Stay or Leave

Should I stay or should I leave? Am I trapped in the barrio or is the barrio an inescapable, yet beautiful part of me from which I should not flee (or even have the desire to leave)? Should the life-taking stories of my barrio take precedence (like they do in the news) or do I privilege only the life-giving (counter) narratives that dignify my city? If I stay, am I being a bad parent, allowing my son to remain in a potentially dangerous environment where opportunity and resources are scant? If I leave, am I being a bad Christian by opting for my family’s and my own comfort and safety?

These questions invaded my mind and the noises of my barrio played a conflicting melody where love, sacrifice, injustice, and pain entwined.

El ruido que amo (the noise that I love)

I love las cumbias, las rancheras y los boleros I hear desde mi ventana. I didn’t exactly request this music pero my neighbors’ music selection is everyone’s delight. Ok, maybe not everyone’s, but I like it. I’ll be hanging out in my back yard and suddenly la canción de Ana Gabriel que puso la vecina gets me going, and I start singing my heart out: ¿Quién como tú, que día a día puedes tenerle? It takes me back to the many road trips I took with my parents when I was a little girl. Ana Gabriel, Juan Gabriel, Los Bukis – those were my jams!

I love el ruido que mi gente makes when they’re hussling. Tamales, tamales, tamales. ¡Tamales de piña, de puerco, de pollo, tamales! I love when my son runs out yelling raspadooo when the street vendors pass by honking their horns announcing la llegada of those delicious raspados we all slurp with such gozo. I love hearing mi pueblo use their voice to try to make ends meet en el swapmeet: barato, barato, barato, pásele; ¿qué le damos, señorita, pásele a lo barato? 

I love la euforia que se escucha cuando la selección mexicana scores a goooooooool!

Whoever said my people have been silenced, has not set foot in my neighborhood.

El ruido que odio (the noise that I hate)

I hate that I can distinguish the sound of fireworks from gunshots. I hate that we have to run inside the house and lock every door when we hear shots fired. I hate that every other day police sirens and the noise of helicopters drown out the sound of my favorite TV show, reminding me that I am not safe. I hate the cries of yet another grieving mother as she pleas with the public to help her find her child’s murderer.

El ruido que amo y el ruido que odio are juxtaposed mainly because “U.S. barrios have been a source of cultural resistance; they function as reterritorialized spaces where it is possible to maintain one ́s culture and to resist assimilation. At the same time, the barrios are social spaces where ethnic lower classes are segregated thus impairing their economic development and creating a subculture of violence and poverty.”[1]

El silencio que mata (the silence that kills)

But the most murderous force in my neighborhood is silent. The culprit hides in plain sight. More than two thousand pounds of toxic chemicals are emitted in Wilmington, California every single day. My beloved city is surrounded by the largest concentration of oil refineries in the state and the third largest oil field in the contiguous U.S., and it is home to the largest port in North America (Grist 2022). Wilmington, which is 90% Latino and 40% immigrant, is a toxic wasteland; the dumping grounds of big oil corporations. The contaminants expelled daily create diseased bodies in a community where the median household income is 40% below the state’s average and where 28% of its residents are not medically insured, a number that represents three times more than the national average. The environmental hazard created by these companies also has an impact on violent crime. Several studies have found a link between violent crime and pollutant exposure: “air pollutants act as stressors, eliciting endocrine stress responses in our brains that lead to irrational decisions and violent tendencies and also disturb the physical, cognitive and emotional health of people exposed to it at high levels” (The Guardian 2022).

Wilmington, CA; they call it a “bad neighborhood” and bad neighborhoods are always bad because of the individuals that inhabit it. A “bad neighborhood” is never thought to be bad by virtue of systemic injustices that include racial and environmental inequalities. My family and I are from a “bad neighborhood,” but I don’t think we’re bad people. Jesus himself was from Galilea, a neighborhood deemed undesirable. Dr. Chao Romero asserts that if Jesus was from California, he would not come from Beverly Hills or Calabasas, but the most marginalized regions of the state, like East LA or the Central Valley.[2]

What we really mean when we say “bad neighborhood” is impoverished, and, often, Brown or Black. The “good neighborhoods” are strictly regulated. Associations determine rules about the colors in which you are allowed to paint your house, how often you’re supposed to do your lawn, and how much noise you can make. “Good neighborhoods” are wealthy, have good school districts, lower crime rates and are predominantly White. Language matters because language constructs truth. The use of “good/bad” as it refers to neighborhoods continues to strengthen the belief that the people who live there are inherently bad and completely disregards systemic issues that have created and continue to sustain the disenfranchisement of our barrios.

I understand the ways in which systemic issues have worked against my community. I love my community for the ways in which it has shaped me to be resilient, humble, and faithful. I am grateful for the ties I have formed there and the life lessons that have been imparted to me: to not judge people by what they have or where they came from. Nonetheless, there is another competing truth: I have witnessed more gun violence than the average American, I attended low-performing schools in the area and do not feel safe letting my teenage son walk alone to the store that is 100 feet away from my house. I have lived in this city for over 30 years and there is a certain level of comfort granted to me by familiarity, but as a mother, I face a conundrum: do I stay or do I leave?

Deciding to leave our barrios is more than aspiring to a bigger, nicer house with abundant parking, and plentiful green spaces. Leaving our barrios means that our children will have better educational opportunities, access to resources that improve their livelihoods, and the probability of being less exposed to violent crime. Ironically, the dilemma many of us face is similar to the one experienced by our first-generation immigrant parents with one distinction: my socioeconomic status and educational levels have significantly improved while remaining in my native community.

