Whenever I lead a training session on cultural identity—particularly when there’s a strong white presence—I begin with this question: “Describe the first encounter you remember having with race.” Most participants answer this with relative ease, and what they share is always enlightening. In the most recent training I conducted, their answers included a typical gamut of stories.
The first participant described a crosscultural friendship. A Pakistani family moved into his neighborhood during his elementary school years, including a boy his age with whom he became fast friends. He visited his Pakistani friend’s home and came into contact with a range of culturally different practices. The food they ate, the clothes they wore, and the family dialect stood in contrast to the cultural norms of his white family.
The second participant described the first time she saw a person of color in a public position of influence, an African American pastor that spoke at her church. As a seventh grader, she noticed not only the pastor’s unique rhetorical style but also that there was not a single black person in her own congregation.
The third participant described witnessing an overt act of prejudice, which is the most common racial encounter white people share with me. He was walking home from high school with a black friend during his freshman year when a police car followed them from a distance for a couple of blocks before pulling up next to them. The officer rolled down his window and asked the white teenager if everything was all right. He was confused by the question and assured the officer everything was fine. As the police car drove away, he asked his black friend if he had any idea what that was about. The black friend then told him about racial profiling, saying that instances like that were not uncommon for him. This shook the white friend to the core.
This exercise is an important introduction to conversations around race and cultural identity for a couple of reasons. First, it helps participants to reflect on encounters with race that have shaped their understanding. Second, and most important, it serves as a reminder of the normalization of whiteness.
My own story is no different. The first time I was asked to describe my initial encounter with race, my answer came quickly. I was in fifth grade, and my family lived in an all-white neighborhood—until a brave black family moved in. They were there less than a week before someone set fire to a cross in their front yard. I will never forget my confusion and the rage that boiled within me as my father explained the legacy of the Ku Klux Klan to me.
Encounters like these play an important role in the growing consciousness of white Americans, but they must also remind us of how pervasive and normalized white culture is. What about the all-white (or almost all-white) neighborhoods we grew up in? Was there a reason they were all white? What about the all-white (or almost all-white) roster of teachers we sat under? Was there a reason they were all white? What about the all-white casts we saw on television growing up? Did these not play a role in shaping our views on race and culture? Do these also qualify as encounters with race?
The answer is obviously yes; we have encountered race daily since the day we were born. But we’re taught to internalize white culture as normal, so we’re unaware of the profound ways race shaped us during our early years. Not until we have an interruption connected to a person of color or a confrontation with overt racism do we begin to see something outside our cultural norm.
So encounter is the first stage of our cultural identity journey. If we are to be liberated from blindness and to move toward greater levels of awakening, we must find a way to see the deeper meaning behind our daily encounters with race. This chapter is about to take a dive into that deeper meaning, but I’d like to share a couple of thoughts first.
This book is built on seven stages (each with its own chapter) that mark the cultural identity process of a white person seeking transformation from blindness to sight: encounter, denial, disorientation, shame, self-righteousness, awakening, and active participation. The six stages after this chapter, “Encounter,” can happen in any order. Often a person enters and reenters certain stages at multiple points along the way. But the one stage that remains foundational throughout the process is the encounter. We must learn to see critical encounters with race; if we don’t, the rest of the process collapses.
Second, much of the material I’m about to cover in this chapter may be difficult to hear. It isn’t easy to ask critical questions about our country’s origins or about our own family tree. There may be points in this chapter where you feel I’m being unnecessarily confrontational. You may feel frustrated, defensive, or angry—or sad, defeated, or overwhelmed. If and when you do, I hope that you will see it as an opportunity to embrace the tension, discomfort, and uneasy feelings. Transformation rarely comes easily.
With those two disclaimers in place, let me ask a couple of questions: When we have encounters with race, what should those encounters ignite in us? If we learn to awaken to the racial realities behind encounters, what may we come to see?
The answers to these questions are found in four interlocking racial realities in America. Only when we see these four can we better understand our own cultural identity:
In chapter one, I shared how my South Asian friend upended my understanding of race when he said, “Daniel, you may be white, but don’t let that lull you into thinking you have no culture. White culture is very real. In fact, when white culture comes in contact with other cultures, it almost always wins. So it would be a really good idea for you to learn about your culture.” It took me years to understand what he was saying, and not until I began to engage with the American history of race did the fog begin to lift. A helpful starting point for me was learning to distinguish between two words that seem to have similar meanings but are actually very different things: ethnicity and race.
