With the rise of anti-Asian racism triggered by COVID-19, the Asian American Christian Collaborative released the “Statement on Anti-Asian Racism in the Time of COVID-19.” This statement “denounces the current rise in anti-Asian racism in the United States of America. It calls for an immediate end to the xenophobic rhetoric, hate crimes, and violence against our people and communities, and invites all Americans to join them.”
The SOLA Network supported this statement, and more than 10,000 people have signed it since it was published on March 31, 2020.
SOLA Editor Hannah Chao interviewed Pastor Raymond Chang, president of the AACC, and Dr. Michelle Reyes, vice president of AACC, both of whom were lead drafters on the statement and are committed to Biblically-rooted racial justice. Their conversation covered topics from how Asian Americans are awakening to the reality of systemic racism, how knowing history can help us to frame our conversations on race, and how churches can help speak on the sin of racism.
Please note that the answers below have been edited for length and clarity.
Hannah Chao: A lot of Asian American Christians, especially the ones I have talking to, have felt like they were a little different but still felt mostly American. But COVID-19 and the election in 2016 were the two things that woke them up to how they’re seen as foreign or outsiders.
What are the things that you’re hearing from people who have had their eyes opened during this period?
Dr. Michelle Reyes: It is like an awakening of sorts. For anyone involved in anti-racism or justice work, most of the time we’re seeing somebody who’s experienced it so deeply and so personally that they can’t help but respond. That’s what we’re seeing with people who have never experienced racism before, but [now they do] because of the widespread mistreatment and racial profiling of Asian Americans as a whole.
Some people have been coughed at and spit at for the first time, chased down the street, with people shouting “Coronavirus!” after them, and even far more harmful, life-threatening situations where people have been stabbed or physically assaulted — one woman had acid thrown on her face.
Once you’ve had that firsthand experience, you can’t go back. It begins that journey of, “Okay, what do I do? Where do I go?” I think that’s where a lot of people are in this new camp now. At the same time, there are still many Asians who feel white-adjacent, and who feel like they don’t experience the same kind of racism the other minorities feel. For them, what we’re trying to do with this statement is to elevate our stories because there are so many Asians and Asian Americans that don’t know our history here in the U.S.
There is a long and systemic history of Asian American or anti-Asian racism. In the statement, there’s a specific paragraph where we try to catalog some of the main major events that have happened through U.S. history.
We mention how Chinese Americans were excluded from immigration based on race in 1882. All Asians were later excluded [from immigrating] in 1917. Many people already know that innocent American citizens of Japanese descent were incarcerated en mass in World War II. South Asians, like my own family and friends, were mistreated, called terrorists, and assaulted after 9/11. Finally, the largest mass lynching in American history was the Chinese massacre of 1871, in which 18 Chinese men were attacked and murdered.
But, not many Asians and Asian Americans know this history. We don’t even know our own stories. If you didn’t know this, you’ll think that what’s happening right now is not as big of a deal or that it’s just isolated to a few racist individuals, as opposed to seeing what’s happening right now as part of just the next iteration or development in a long history of anti-Asian racism in this country.
Hannah Chao: We’ve all heard about Asians being the model minority and so we have this weird space in society. I remember reading Andrew Yang’s op-ed, and he concludes by saying we have to show that we are American.
I think for a lot of Asian Americans, they would read that and say, “Yeah, we have to just be more American,” and hide away the Asian part of us. What would you say to those Asians who feel like we have to do something to be seen as the “good” minority?
Pastor Raymond Chang: With the rising rhetoric, with the media images of Asian Americans in masks affiliated with headings around COVID-19, prevailing perceptions and attitudes towards Asian Americans were revealed. The broader society doesn’t really know what to do with us. As long as we fit within our expected roles and we play along with our assigned racialized roles, we will get more of society’s rewards. But, that is ultimately dehumanizing.
We fall under the model minority myth and can’t escape the perpetual foreigner syndrome. These things keep us in what I call racialized cages. As long as we play into the stereotypes, then we aren’t perceived as a threat. But as soon as we try to break out of the stereotypes, we’re perceived as a threat and everything starts to shift. No longer are we the model minority, but we immediately move back to being the “yellow peril” and our perpetual foreigner-ness becomes amplified because we’re not falling into the model minority myth.