The Christian Community Development Association (CCDA) emphasizes a ministry of presence in which believers are active members of the communities in which they serve. It is a way of doing ministry that decentralizes white saviorism and centers the voices of community members. They invite people to be wholly present in their areas of ministry by becoming (and remaining) a neighbor. As a Christian that understands the importance of serving the socially dispossessed, am I to remain and use my social and economic capital to help my community flourish or should I leave relocating in a city where my children will be safer and have access to opportunity?

I left. It might seem like that was the easiest decision to make, but it certainly didn’t feel that way. I wrestled with this decision for quite some time, asking the Lord for guidance: “Lord, help us; ayúdanos a entender tu voluntad.” Months later, my husband and I received an answer to our prayers that gave us the certainty that we were being called out of my beloved city. In very God-like fashion, he set the pieces in motion and directed our steps.

So, should you stay or should you leave? I don’t know, and I don’t think there’s a generic right or wrong answer. God directs our paths in unique ways in different seasons of our lives (Ecclesiastes 3: 1-8). For people of color, these decisions are especially difficult as we encounter survivor’s guilt. Dr. Piorkowski explains that survivor’s guilt, or success guilt, is prevalent amongst first-generation college students from marginalized communities. We often ask ourselves – and God – questions that are filled with remorse: Why did I succeed when so many others in my neighborhood didn’t? Why am I alive when many of my classmates aren’t? Why do I have the opportunity to live in better conditions when many of my family members don’t? How is it possible that I love my barrio, but still want to leave it?

Guilt and gratefulness collide, but this guilt is crippling because it doesn’t allow me to faithfully receive God’s blessings. Instead of viewing the earth as a punishment that we must endure to buy our way into Heaven, we must understand the earth as a good place created by God (Genesis 1:18; Genesis 1:31) and our salvation as a free gift from our Lord (Ephesians 2:8; Romans 6:23). Perhaps God is indeed calling you to stay, but the decision to remain should not be guided by guilt. Conversely, if we are being led to leave, we must not do so developing a posture where we see our former neighbors as less-than, or inherently lacking, because of their socioeconomic status, and in doing so, engaging in the further dehumanization of our barrios. Remember that “You will always be Esperanza. You will always be Mango Street. You can’t erase what you know. You can’t forget who you are” (The House on Mango Street). 

About Dra. Meduri Soto

As an academic from el barrio, Dra. Meduri Soto strives to engage in scholarly work that honors and gives visibility to her community. Her faith drives her passion for justice as she seeks to reveal the ways in which certain language ideologies are constructed to operate unjustly against our communities. Her work acknowledges language as a powerful tool and promotes linguistic diversity in its different manifestations. Bicultural and bilingual identities are at the center of Dra. Meduri Soto’s work. She is a Spanish professor at Biola University where she teaches second language and heritage language learners. To learn more about her work, follow her on Instagram: @la.dra.itzel

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Footnotes

[1] Views of the Barrio in Chicano and Puerto Rican Narrative (Antonia Domínguez Miguela)

[2] The Brown Church: Five Centuries of Latina/o Social Justice, Theology and Identity (2020) 

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Shifting from Exclusion to Embrace

This fall we are featuring three pieces by student writers who are engaging theologically as bi-cultural leaders. We are thrilled to give platform to these up and coming voices who will surely shape the trajectory of the mestizo church. -The Editors

Before I began my PhD program, I had the privilege to live, work, and worship in East Chicago, Indiana, a small city near the Illinois-Indiana border whose racial demographics are almost evenly divided between African American and Latinx communities. I taught seventh-grade English Language Arts at the local middle school for five years while serving as Christian Education Director at my local Latinx Pentecostal church. The main responsibilities of this role included weekly Sunday School programming as well as annual events like Vacation Bible School. However, I became disillusioned by the disconnect between the church and the surrounding community. I would see my students playing outside on the same street as the church and wanted to invite them to participate in church gatherings, but I doubted if the experience would be life-giving. I wanted to keep my students safe as they were already experiencing the violence embedded in the US public school system. Rather than supporting them in their learning and development, school was a space where they were othered; their voices missing from the curriculum; their appearance and behavior surveilled, scrutinized, and ultimately admonished. And the church was not exempt from perpetuating those same logics that criminalize children of color for simply existing. Noticing this overlap, I yearn for a world otherwise, one with an abolitionist orientation where all members of the Beloved Community are allowed to be imperfect but held accountable, joyful, and above all, safe. My hope is that the Church, as an integral community partner, would lead this initiative. If we start here, we can impact other institutions and spaces. 

The otherwise world where children of color are not criminalized for appearance or background depends on a shift from shame and punishment as responses to harm, to an abolitionist orientation. The ways in which we interact and respond to each other in various environments, including school, church, home, and the larger community reveal our values and commitments.

Are we committed to relationship and story or shame and punishment? An abolitionist orientation embraces love, deep community, and accountability. The shift toward relationship is key considering the disproportionate punitive measures experienced by students of color, particularly Black girls, in urban public schools. According to Walker, Green, and Shapiro, “A New York Times analysis of the most recent discipline data from the Education Department found that Black girls are over five times more likely than white girls to be suspended at least once from school, seven times more likely to receive multiple out-of-school suspensions than white girls and three times more likely to receive referrals to law enforcement.” Monique Morris explores this issue more in-depth in her book and subsequent documentary, Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools. In my time as a middle school teacher, I remember seeing students walk through metal detectors and have their bookbags inspected before they could even receive breakfast. If they were considered disruptive or disrespectful, they could receive a lunch detention where they had to eat silently in a room separated from their peers. Multiple incidents often led to in- or out-of-school-suspension where students would be isolated at home for anywhere from 1-5 days.

