You’re welcome, Kristin. Good to hear from you!

Thanks for sharing this important experience with us, Maiya! So much to reflect on here.

Thank you for sharing your experience. Your are right, injustice is not just Black/White. Make sure you check out another post in this series from an Asian American perspective. You can find it here: Lamenting the Atlanta shootings

Thank you for putting it this way–that you can feel the love and wisdom in what Phaedra and John have shared and how they shared (tone). I agree! And isn’t that the most important thing?

Having said that, as an Asian-American, I want to add that racial injustice isn’t just a Black/White issue. Even though that may seem obvious, conversations like this seldom include non-Black/White encounters, positive or negative. While I understand the Black/White issues may be the most entrenched & wide-spread, I believe that as Christians we also have the opportunity to explicitly demonstrate & encourage the greater unity we all share in Christ.

For over two years we had a young Black man who was in my son’s high school class live with us after his mom kicked him out. One day while driving home, our alarm company called me after the house alarm was set off. The young man knew how to disarm it but panicked so he wasn’t able to disarm it before the police arrived. I’d seen the squad cars speed past me & my heart started racing. Police were heading towards the back door as I got home & ran to them shouting, “Those are my boys!”

I knew that young man would be terrified in a way my son, who’d been napping upstairs wouldn’t be. He was sitting at the table with his head in his hands & I rushed over to him to both defend him if necessary & to make it clear to the police that he was part of my household. Later I realized that’s how most Black parents feel most of the time. My husband is White & when he heard what happened, he couldn’t understand why I got so upset. He said if the police had taken the boys in, we would’ve just gone to pick them up. As much privilege as I have, he & I couldn’t discuss issues of race productively back then.

I may not be Black or White but that experience, being nonwhite & having biracial kids made the fight against racial injustice more a part of my life than it ever was before. We all learned a lot during the next two years. The young man had been taught to hate White people & we learned things you may only learn by living with someone, no matter how many BIOPOC friends, colleagues or others you know or work with.

Being well-grounded in our Christian faith, understanding other people’s perspectives & asking not just WWJD but “What would Jesus do if He was me?” are crucial for us to harness the spirit of power, love & self-discipline in Christ, overcome our human spirit of timidity to collaborate & ally with one another to fight racial injustice. May we truly seek to be transformed in Christ’s likeness by God’s grace for not just our own sakes but also for the sake of others. For with God nothing is impossible.