must be drug addicts. Because our son, James, is African American, we are prepared to be on the receiving end of racial prejudice for the first time in our lives.
Perhaps a greater outrage is the dollar amounts that are often affixed to skin color. At our agency, the placement fee is the same for children of all ethnicities. But in many places in the country, adopting a Caucasian child can cost almost twice as much as adopting a non-white or biracial child. This is because ethnic minority children are deemed 'hard to place' --fewer families are willing to adopt them--and are thus considered less desirable. Often, the lighter skinned a child is, the more expensive he or she is to adopt. This is true even among Christian adoptive parents and at Christian agencies. The Bible says all humans are created in God's image. There should be no 50-percent discounts. How, then, can Americans--even American Christians--tolerate a practice that deems some children to be 'less desirable' than others?
The issues are really more complicated. It appears to be more socially acceptable in the United States for white people to adopt non-white children from outside the U.S. than to adopt minority children from within the country. There is only anecdotal evidence for this, of course. But it suggests that white Americans, at least, make a number of gut-level assumptions about and distinctions between people of different ethnicities.
What makes this all the more remarkable, is that, in theory at least, Americans are not supposed to make such distinctions. When Barack Obama was elected president in 2008, culture-watchers began debating whether the United States had finally become a post-racial society. The logic runs like this: now that an African American has been elected to the nation's most powerful position, the glass ceiling is shattered. The limitations and obstacles that once held back people of color are gone. The long-awaited dream of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., that people will one day be judged 'not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character,' has been realized. The United States is now officially colorblind. The wealthy and powerful hail from all ethnic backgrounds. In terms of policy, it is against the law for a company to refuse to hire an employer or for a university to refuse to enroll a student based on the color of her skin. It can be easy to believe that, at least on paper, the country has put racial discrimination in the past.
This topic is one on which majority culture and minority readers will have very different perspectives. It's probably useful, then, that we acknowledge from the beginning that we primarily have majority culture, specifically white, readers in mind when we describe what goes without being said said about race and ethnicity in the West. In general, minority readers will be considerably more sensitive to these issues. It is the unfair privilege of majority peoples to not worry about the difference ethnicity makes; it is not an important part of our everyday lives. So in the rest of this chapter, we will refer primarily to white male Westerners.
A word about terminology is in order here, too, before we proceed further. We have used the terms race and ethnicity somewhat interchangeably to this point. We've done this primarily because we suspect most readers are accustomed to discussing these issues in terms of race. We will use the word ethnicity for the remainder of this chapter, however, for a couple of reason. First, race is largely an invention of the Enlightenment, intended to categorize the natural world into groups according to type. Race was believed to account for the difference between humans of different 'kinds.' In nineteenth-century England, for example, one theorist writes, all people could be divided into 'a small number of groups, called "races," in such a way that all members of these races, shared certain fundamental, biologically heritable, moral and intellectual characteristics with each other that they did not share with members of any other race. The characteristics that each member of a race was supposed to share with every other were sometimes called the essence of that race.'
We reject this belief and the related implications--that some 'races' are morally and intellectually superior to others, for example. We believe there is only one race, the human race, made in the image of God. Second, speaking in terms of ethnicity is a more precise way to account for the differences between people groups. Blanket racial terms, such as Caucasian and black and Latino, flatten important distinctions between cultures.
So what goes without being said--especially by white Western males--about ethnicity? First of all, many white Westerners feel that the worst thing they could be called is a racist. We know deep down that we're not supposed to make value distinctions between people of different ethnicities, as if it's better to be white or black or whatever. Because we're hesitant to make value distinctions--and rightfully so--we're often slow to make any distinctions at all. Thus it goes without being said form any that to be truly equal, everyone must be the same. This is what we mean by being colorblind : the belief that ethnic differences don't matter. Of course it would be fine if what we meant was that everyone should be treated with equal dignity or enjoy the same rights. But we suspect what is commonly meant is that everyone should be treated as if they were the same--and by same, what is frequently meant is majority culture.
Consequently, we are trained to assume that ethnicity is unimportant and that prejudice on the basis of ethnicity is an impossible motivation for behavior. We avoid making an issue 'a race issue' unless there's no way around it, because we have convinced ourselves that ethnicity is no longer a factor in social situations. This leaves us somewhat schizophrenic, because we all know that we carry latent prejudices privately while we are trained to pretend that we don't.
As Christians, we are firm in our convictions that all ethnicities are equal in value: 'There is no difference between Jes and Gentile' (Romans 3:22). As authors we are deeply committed to and convinced of the fundamental equality of all peoples. We also believe that to understand a culture, you must be aware of ethnicity and especially the prejudices that may exist within particular culture. To ignore them is naive and can result in serious misunderstanding.
Consider this example. Let's suppose a Korean missionary decides to move to Birmingham, Alabama to start a church. He notices that a lot of people are dark-skinned. He asks you, 'Is there a difference between blacks and whites?'
In our piety, we might answer, 'No, everybody is the same.'
It is certainly true that all are equal, but our pious answer is misleading in several ways. First, we are likely setting our Korean missionary up for trouble. He will be blindsided by the first racist he meets, and he will surely meet one. Second, he will notice some differences among the locals in worship and dialect and perhaps even in dress and cuisine. Third, he might assume that the majority culture of is neighborhood is representative of the majority culture of North America. Just as ignorance about ethnicities can lead to misunderstanding in our daily lives, so too it can lead to misunderstanding of the Bible.
We are conditioned culturally not to make generalizations about people based on ethnicity. We know better than to say, 'He does such-and-such because he's Latino.' We affirm that instinct. But being oblivious to ethnicities can cause us to miss things in the Bible. The biblical writers and their audiences were more than happy to make such generalizations. 'He does such-and-such because he's a Jew' was a perfectly legitimate argument for first-century Romans. Consequently, we may read the Bible ignorant of ethnic differences in the text that would have been obvious to the first audience. Or we may naively believe that those differences don't matter anyway because first-century Rome must have been post-racial, like we supposedly are. Other times our deeply ingrained racial prejudices influence our interpretation so that we assume the ancients held the same stereotypes we hold." pgs 52-56
- Brandon J. O'Brien
from: http://www.amazon.com/Misreading-Scripture-Western-Eyes-Understand/dp/0830837825/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1356302988&sr=1-1&keywords=misreading+scripture+with+western+eyeshttp://www.amazon.com/Misreading-Scripture-Western-Eyes-Understand/dp/0830837825/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1356302988&sr=1-1&keywords=misreading+scripture+with+western+eyes
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