In many local churches, including the one where I served, the practice of disciplina also indicates an orientation towards punishment via exclusion. When an action was committed that was deemed unfit by the pastor because it went against church norms and/or Christian values, the person on disciplina would be excluded from participation in church activities. Sometimes this also included revoking their titles and positions from leadership. The extent of the isolation during a person’s disciplina was ultimately at the discretion of the pastor, much like how a school administrator determines how long a student is suspended. In both church and school, isolating a community member does more harm than good. Instead, an abolitionist orientation invites accountability through deep community. How are we working together as one body to hold each other accountable while still showing love?

Abbot Elementary is an unexpected example of how to apply an abolitionist mindset to a space tainted by dynamics of punishment and exclusion. For fans of television sitcoms, Abbott Elementary is a refreshing addition to the genre. Following the hilarious and, at times, heartbreaking happenings of an urban public school in Philadelphia, the series deals with issues such as underfunding, integrating technology, surveillance, and building community among students and staff in a “mockumentary” style. As a former public school teacher and an emerging Christian education scholar, the show hits home.

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In the fifth episode of the first season, a student named Courtney is transferred to main character Janine’s (Quinta Brunson) class. Courtney quickly commands control of the classroom by having the other students call her by the teacher’s name and changing the words to the Pledge of Allegiance. In many traditional classrooms, these kinds of behaviors would have resulted in Courtney being disciplined with detention or suspension for being disrespectful and disruptive. After reading Courtney’s file, Janine realizes Courtney is extremely intelligent and acting out of boredom, so Janine disregards the disciplinary advice from a senior colleague who previously had Courtney as a student. Instead, she works with the school admin and the other teachers to find a better placement for Courtney.  While Courtney was doing things that were disruptive to the class, the onus was placed on the teachers to figure out what would be the best learning environment for her and her classmates. This gives an example of turning towards accountability rather than exclusionary punishment, and it was not possible until the teachers took the time to honor the full story of their student.

An abolitionist orientation toward accountability and story aligns with the vision of Beloved Community reflected in the teachings of Jesus.  

He sat down, called the twelve, and said to them, “Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.” Then he took a little child and put it among them, and taking it in his arms he said to them, “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.”

–Mark 9:35–37 (NRSV)

Jesus is inviting the disciples into a similar shift away from the competitive, cutthroat way of life and into an abolitionist orientation towards accountability and deep community where the most vulnerable are protected and prioritized. In a world of exclusions, I pray that our schools, churches, and other community institutions would be spaces where children of color experience embrace. Bettina Love explains it this way, writing:

The practice of abolitionist teaching [is] rooted in the internal desire we all have for freedom, joy, restorative justice (restoring humanity, not just rules), and to matter to ourselves, our community, our family, and our country with the profound understanding that we must ‘demand the impossible’ by refusing injustice and the disposability of dark children. (Love, 7)

An abolitionist orientation welcomes children of color to be their full selves without fear of punishment and rejection. All members of the mestiza Church, educators and non-educators alike, can participate in the co-creation of this abolitionist world, as directed by the Teacher Himself, who calls all into abundant life.

About Adriana Rivera

Adriana (Dri) Rivera, a lifelong learner of Puerto Rican descent, is a former 7th grade English teacher and lay leader in Christian Education and youth ministry from Northwest Indiana. She studied Secondary English Education at Indiana University Bloomington before earning her MDiv at McCormick Theological Seminary in Chicago. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Christian Education and Congregational Studies at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary in Evanston, IL with concentrations in emancipatory pedagogies and decolonial theologies. By practicing an abolitionist pedagogy, she imagines a world otherwise where all members of the Beloved Community can experience abundant life, sin vergüenza.

Follow Dri on LinkedIn and YouTube.

Footnotes

This article is an adaptation of an unpublished paper for a course at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary

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Immigrants Against Immigration?

We were in our dining room table tomando cafecito and chit chatting. The TV had remained on in the background and Noticias Univision announced that there was a new wave of Central American migrant caravans approaching la frontera. She reacted angrily and exclaimed, “Nada más vienen a robar, a aprovecharse del gobierno y a quitarnos lo que es nuestro” (They only come here to steal, to take advantage of the government and to suck us dry). I had heard this phrase before, but never in my home and certainly never in Spanish. Her comments me cayeron como un balde de agua fría – they destabilized my narrative.

As a second-generation Mexican-American immigrant, I carry my family’s migration story with pride and a great sense of responsibility. Part of my identity was formed by that journey. Although I was born in the U.S., never had to flee my home in search of better opportunities, and have not suffered persecution based on my citizenship status, I am intimately connected to these stories through my family members. As a Christian, I am also linked to the migrant narrative through the Bible. Jesus was an immigrant,[1] and the Bible is filled with stories of people who had to migrate in order to escape violence, poverty, or because they felt God’s calling in a new land.

I’ve carried, protected and defended my immigrant family’s inherent value in a society that devalues them and fails to recognize their full humanity. I’ve clung to the biblical truths that exhort us to love and care for all people, particularly those in vulnerable positions.[2] I am, to a certain extent, accustomed to the anti-immigrant rhetoric repeated by individuals outside of the immigrant community. I am familiar with the misapplied Romans 13 verse used by Christians who oppose (undocumented) migration, but this rhetoric had now infested my home and disrupted my story.     

What was most destabilized were the college applications that I wrote, proudly referencing my family’s migration journey; the lesson plans I prepared for students in which we explored migrant stories in the Bible; the scholarship I produced about the immigrant experience; my multiple conversations with my son about his grandparents’ journey so that he wouldn’t forget and become one of those third-generation Mexican-Americans who ignores the plight of immigrants, or worst yet, resents it. I was haunted by this question: “Does my advocacy and story make sense now that my relative declared herself anti-immigrant in our dining room table?”