Ethnicity refers to the way people identify with each other based on commonalities such as language, history, ancestry, nationality, customs, cuisine, and art. Within the larger framework of “white,” we can easily identify dozens of ethnicities. I’ve already mentioned my Irish roots with its customs, language, music, dance, sports, cuisine, and mythology, as well as my German and French heritage. While I haven’t immersed myself in those two cultures to the degree that I have my Irish side, examining them has helped me understand ethnicity.
Race is different. There is near unanimous scientific agreement that race is a social construct (that is, it is created by human beings, not God) that goes far beyond the scope of what ethnicity describes. Here’s how this developed: When Europeans first colonized America, the concept of race, as we know it, did not yet exist. The white people who settled here over the years weren’t yet considered white; they were British, French, German, Welsh, Dutch, Italian, Irish, and so on. In fact, they represented a wide range of cultural, ethnic, and economic differences, and the idea of viewing them through a single racial lens would have been outlandish.
That began to change when slavery became an integral part of the American fabric. The economic machine created by Europeans was expanding at a torrid pace, and its dark secret was its reliance on slave labor as its primary fuel. The horror of slavery was a major moral crisis for America, but instead of acknowledging the sin of that enterprise, we went in the opposite direction. We began to deemphasize the differences within various European ethnicities and began to describe white people as a human collective that was inherently superior to people of color.
In his critically acclaimed book The Wages of Whiteness, David Roediger, a professor of American studies and history at Kansas University, made the case that slavery had a dramatic impact on the social construction of race and specifically on what we now consider to be white. He contended that this construct was a conscious effort by slave owners to gain distance from those they enslaved. Though there had been no collective sense of white before slavery, that changed quickly. By the eighth century, Roediger wrote, white had become well established as a racial term in the United States. By the end of the nineteenth century, it had become an all-encompassing term.1
Another book often cited when exploring the social construct of race is Noel Ignatiev’s How the Irish Became White. Ignatiev tracked the historical immigration patterns of the Irish to America and contended that in their early years here, they were mistreated, oppressed, and seen as inferior to other European ethnic groups. Ignatiev wrote that because of their suffering, they formed a unique bond with African Americans: they lived side by side, they shared workspaces, and they were part of the same class competing for the same jobs. When the census was taken in 1850, the term mulatto was introduced for the first time and used primarily to describe a person of both Irish and African American descent.
The Irish immigration overlapped with the continued development of the social construct of race, and a powerful white republic was emerging. Ignatiev suggested that due to their desire to be accepted as white, the Irish embraced racism against American blacks and supported the institution of slavery. As they began to achieve acceptance into the white race, some Irish embraced an even more virulent strain of racism that emphasized their differences from blacks. In essence, the Irish became white, helping to solidify the modern concept of the white race.
For many of us the term white supremacy evokes strong images ranging from the Ku Klux Klan to the Nazi regime. When we get past the emotional response to the term and consider its definition, we can see that it remains relevant. According to Dictionary.com, white supremacy is “the belief, theory, or doctrine that white people are inherently superior to people from all other racial groups, especially black people, and are therefore rightfully the dominant group in any society.”2
Race is a social construct, as explored earlier, and white supremacy is an ideology (or belief, theory, or doctrine) that has informed and sustained this construct. Said another way, the system of race in America has consistently treated white people as a superior race and has consistently treated nonwhites as inferior.
While this can be difficult to hear, it isn’t difficult to prove. Let’s begin with the Declaration of Independence, the document that established our nation. One of the most appealing things about it is the way it articulates these fundamental ideas: “We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.”
While this was a brave and noble vision (at least for men—it did not include women), the description of people indigenous to the land was neither brave nor noble: “The Inhabitants of our Frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known Rule of Warfare, is an undistinguished Destruction, of all Ages, Sexes and Conditions.”3
Our definition of white supremacy is key at this point, because it stresses the belief (or doctrine) not only that white people are inherently superior but also that they are rightfully the dominant group. The creation account in Genesis highlights one of the ways human dominance is exerted: “Now the LORD God had formed out of the ground all the wild animals and all the birds in the sky. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name” (Genesis 2:19).