The perceived threat is what drives people’s negative and harmful attitudes towards us. It is a threat against our very existence rooted in notions that our presence is a virus to this country, even though we ourselves have lived in this country for all of our lives.
Michelle Reyes: Soong-Chan Rah once said, “We are in a cultural moment where Asian Americans have gone from pet to threat.” In terms of the myth of the model minority, I know so many Indians and fellow Asian Americans who grew up thinking this was a good thing because it was proof of how smart, successful, and wealthy we were. But we also have to recognize, like Ray was saying, that this is a racialized stereotype of Asian Americans that was created during the 50s and 60s. Asian immigrants were allowed to enter into the United States, but not all Asians were allowed re-entry at that point. It was only the top of the talent pool — the doctors and lawyers and businessmen.
These Asian men and women were allowed into the U.S. so that the government could pit us against African Americans. You can’t miss the fact that this was all happening during the height of the Civil Rights Era. We are not some superior minority race. Nobody should buy into that.
But this is exactly what white supremacy does — it pits people of color against each other and keeps us fighting more with each other as opposed to choosing to link arms and fight against racism together. Asians and Asian Americans need to break the myth of the model minority. If we are going to pursue anti-racism work, that has to go.
Hannah Chao: So how do you think Asian American Christian Collaborative and its statement helps churches to really start empowering and teaching local churches and Christians to talk about race?
Michelle Reyes: The first is that we have to have a proper definition of what racism is because it determines the solution that we pursue. Many people think that racism is any racial prejudice from one person to the next. In which case, then people get into all those complicated conversations about whether an Asian person or a black person being racist against a white person, and it gets very confusing very quickly about who is racist and who is not.
But I think a better definition is any prejudice against someone because of their race and when those views are reinforced by systems that have power. We have to understand that racism has a power dynamic because if we only think of it as the first definition, any racial prejudice between two people will inaccurately reduce the issues of racism in America to individual racists. We will reduce it to a battle for the hearts and minds of these individual racists as opposed to seeing racist behaviors and racial oppression as part of the larger system.
We have to start there because if we do not, then the way churches, Christians, and people, in general, will try to fight against racism will be to tell individuals, “Just be nicer.” Sometimes there’s good there in having a talk with a neighbor, colleague, or friend about why his or her comments were hurtful. But that alone won’t combat systemic tropes of anti-Asian racism and racism in our country, institutions, pop culture, and so on. We have to care about systems of racism, and we have to care about how this trickles down through policies.
What does this mean for Christians in the church? It means that beyond just preaching from the pulpit on Sunday mornings and having heart-to-heart conversations with [individual] congregants, churches need to care about politics. We have to care about holding elected officials accountable, about whom we’re putting into office, and what policies are being put in place. Oftentimes, Christians separate church and politics, but what if we actually care about breaking cycles of racism? We have to be having those conversations too.
Raymond Chang: One of the hopes that we have with Asian American Christian Christian Collaborative is to get us to the true Gospel message, which is the message of the Lordship of Christ over all things and his activity in and through his ambassadors — who are all of us who have placed our faith in him — and allowing us to be witnesses into the world so that people might be able to have glimpses of what God’s kingdom looks like.
But I don’t think that a lot of people looking into Asian American churches or even predominantly white churches would say that we have a deep impact in the world around us. I do think that there are some churches doing some great things, but overall, we are perceived more as country clubs than field hospitals. That needs to change quickly because younger generations — millennials and Gen Zers primarily — they want to see faith that makes a difference in this world.
We also hope to get us to a true orthodoxy. We don’t want a racialized theology to dominate our pulpit ministry, our discipleship efforts, our philosophy of our ecclesiology, or our philosophy of church engagement. To get to true orthodoxy, we have to realize that churches are all set upon a very racialized landscape, and if we don’t address the racialized landscape, our churches are buying into and perpetuating the problems that we have seen in society.
Hannah Chao: The anti-racism statement was a call to churches to teach on race and combating racism. What is kind of a step or steps that a church can take?