We’re used to telling simplified stories of ourselves and others. Dichotomous stories have become our templates: villain/hero, victim/victimizer, good/bad. However, our reality as humans is a lot more complex. In fact, biblical narratives do not rely on utopian, unidimensional characters. The stories told in the Bible direct us towards God’s perfect love, not to our own perfection. As humans, we embody positive and negative traits, and it is only by God’s redeeming grace that we are salvos.

When she pronounced herself anti-immigrant my story became muddied. Frankly, I wanted to pretend she had never uttered those words, but that conversation haunted me. She was a first-generation immigrant herself. How could she speak so vilely about immigrants? Renowned journalist María Hinojosa’s memoir Once I was You describes how her positionality as a 1.5 generation immigrant made her empathetic to the suffering of immigrants and keenly aware of the injustices committed against this group. But my relative, unlike María, had not developed a deeper sense of awareness or empathy. “Once you were them,” I told her, “How can you say all this?”

This article attempts to answer that question. My goal is to engage in an honest, even if difficult, reflection about why members of the Latino community, particularly immigrants, hold anti-immigrant notions. To accomplish this, in the following sections, I will hypothesize on the potential factors that contribute to the existence of an anti-immigrant rhetoric upheld by immigrants themselves.

Hypothesis #1: A distorted view of justice

Last year, when I first heard the rumors about the cancelation of student loans, my immediate reaction was anger. “I’ve paid thousands and sacrificed so much! Why do these people now get to have their loans canceled?” I thought.

My angry reaction about the cancelation of student debt and the belief that, “If I suffered, others must too” was selfish and absurd. In a way, we’ve normalized a warped vision of justice in which we believe that we are entitled to sustaining oppressive systems on the basis that those systems oppressed us. We tend to feel as though the suffering of others somehow justifies our own, but two injustices don’t equal justice. Your suffering doesn’t erase or ameliorate mine. We consider it unfair if others “get a pass” or “have it easier than us.” Some immigrants believe that if they had to go through all those troubles, so do others. We can accept God’s free gift of salvation but cannot tolerate when others are “freely rewarded.”

The parable of the unforgiving servant (Matthew 18:21-35) tells the story of a man who pled for mercy for not being able to pay his debt. After the King shows him mercy and forgives his debt, the man meets a fellow servant that owed him money, demands payment and throws him in jail when he could not pay. Many immigrants are pleading to be let in as they try to find refuge for a multitude of reasons, and some immigrants who are now living in the States refuse to welcome them. In a 2015 survey conducted by the American Values Atlas, 10% of immigrants who had lived in the States for a year or less thought that immigrants threatened traditional American customs and values, and 14% of immigrants who had resided in the U.S. for 20 years perceived newcomers as threats.

In times of financial hardship immigrants become economic scapegoats. “I hear they’re getting free health care,” she said trying to strengthen her case, “and I have to pay for mine out-of-pocket.”

Placing blame on the most socially dispossessed groups of people in our society during times of economic adversity is not uncommon. Perhaps immigrants that have been in this country for decades feel an added sense of frustration as they realize that the promise of the American Dream was not fulfilled in the ways they had imagined and la mentalidad cangrejo or “if I can’t have it, why should others,” prevails. Instead of binding together to help each other, we tear one another down and call that fair, but Christ points us in the direction of love, humility and compassion.

Hypothesis #2: Racism, colorism & nationalism

Although we might be more accustomed to thinking about the evils of racism within a white vs. POC framework, the truth is that racism and colorism also operate within our own communities. Being a Latin American immigrant doesn’t automatically place everyone on an “equal playing field;” racism and colorism don’t disappear in immigrant spaces and these corrupt ideologies often impact the experiences of immigrants in the country of destination.

Pew Research (2021) found that Latino-on-Latino discrimination is almost as common as discrimination experienced from other ethnic groups, and skin color and nativity seem to play a role; 41% of Latinos with darker skin report receiving unfair treatment by other Latinos, compared to 25% of lighter skin Latinos. Latinos born in Latin America are 9% more susceptible to suffering discrimination from other Latinos. Furthermore, close to 50% of Latinos reported hearing racially insensitive or racist remarks about other Latinos often (13%) or sometimes (35%).

In a skin tone stratified society that privileges fair skin, skin color also plays a role in the experiences encountered by immigrants. A recent report published by Freedom for Immigrants revealed that Black immigrants are six times more likely to be placed in solitary confinement; that although Black immigrants only make up 7% of all non-citizens in the U.S., they account for 20% of immigrants detained on criminal grounds. Indigenous peoples are also disproportionately affected by anti-asylum policies, face linguistic exclusion within immigration services, and are victims of anti-Indigeneity racism (Amnesty International 2021).  

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There are also elements of nationalism that play a role in Latino intragroup discrimination. If you are part of a Mexican family, you’ve probably heard many derogatory comments said by your family about Central Americans. The anti-Central-American attitudes predate the migrant caravans, but the influx of Central Americans traversing Mexico has strengthened feelings of hostility and rejection felt by Mexicans towards the Central American community. In fact, a 2019 survey conducted by Washington Post and Reforma found that 6 in 10 Mexicans (who lived in Mexico) considered migrants to be burdens and 55% supported deporting migrants. One would assume that Mexicans, many of whom have family members living abroad as immigrants, would welcome immigrants with open arms.

As a Church, our call is to welcome everyone, not only those who look like us, speak like us or have the same passport as us. Rev. Alexa Salvatierra reminds us that, “The Church is called to embody the boundless love of God by being a community of radical welcome to all God’s children.” Radical welcome embraces the wholeness of the guest and allows engagement in mutually life-giving relationships.