When Adam named the lesser members of creation in the Garden of Eden, he was exercising dominance in the literal sense: in Genesis 1:28, God gave humankind dominion over the fish in the sea, the birds in the sky, and every living creature that moves on the ground. It was an exercise in power that approached divine-like levels, and it was a power that was to be stewarded with extreme caution.
The founders accepted a distorted version of the dominion that God entrusted to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. But this form of dominion was especially sinful. Not only did they anoint us with a power that was not ours, they also used it to name other human beings.
If this weren’t audacious enough, they went beyond just naming in a generic way: they chose to found our country on a dehumanizing picture of an entire group of people being fundamentally “merciless” and “savage.” The Bible repetitively refers to human beings as God’s treasured possession, and to dehumanize another person is to demean those who are valuable according to God.
The act of encoding white supremacy into foundational documents did not end with the Declaration. It’s splashed across the pages of the US Constitution as well. Written during the height of slavery in America, article 1, section 2, paragraph 3 says this about people of African descent:
Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.4
When they referred to African Americans as three-fifths human in this Constitutional provision, they literally dehumanized a group of people in the fullest sense of the word. This mathematical equation demonstrated how the racial hierarchy was viewed: white people were 100 percent human, but black people were only three-fifths.
Some defendants of the Constitution contend that it’s unfair to use the three-fifths human clause as an example of inferiority because that was just a tactic used to negotiate the tax system. But arguing that point suggests that this provision is the only place where we see the historical dichotomy between black life and white life. Another unsightly example is the social and legal principle referred to as the one-drop rule: any person with even one drop of sub-Saharan African blood was to be considered black. The message sent through this law and others like it was clear: whites were the superior race, and even a single drop of inferior blood contaminated the purity of whiteness.
Though white supremacy was aimed at native and black people in a unique and devastating way, it was also the foundation of how we named and depicted other groups of color. For instance, in his book Mongrels, Bastards, Orphans, and Vagabonds, Gregory Rodriguez traced the way the dehumanizing word mongrel was used to paint Mexican people. In the 1850s, at the time of the conquest of the Southwest, Secretary of State James Buchanan, who also served as the fifteenth US president, warned white Americans of the dangers of hosting a “mongrel race.”5 In the 1920s, Representative John C. Box warned that allowing immigration would lead to the “distressing process of mongrelization” in America.6 And in more recent memory, Donald Trump took this narrative further in his 2015 presidential campaign, saying, “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. . . . They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.”7
Ronald Takaki, author of A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America, demonstrated ways that the Chinese experienced white supremacy as well. At the California constitutional convention of 1878, John F. Miller warned, “Were the Chinese to amalgamate at all with our people, it would be the lowest, most vile and degraded of our race, and the result of that amalgamation would be a hybrid of the most despicable, a mongrel of the most detestable that has ever afflicted the earth.”8 Two years later, this culminated in laws prohibiting marriage between a white person and a “negro, mulatto, or Mongolian.”9
In their work on Asian pan-ethnicity, social scientists Kenyon Chan and Shirley Hune explored ways in which other Asian immigrant groups were targeted by the dominant culture. The Japanese and Koreans were regularly referred to as “the yellow peril.” Filipinos were derogatorily referred to as “little brown monkeys.” Asian Indians, most of them Sikhs, were called “ragheads.”10
Dr. Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, a professor of sociology at Duke University, poignantly demonstrates how the doctrine of white supremacy has undercut our aspiration of being a nation of equality. He writes of the ways in which the metaphorical “melting pot”—the notion that people of different cultures can mix and melt together into a big cultural pot that is harmonious and happy—was consistently used to promote the vision of equal access to the American dream. He noted that, as appealing as this vision is, it was never possible. Because our culture asserts that white people are superior, people of color never have equal access to that pot. In a PBS documentary on race, Bonilla-Silva memorably said it like this: “[The] melting pot never included people of color. Blacks, Chinese, Puerto Ricans, etcetera, could not melt into the pot. They could be used as wood to produce the fire for the pot, but they could not be used as material to be melted into the pot.”11
I will use the phrase narrative of racial difference from this point forward, because it has been a very helpful tool for my own navigation through cultural identity and that of other white folks. Bryan Stevenson was the first to popularize this terminology. He is a nationally recognized lawyer that has dedicated his career to helping the poor, the incarcerated, and the condemned, and he is one of the great activists of our day.12
Stevenson is a brilliant thinker on race, and the linchpin of his ideas is the narrative of racial difference. Here’s how he described it in an interview:
The whole narrative of white supremacy was created during the era of slavery. It was a necessary theory to make white Christian people feel comfortable with their ownership of other human beings. And we created a narrative of racial difference in this country to sustain slavery, and even people who didn’t own slaves bought into that narrative, including people in the North. . . . So this narrative of racial difference has done really destructive things in our society. Lots of countries had slaves, but they were mostly societies with slaves. We became something different, we became a slave society. We created a narrative of racial difference to maintain slavery. And our 13th amendment never dealt with that narrative. It didn’t talk about white supremacy. The Emancipation Proclamation doesn’t discuss the ideology of white supremacy or the narrative of racial difference, so I don’t believe slavery ended in 1865, I believe it just evolved. It turned into decades of racial hierarchy that was violently enforced—from the end of reconstruction until WWII—through acts of racial terror. And in the north, that was tolerated.