Michelle Reyes: One thing is proving that you’re in this for the long haul and caring about racism against people of color equally. My church is a minority-led multicultural church. Whenever there’s a racist attack against any person or people group, we take time out of our Sunday morning service to lament and to pray for the people who were hurt or the families that are suffering — whether it was the mass shooting at Walmart in El Paso to Charlottesville back in 2017.
We don’t just sleep on those moments, and we make it a big deal in our church and [the pastor] will maybe even choose to change the sermon to preach against it that Sunday and spend time corporately to pray.
I also want to speak specifically for pastors because I have a high view of the pastorate, and I also believe that the way the pastor goes, the way the church will go. If we want this to trickle down into ministries, into discipleship, into a way of thinking for a congregation, then whether you’re preaching in Genesis, Revelation, or Malachi, racism is addressed throughout Scripture, and that needs to be a recurring thing that you bring up at the pulpit and calling out.
Raymond Chang: Asian Americans have to do catechesis around issues surrounding the history of Asian Americans and the realities of race that have not been sufficiently addressed through our educational systems and our churches. Asian Americans who have wholesale bought into the model minority myth — a myth that essentially says we need to put our heads down and work hard and prove that we can “succeed” in this society — have benefited by giving up a lot of their Asian-ness. Because they changed in order to fit into the racialized landscape, they will not want to contend with race because there is a high cost associated with it.
But as we are seeing with the rise in overt anti-Asian racism during this period of COVID-19, things can change on a dime. For us to ignore the impact of racialization and racism means that we will ultimately perpetuate problems not only for the Asian American community, but for other communities of color as we fall into that “pet” role in a racialized society. Further, you are actually doing harm to our non-Asian brothers and sisters who are committing the sin of omission by not addressing the issues. So I think addressing both Asian American history and the sad and sinful realities of race have to be a part of our catechesis or into our discipleship.
The other thing we have to wrestle with is that a lot of our theological training and our seminary training has lacked any robust engagement around issues that are not intimately tied to whiteness and white supremacy.
In seminary, I had to supplement my theological education by reading books that were not written by white theologians. Why? Because white theologians were and are socially located in contexts where they oftentimes are a part of the dominant majority and the dominant norm. Because of that, they had a hard time seeing what was affecting the margins of society, when the broad majority of the Bible is written to people who were marginalized.
In the history of secular society, Israel is but a blip. We barely see Israel being written about in any of the major histories of the world. Yet for us, because we center around the cross and around Christ, and because we know that Jesus is ultimately king over all things, we take the narrative of Israel, which is a marginalized narrative, and we understand God through that lens.
Asian Americans have especially lost that ability to see the margins clearly because we have oftentimes bought in wholesale to whiteness. While we would struggle to admit it personally, many of us like the idea of being known as honorary whites because it comes with more privileges than being tagged as black. (After all, who wants to be treated worse just for their skin color and because of the effects of systemic injustices that they inherited?)
But the honorary white status is a fickle one. At best, we are white-adjacent (meaning as a whole, we will never be fully accepted as white, though we will be used to advance the agenda of whiteness). This leads us into a place where the longer we are here, the less we know who we are. Because of racialization and racism, we lose more of what God infused into us. If we do that, the vision of Revelation 7:9 will go from a worshiping community of people from every nation, tribe, people, and tongue, to something far less.
As the generations pass, if we lose more and more of ourselves, we are essentially saying, “I’m tired of being the eye or I’m tired of being the nose. We should all be the forehead or we should all be the finger.” But that would be a terrible body that’s just full of foreheads or a million fingers. That is not the way God designed it.
Recommended books for further reading from Dr. Michelle Reyes and Raymond Chang:
- The Making of Asian America by Erika Lee
- America for Americans: A History of Xenophobia in the United States by Erika Lee
- Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning by Cathy Park Hong
- The Color of Success: Asian Americans and the Origins of the Model Minority by Ellen D. Wu
To learn more about the Asian American Christian Collaborative, check out its website. In addition, to read the Statement on Anti-Asian Racism in the Time of COVID-19, click here.
To see SOLA’s essay on why it supports the Statement, click here.