Hypothesis #3: Whiteness as an ideology that also infects immigrants of color

Whiteness is an ideology that can be upheld by white and non-white people alike; much like machismo, a male-centered ideology that is, on many occasions, supported and perpetuated by women. It is perplexing, but we must recognize that as social beings we breathe the same air; whiteness, in this country, is the polluted air we all breathe. Survival is the name of the game for many first-generation immigrants and “the desired proximity to whiteness and white acceptance, and the temptation to protect it once you have it, is a survival mechanism” (Vu). Perhaps the animosity felt by first-generation immigrants towards other fellow immigrants is birthed out of decades of contorting their identities in white-appeasing ways for the purpose of fitting into a society that views whiteness as normal and everything else, as undesirably foreign. 

People of color who uphold whiteness and by extension, immigrants who oppose immigration, seem to be preposterous and self-harming, but internalized oppression leaves us all exposed. In his seminal work, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire claims that the oppressor’s concern is to change the consciousness of the oppressed in order to convince them that oppression isn’t actually occurring, enabling conformity and uniformity. According to Frantz Fanon, the “breaking in” of the oppressed happens when the oppressed themselves admit “loudly and intelligibly the supremacy of the white man’s values” (The Wretched of the Earth). Internalized oppression occurs when we turn against ourselves, our families, and our communities and we take to heart and mind the lies of the enemy. This type of oppression doesn’t always manifest in loud and clear ways; instead, it lurks in our subconscious, inhabits our deepest thoughts, and expresses itself in the most unexpected ways. Whiteness contaminates our mind. We suck in this polluted air for so long that it becomes our norm, even as it destroys us. This is why people like my relative can have first-hand experiences, intimately know the stories, bear the oppression, and still become their community’s most avid persecutor.  

Final Thoughts

Sometimes the stranger becomes known, the foreign land becomes familiar, and the powerless gain power. Our circumstances may change, but our compassion, empathy and love for each other should not wane. Oppression, says Freire, “is necrophilic; it is nourished by love of death, not life” and God is the antithesis of death.

According to a Pew study, people’s religion greatly influences their views on abortion, the death penalty, and homosexuality, but not immigration. Similarly, a LifeWay Research poll found that only 12% of evangelicals think biblically about immigration, citing the media as more influential on their immigration views. There seems to be an obvious disconnect considering that the Bible speaks amply about immigration and references the foreigner extensively[3]. God doesn’t speak to us tangentially about immigrants; in fact, God commands us to welcome the foreigner (Leviticus 19:34), treat them justly (Deuteronomy 27:19; Exodus 22:21) and care for them (Matthew 25:35-40; Deuteronomy 10:18-19).   

Sinful ideologies can also infect the very same people we’re trying to defend, but our advocacy for the vulnerable should always be guided by God’s unwavering word and His love for immigrants.

“El inmigrante militante”

Aún huelo tu aroma en ese recoveco en el cual te escondiste. Aún siento tu sudor y escucho el pálpito de tu corazón al intentar cruzar desapercibidamente. Anhelabas con que ese espacio minúsculo, carente de luz, te condujera hacia tu nuevo hogar. Y ese hogar te dio tanto, pero también te quitó todo. Treinta años después, la casa de oro te construyó, y el corazón de piedra te formó. Ahora, tú vigilas la frontera, destruyendo sueños ajenos. Pero esos sueños también eran los tuyos. Formaste enemigos imaginarios, volcándote contra ti misma. Creíste la mentira del enemigo, sabiendo por experiencia propia la verdad. Recuerda, hija, el día en que tú saliste de Egipto.

About Dra. Meduri Soto

As an academic from el barrio, Dra. Meduri Soto strives to engage in scholarly work that honors and gives visibility to her community. Her faith drives her passion for justice as she seeks to reveal the ways in which certain language ideologies are constructed to operate unjustly against our communities. Her work acknowledges language as a powerful tool and promotes linguistic diversity in its different manifestations. Bicultural and bilingual identities are at the center of Dra. Meduri Soto’s work. She is a Spanish professor at Biola University where she teaches second language and heritage language learners. To learn more about her work, follow her on Instagram: @la.dra.itzel

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Footnotes

[1] See Octavio Esqueda’s What’s Your Immigration Status? Divine (2017)

[2] See Robert Chao Romero’s The Brown Church (2020). 

[3] For theological references that center immigration, consult the Mygration Christian Conference.

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A Language for the Pain

To borrow a line from Willie James Jennings, “The things I tell are precise accounts while being exact fabrications…everything I tell you, everything, is the truth. It is the truth in service of moving us to a new place of gathering.”

Mi Amiga

Her lowered head spoke as we sat in silence. So did her hands busily crumpling a napkin from lunch. I listened to mi amiga’s body language while she gathered her thoughts and braced to share her pain.

“This place is wearing on me, Professor Cartagena. I don’t know how much I can take. Some days I feel like I’m gonna loose it…like I’m going to explode.”

Mi amiga was silent for a moment. Her brown hands continued to work on the napkin.

“I can handle the big things—the in-your-face racism or sexism. They’re terrible, but they’re so big that people can’t pretend they didn’t happen, can’t pretend that you’re making something up. Does that make sense, Professor Cartagena?”

“It does, hermana. It does. I hear what you’re saying.”

“When students taped ‘Beaner’ posters on my dorm door, there was no hiding it, no denying it. When they dumped dried beans into my laundry, it was clear that they’d been racist and had violated my privacy and my roommate’s privacy—I mean, they went into our room and put the beans in my clothes hamper! And when white students post racist or sexist things about me on social media, my friends and I can take pictures. We have the evidence!” 

After briefly raising her head to look me in the eyes, mi amiga again gazed at the ground. Her napkin resembled a powder. The evidence of its existence was nearly gone.