And so we are very confused when we start talking about race in this country because we think that things are “of the past” because we don’t understand what these things really are, that narrative of racial difference that was created during slavery that resulted in terrorism and lynching, that humiliated, belittled and burdened African Americans throughout most of the 20th century. The same narrative of racial difference that got Michael Brown killed, got Eric Garner killed and got Tamir Rice killed. That got these thousands of others—of African Americans—wrongly accused, convicted and condemned. It is the same narrative that has denied opportunities and fair treatment to millions of people of color, and it is the same narrative that supported and led to the executions in Charleston [South Carolina].13
As we reflect on the significance of his description of the narrative of racial difference, let’s focus on three of his points.
1. “We created a narrative of racial difference . . . to maintain slavery.” This connecting back to the first point of this chapter: race in America is a social construct. Taking a different angle than any we’ve explored, Stevenson points out that early white Christians faced a moral dilemma when it came to slavery: How could they justify the possession and ownership of fellow human beings? He suggests that the only way was to subscribe to a narrative that claimed white people were inherently more human than black people.
2. “I don’t believe slavery ended in 1865, I believe it just evolved.” Here Stevenson observes the difference between the institution of slavery and the narrative that undergirded it. The institution was technically overturned on December 6, 1865, when the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution was ratified. As important as the legal dismantling of slavery was, it failed to uproot the ideology that allowed it to thrive. If you’ve ever tried to maintain a garden, you know that uprooting is an important task. You can remove weeds all day, but if the roots aren’t extracted, it’s just a matter of time before the weeds return.
3. “It is the same narrative that has denied opportunities and fair treatment to millions of people of color, and it is the same narrative that supported and led to the executions in Charleston.” Here Stevenson challenges us to see the presence of the narrative in the early days of America and to follow the thread throughout the different eras of American history: During slave days, the narrative poisoned our minds to justify owning other human beings. In the late 1800s, it poisoned our minds to participate in lynchings and to watch as people of color (mostly black) were executed publicly without a legal trial. In the mid-1900s, it poisoned our minds to enact Jim Crow laws and to watch as whites-only spaces were built and preserved throughout society. In the later 1900s, it poisoned our minds to criminalize young men of color and establish America as the country with the highest incarceration rate on the planet. In the present, the narrative has produced endless tragedies, including the deaths of Michael Brown, Rekia Boyd, Eric Garner, Sandra Bland, Tamir Rice, and many more.
This quote from Stevenson is useful on multiple levels. First, the narrative of racial difference integrates the two racial realities we covered in this chapter: race is a social construct, and this construct was built around the history of white supremacy. Furthermore, it elucidates the way the ideology of white supremacy was sustained by the narrative of racial difference, and it connects that narrative to modern incarnations of racism.
This quote is helpful for another reason as well—a reason of particular importance for Christians: it helps us see the ways in which racism is a spiritual problem and how the ongoing support of it directly defies the heart and character of God. We could view the narrative of racial difference from many theological angles, but at the top of the list is the way it denies the biblical understanding of what it means to be human.