“But you can’t screenshot the stares, Dr. Cartagena. You can’t make sure other people see the sideways glances and stink eyes. You can’t pause the question, ‘How did you get into this school?’ to make sure other people hear it. You can’t rewind and play the ‘You know we can date and mess around but can’t marry, right?’ question white males ask you to prove that they’re trying to exploit your ‘exotic’ body and sexuality. You can’t prove that these things happen. You don’t have the evidence, just your memory. And the pain…It’s so isolating, Professor Cartagena. And it adds up. These things add up. They take a toll on you, on your body and your mental health. Sometimes…sometimes the big racism is easier to face.”

A Language for the Pain: Microaggressions

Mi amiga was suffering. She’d experienced neon-light racism, the kind that makes skeptics about racism’s existence confident that, here, at last, is an instance of racism that they may, nay, must denounce. But if we listen to her words and her body, this form of racism wasn’t the greatest source of her pain. Something else had taken a toll, and still was.

What caused my friend to lower her head? What prompted her to dismantle a napkin? What overwhelmed her? What made her feel like she might explode? Stares, sideways glances, stink eyes, racist questions about ability, racist questions about gendered sexual exploitation—these were the culprits.

Race scholars call these culprits microaggressions. Harvard psychiatrist Chester Pierce introduced the term “microaggression” in his essay “Offensive Mechanisms” (1970). Reflecting on abusive behavior, Pierce writes:

Most offensive actions are not gross and crippling. They are subtle and stunning. The enormity of the complications they cause can be appreciated only when one considers that these subtle blows are delivered incessantly. Even though any single negotiation of offense can be considered of itself to be relatively innocuous, the cumulative effect to the victim and to the victimizer is of an unimaginable magnitude. Hence, the therapist is obliged to pose the idea that offensive mechanisms are usually a micro-aggression.

Pierce acknowledges that some abusive actions are glaringly gross and large scale. They include the neon-light racism and sexism mi amiga suffered. But not all abusive actions are this glaring or large. As Pierce notes, most aren’t. Instead, they are smaller slights and put-downs some people receive every day. Moreover, the cumulative effect of these smaller scale injustices takes a toll on victim and victimizer alike, leaving both bowed under these evils’ compounded weight.

In this and later work, Pierce develops the concept of microaggressions to account for subtle, quotidian forms of racism. He argues that antiracists “must not look for the gross and obvious [forms of racism]. The subtle, cumulative mini-assault is the substance of today’s racism.” Thus, Pierce encourages antiracists to look for the stares, sideways glances, stink eyes, and racist questions mi amiga suffered. He contends that “the relentless omnipresence of these noxious stimuli” fill the U.S.’s social fabric. “These cumulative, minor but incessant put-downs often remain psychopollutants in the social environment,” Pierce writes, “[and] their lingering intractability is a major contributor to the continuing traumatic stress” racialized minorities suffer individually and communally.

A Language for the Pain: Racial Battle Fatigue

Building upon Pierce’s work, race scholars such as William Smith study the toll that racial microaggressions enact upon racialized minorities like mi amiga. Within an interdisciplinary framework called “racial battle fatigue,” Smith and fellow investigators examined how the cumulative stress of microaggressions impacts Latin@s and Black Males in historically and predominately white schools. The following chart details the cause and stress responses they uncovered.

Smith, William A., et al. “Racial Battle Fatigue and the MisEducation of Black Men: Racial Microaggressions, Societal Problems, and Environmental Stress.” The Journal of Negro Education, vol. 80, no. 1, 2011, pp. 63–82.

Microaggressions cause physiological, psychological, and behavioral stress responses in racialized minorities. The twenty physiologically responses Smith records include headaches, hives, intestinal problems, and insomnia. Similarly, the sixteen psychological responses range from irritability to hopelessness. And the seventeen behavioral responses vary from overeating to procrastination.

In subsequent conversations, mi amiga mentioned suffering from headaches and insomnia. She told me that she struggled with frustration and feelings of helplessness. And wondered aloud why she’d grown impatient and struggled to do easy class assignments.

“Professor Cartagena, I feel like I’m falling apart. What’s wrong with me?”

“You’ve suffered greatly, hermana. And your body has kept the score.”      

Returning to Mi Amiga

Each time I spoke with mi amiga, a passage from James Baldwin’s “Uses of the Blues” came to mind. Reflecting on Black suffering, Baldwin writes:

You’ve seen these black men and women, these boys and girls; you’ve seen them on the streets. But I know what happened to them at the factory, at work, at home, on the subway, what they go through in a day, and the way they sort of ride with it. And it’s very, very tricky. It’s kind of a fantastic tightrope.…And I know that some improbable Wednesday, for no reason whatever, the elevator man or the doorman, the policeman or the landlord, or some little boy from the Bronx will say something, and it will be the wrong day to say it, the wrong moment to have it said to me; and God knows what will happen. I have seen it all, I have seen that much.

When mi amiga said, “Some days I feel like I’m gonna loose it…like I’m going to explode,” I thought, “I know what happened to you. I know what happened to me. I know what we go through in a day.” But I didn’t share these thoughts with her. I didn’t even recommend that she read Baldwin—at least not yet. Instead, I shared the words “microaggression” and “racial battle fatigue.” I offered her language that illuminated reality and empowered her to name her experience. Naming the causes of our festering wounds is an important step toward our healing.

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About Dr. Nathan Luis Cartagena

A son of the US South (Mom) and Puerto Rico (Dad), Dr. Cartagena is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Wheaton College (IL), where he teaches courses on race, justice, and political philosophy, and is a fellow in The Wheaton Center for Early Christian Studies. He serves as the faculty advisor for Unidad Cristiana, a student group working to enhance Christian unity and celebrate Latina/o cultures, a scholar-in-residence for World Outspoken, and a co-host for the forthcoming podcast From the Underside. He’s also writing a book on Critical Race Theory with IVP Academic.

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Is your Bible Anti-Black? Pt. 2

Editors Note: Throughout this essay, “black” and “white” refers to the colors, while “Black” and “White” refer to historic racialized communities.