The creation account in Genesis 1 famously opens with the words “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” and then goes on to chronicle God’s activities throughout the first six days. It concludes with the culminating act of God’s divine power—the creation of humankind:
Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”
So God created mankind in his own image,
in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them. (Genesis 1:26-27)
This passage reveals the splendor of the doctrine of the imago Dei, which holds that all human beings are created in the image and likeness of God. In Scripture, the imago Dei is applied exclusively to humans, highlighting the unique qualities with which we have been divinely endowed. Genesis 1 therefore is the first signpost of the “good news” of the gospel in the biblical account; it affirms that human beings are good, are of infinite value, and are a reflection of the character of the triune God.
The introduction of the imago Dei in Genesis 1 was a declaration of multiple truths, but chief among them was the establishment of a standard for human value and worth that would be carried throughout Scripture. The doctrine explicitly reaffirms human value at numerous points throughout the Bible (such as Genesis 5:1-3; 9:6; Psalm 8; 1 Corinthians 11:7; Colossians 3:9-10; James 3:9). Along the way are places where a writer simply stops and dwells on the magnificence of the doctrine.
King David, for example, regularly referred to the imago Dei in his poems, psalms, and songs. One of my favorites was when he asked,
What is mankind that you are mindful of them,
human beings that you care for them?
You have made them a little lower than the angels
and crowned them with glory and honor. (Psalm 8:4-5)
He took the implications of the imago Dei so far that it can make us uncomfortable. Isn’t it incredible that we are a little lower than the angels and crowned with glory and honor?
Passages like this played a role in shaping the works of giants like C. S. Lewis, who was one of the heavyweight thinkers of the twentieth century. When meditating on the imago Dei, he came up with the concept of “the weight of glory,” a phrase he used to name both a sermon and a book. He believed that because each person reflects the very glory of God, we should value humanity accordingly. He wrote, “It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses. . . . There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal.”14
It’s important to wrap our minds around the doctrine of the imago Dei because it’s a theological foundation we must stand on as we learn to critique and condemn the social construct of race in America and our historical reliance on white supremacy. Stated simply, the imago Dei declares that all human beings are valuable and of infinite worth. God is the one that makes this declaration, and no human being is allowed to challenge it. To do so is to play God. Yet when we created the American construct of race, that’s exactly what we did. We undercut the imago Dei by establishing the narrative of racial difference.
The fact that we recognize racial difference is not the issue. The theological danger comes with a system of race that assigns value based on the differences. Assigning value to human beings is in direct contradiction to the heart of God, and it is a sin of the highest order.
Now let’s name what the narrative of racial difference reveals to each of us.
First, it helps us to identify the sin behind racism. When we see an individual act of racism, most of us are comfortable labeling it a sin. But if our vision is limited to individual acts of racism, we are unable to understand both the world and ourselves. The original narrative of racial difference was built on a lie—the lie that human beings can be valued along a racial spectrum. The sin behind this lie touches every part of our society. Seeing the presence of the narrative of racial difference positions us to join the redemptive work of Jesus Christ in a unique and powerful way.
Second, the narrative of racial difference can help us decipher the messages that have informed our understanding of cultural identity, which has formed in the midst of a heated contest between two competing ideologies: that narrative and the imago Dei. To live in America, especially as a Christian, is to be bombarded by diametrically opposing messages. The narrative of racial difference promotes a valuation of life measured along a racial continuum with a sliding scale, which dehumanizes both people of color and people who are white. The doctrine of the imago Dei insists on recognizing every human being as an image bearer of God and therefore as valuable and worthy. To live from our identity in Christ, we must confront the ways the narrative has informed both our sense of self and our views of other people.
When left unchallenged, the narrative of racial difference inflicts catastrophic damage on every level of society, starting at an individual level moving into communities of people before infecting the roots of our social systems. We need a transformed vision that recognizes the narrative at each level, but we especially need to learn to see the impact of the narrative on our social systems.
A social system is made up of the elements that work together in towns and cities, such as schools, police departments, businesses and manufacturing, hospitals, grocery stores, housing, and other entities. Though these entities provide services or play certain roles, they also form what is often called a social system. Each element within a social system is supposed to serve people of all backgrounds equally, regardless of race or any other social marker. But the narrative of racial difference prevents that because it is built around a calculation of human value based on race, which reproduces inequalities.
Let’s look at education to see how the narrative poisons a social system. American education is meant to provide a standard education so all can participate in and contribute to the economy. However, statistics reveal an overwhelming discrepancy between the education provided for white students and that provided for students of color. Why is this social system working for some and failing others? The primary culprit is the narrative of racial difference.