שְׁחוֹרָ֤ה אֲנִי֙ וְֽנָאוָ֔ה בְּנ֖וֹת יְרֽוּשָׁלָ֑יִם כְּאָֽהֳלֵ֣י קֵדָ֔ר

כִּֽירִיע֖וֹת שְׁלֹמֹֽה

אַל־תִּרְאֻ֨נִי֙ שֶֽׁאֲנִ֣י שְׁחַרְחֹ֔רֶת שֶׁשְּׁזָפַ֖תְנִי הַשָּׁ֑מֶשׁ בְּנֵ֧י אִמִּ֣י נִֽחֲרוּ־בִ֗י שָׂמֻ֨נִי֙ נֹֽטֵרָ֣ה אֶת־הַכְּרָמִ֔ים כַּרְמִ֥י שֶׁלִּ֖י לֹ֥א נָטָֽרְתִּי

—Song of Songs 1:5-6

This is essay two of two for the mini-series “Is Your Bible Anti-Black.” In the first essay, I engaged renowned Old Testament scholar Wilda Gafney’s critique of how the King James Version renders Song of Solomon 1:5. Whereas the original Hebrew literally reads “black am I and beautiful,” the KJV’s translators choose to write “I am black, but comely [beautiful].” Reflecting on this glaring difference, Gafney argues that the KJV’s translators “could not see blackness as beautiful, and so their whole identity [as self-identified white men] went into that one conjunction saying, ‘in spite of being Black, she’s all right.’ But that is not what the text said. And so that was the first place where I understood that people make choices when they translate [the Bible], and those choices affect what we hear [from the text].” The KJV’s rendering is wrong, Gafney contends, and layers anti-Black racist ideas onto the biblical page. Accepting Gafney’s argument, I extended her work by detailing the KJV’s cultural and racial context and noting how modern versions compare to it.

In this essay, I return to Song of Solomon to offer an interpretation of verses five and six. I again think with Dra. Gafney, following her lead as I listen to this ancient Song’s textual rhythms. Join us.

Setting the Stage: Song of Solomon 1:1-4

Song of Solomon shocks its readers. Whereas the song never explicitly mentions God, it repeatedly and exuberantly details human love. And this is not the love of mere friends. As Gafney observes, the text focuses on “the love of two people expressed sensuously, sexually.” More specifically, the song celebrates “the love of and between two black bodies—offered as scripture and revelation.”

The first black body the song introduces is the text’s lead woman. She is the focus of our passage and essay. And she immediately makes her romantic desires known.

May he kiss me with the kisses of his mouth!
For your love is sweeter than wine.

Your oils have a pleasing fragrance,
Your name is like purified oil;
Therefore the young women love you.
 Draw me after you and let’s run together!
The king has brought me into his chambers. (NASB, vv. 2-4)

Intoxicating kisses, fragrant oils, an alluring name, romantic flight, and a royal bed chamber—these are the Song’s opening themes.

The beloved declares her ballad publicly. She does not conceal her sensuous love. For immediately after we read her love song, an enthusiastic, supportive chorus enters the text, greeting us and the beloved with a celebration of her imminent sexual union.

We will rejoice in you and be joyful;
We will praise your love more than wine.
Rightly do they love you. (NASB, v. 4)

All are joyful. All rejoice. All celebrate a woman’s sensuality and sexuality. All are elated about the beloved’s foreshadowed lovemaking with her beloved.

A Beautiful Black Woman: Song of Solomon 1:5

This women that the chorus celebrates as rightly loved, what does she look like? Verse five tells us.

I am black and beautiful,
You daughters of Jerusalem,
Like the tents of Kedar,
Like the curtains of Solomon. (NASB, v. 5)

As noted above, the Hebrew text literally reads “black am I and beautiful” (שְׁחוֹרָ֤ה אֲנִי֙ וְֽנָאוָ֔ה). The order matters. As Gafney writes, the verse “emphasizes [the woman’s] blackness by opening with it.” Gafney makes a related point elsewhere: When describing the woman—the one her beloved declares the “most beautiful among women” (v.8)— “[b]lack is the first word.”

Like her beloved, the Song’s lead woman champions that black is beautiful. “I am black and beautiful.” The word “and” translates the text’s vav conjunction וְֽ at the start of וְֽנָאוָ֔ה. This basic conjunction stresses blackness’s inherent beauty. Indeed, Rabbi Marcia Falk’s translation conveys the text’s tone: “Yes, I am black! And radiant/O city women watching me.”

The Song’s lead women again highlights her blackness in verse five by comparing it to the tents of Kedar, or Qedar, and Solomon’s curtains. This analogy, Gafney notes, reveals that the women’s body “is blacker than your average brown-to-black ancient Afro-Asiatic person.” The reference to Qedar tells readers that the woman “is black as a black-haired goat.” As Gafney explains, the Song’s woman is “as black as the black goats’ hair tents woven from the famed goats of Qedar renowned for their beautiful black coats in antiquity.” Gafney’s use of “renowned” is important. As Old Testament scholar Aubrey Buster notes, the Qedar’s tents and Solomon’s curtains “were considered to be striking and beautiful” in the woman’s culture. Hence, the Song’s lead woman affirms that her blackness is strikingly beautiful, worthy of renown and communal adulation like Qeadar’s tents and Solomon’s curtains. Thus, verse five starts and ends by emphasizing the woman’s beautiful black body.