Consider a specific example that shows the social effects of the narrative. Stephanie is an African American, an accomplished medical doctor, and a respected leader in our church. She makes most things she does look easy. Those who don’t know her story may assume that her life path skirted the landmines of racism. But that’s far from the truth.
Stephanie shared her story at church one Sunday, beginning by describing her parents and how their experiences of racial discrimination led them to raise her and her brother in an affluent white suburb in metro Chicago. She shared what it was like to grow up black in an all-white community and the confusion that created in her cultural identity journey.
But Stephanie focused on what she called the most pivotal year of her life: second grade. That’s when her school began testing students individually for gifting in reading and math. Those who scored high were elevated to a gifted track. Stephanie was one of the top students in the class, and she was excited to see how she would perform on the tests. She watched as the teacher called in student after student for testing but not her. Even at her young age she already felt that the teacher treated her differently than the white students. That day, the difference felt very real.
That evening at the dinner table, Stephanie’s mom asked how her day had gone, as she did each evening. Stephanie told her about all the activities of the day and then started telling her about the testing. Her mother asked questions, and it became clear to her that Stephanie had been overlooked. Though she was furious, she kept herself composed in front of her second grader. She knew exactly what she needed to do.
The next morning Stephanie’s mother stormed into the school and asked the gifted program instructor why they had failed to include Stephanie in the testing. The instructor mumbled a confusing explanation, then looked through her records and said that she had accidentally overlooked Stephanie, blaming it on an administrative error. Stephanie took the tests that day and received top scores in both reading and math. She was placed into the gifted program and never looked back.
Stephanie now sees this was pivotal in her development, because it set an academic trajectory for the rest of her life. If her mother hadn’t intervened, Stephanie wouldn’t have been in advanced classes in elementary school, so she wouldn’t have been on the college preparatory track in high school. And if she hadn’t been on the college preparatory track, she wouldn’t have been accepted into med school. And if she hadn’t gone to med school, she wouldn’t be the doctor she is today, serving marginalized populations that often get less-than-thorough medical care.
This story is a clear example of how the narrative of racial difference can infect a social system. In it, we don’t see a cruel, racist group of people maliciously targeting students of color. In fact, I’d bet that if someone had asked the administrators and teachers in Stephanie’s school, “Do you consider yourself to be a racist in any way?” every one would have said no emphatically. And if someone had asked them, “Do you think you see or treat students of color differently than white students?” I’d bet every response would be no. What does this story reveal? In a high-performing, diversity-minded school, a black second grader was treated differently than her white peers.
Is it possible there was a genuine administrative error? Sure. However, it’s likely that the narrative of racial difference was at work, largely undetected. In Stephanie’s case, the narrative led the teacher to assign a lower intellectual capacity to a black student than to the white students.
This illustration is just the tip of the iceberg. We need to examine other critical systems required for support and survival—employment, housing, policing, health and nutrition, and more—for the effect of the narrative. It has poisoned the roots of many of these systems and continues to reproduce disparities in the outcomes for white people and for people of color. As we become more in tune with our own cultural identity, we can join forces with other seekers of justice, and we can name and dismantle the inequitable systems that perpetuate disparities.
The kingdom of God is one reality; the kingdom of this world is another altogether. It’s critical that we not only differentiate between the two but also learn to see why they are so different.
The narrative of the kingdom of God is informed by the imago Dei—that is, every human is created in the image of God. On the other hand, a narrative informed by racial difference undergirds the kingdom of this world; it recognizes differences in God’s creation and then uses those differences as a basis for measuring human worth. Because those kingdoms are diametrically opposed, we are caught in a cosmic war for the soul of humanity.
Cultural identity begins with recognizing that this war has been waged for millennia, and it has impacted us in innumerable ways. We need to ask—and even beg—Jesus to help us to see our King and the kingdom of God in ways that take us far beyond our current vision. We need to seek our identity in Christ and to search bravely for ways in which our understanding of identity has been infiltrated by the narrative of racial difference. We then need to seek to participate in Jesus’ redemptive work in society as he reconciles all things to himself. To do so, we must first encounter the kingdom of this world and learn to see the ways that kingdom reigns as a principality and power of darkness (Ephesians 6:10-20).