Many commentators and translators miss verse five’s celebration of blackness. Gafney laments this trend among translators:

[A] myriad of bible translators continuing into modernity persist with “I am black/dark but beautiful/comely/lovely.” Blackness and beauty cannot occupy the same space in the imaginations so they cannot occupy the same space in their translations, no matter what the text actually says. (emphasis added)

Numerous translators render verse five’s opening vav conjunction “but,” not “and.” This interpretive choice injects an aesthetic distance between blackness and beauty. Nothing in verse five requires this distance. Moreover, and more important: the conjunctive-vav’s common “and” meaning and the positive, culturally loaded invocations of beautiful black goats, tents, and curtains provide immediate linguistic and contextual grounds against this disjunctive, distancing reading.

One respected Old Testament scholar overlooks the previous two points. Tremper Longman argues that readers face a choice at verse five: “Should we translate the waw as a conjunctive ‘and’ or a disjunctive ‘but”?” For Longman, the answer is simple. “The context is actually quite clear. She is not happy with her darker-than-normal skin, so the disjunctive makes sense.” The contrast between Longman’s reading and those of Gafney and Falk is striking. So is Longman’s silence about the rest of verse five. He says nothing about Qeadar’s tents and Solomon’s curtains. It’s as if they weren’t there.

Gafney, Buster, and Falk read verse five as celebrating blackness and its beauty. Longman reads it as lamenting “darker-than-normal skin.” If verse five doesn’t’ drive Longman’s interpretive decision and commentary, what does? His reading of verse six.

Sun Gazed: Song of Solomon 1:6

Desire and joy fill verses two through five. A choir praises the woman after her opening declaration of longing to be with her beloved. Then the woman celebrates her blackness. She is black and beautiful like Qeadar’s famous tents and Solomon’s splendid curtains. Given the prevalence of parallelism in Hebrew songs and poetry, we might expect the chorus to support the woman’s celebration of blackness with their own hymn of praise. But the text doesn’t meet this expectation. Instead, it introduces the Song’s first rebuke.

The translation I’ve used throughout renders verse six thus:  

Do not stare at me because I am dark,
For the sun has tanned me.
My mother’s sons were angry with me;
They made me caretaker of the vineyards,
But I have not taken care of my own vineyard. (NASB, emphasis in translation)

This translation doubly obscures verse six’s first sentence. The word translated “dark” carries the connotation of “black” from verse five. Likewise, the sentence contrasts people’s staring/looking with the sun’s staring/looking. The KJV captures both details: “Look not upon me, because I am black, because the sun hath looked upon me.” Still, the word “stare” better expresses the Hebrew meaning involved in the woman’s rebuke-saturated command to the daughters of Jerusalem. Gafney writes, “It seems the city-women can’t keep their eyes off of her. They keep staring, looking her up and down.” These stares aim to pierce, penetrate, and judge. Again Gafney:

The shout out to the daughters of Jerusalem is an acknowledgement that our bodies are always under scrutiny. We are weighed and measured, consumed and labeled acceptable or defective in a glance. The black beauty Shahorah—we can call her Ebony, Raven, Jet or Onyx—Shahorah says you call me black like that’s an insult. Let me tell you, I am black, as silky-black as the luxurious coat of a Kedari goat, like mink, only blacker.

The Song’s lead woman told the daughters of Jerusalem that she was black and beautiful in verse five. Now she tells them, Gafney writes, “don’t stare at me because my beautiful black skin has gotten even darker while I bask in the sun.”

The sun gazed upon the Song’s black woman and made her darker, gave her a tan. Some modern readers assume that the text’s implied talk of tanning entails that the Song’s lead woman is but a white woman with a tan. This reading projects a white normative gaze onto the text and ignores verse five’s repeated discussion of rich blackness. It also elides the truth that black-skinned people tan. Gafney discusses personally suffering this elision.

I am regularly asked to give an account of my presumptively alternate biology, imagined to be fundamentally different from the interrogator’s own normative experience of being human.

“Can you tan?”

“Do you burn?”

I am expected to answer when questioned. To explain myself and my race. Public access to my body is unquestioned.

And deeply entangled with the notion of otherness is the notion of beauty.

The false assumption that Black people don’t tan which regularly confronts Gafney also occupies a place in study bibles. As Gafney recalls, “Some say...doesn’t verse 6 say that she is sunburned, therefore, she can’t be black – that’s what the notes in my study bible says.” For some readers, “being black and sunburned [is] impossible, as impossible as being black and beautiful” (emphasis in original). Even Tremper Longman joins Gafney in rejecting the assumption that the Song’s lead female is a tanned or sunburned white woman. “The woman was Semitic and likely had a dark complexion to start with. The darkness about which she complains is not her natural skin color but a tan or burn.”

Yet the differences between Longman’s and Gafney’s readings remain sharp. Longman says that the woman “likely had a dark complexion to start with.” Gafney, following verse five’s emphasis on the woman’s blackness, highlights that the woman was black and “revels in the blackness of her skin.” Longman says that the woman “complains” about her “tan or burn.” Though Gafney acknowledges that “the woman in the text ruined her beautiful black Qedari complexion with a sunburn,” Gafney never says that the woman complains about her sunburn. Instead, Gafney says that the woman “embraces the kiss of the sun” while denouncing the Jerusalem women’s glares and how her family treated her. The women’s glares are “reminder[s] that everyone won’t look at [black skinned people] and see the glory that God created.” These glares carry negative class associations with field labor. And her family’s mistreatment of her has left the Song’s lead woman unable to care for her own vineyard—for herself.

Let’s unpack the previous point. Verse six’s second half reads:

My mother’s sons were angry with me;
They made me caretaker of the vineyards,
But I have not taken care of my own vineyard. (NASB)

Though the woman claims her mother, she doesn’t claim her brothers. They are “my mother’s sons.” Similarly, although the woman says her mother’s sons were angry with her, she doesn’t explain why. The text doesn’t say she did anything wrong. It does, however, stress that these sons made her care for the vineyards. The joy of agency is missing; the cruelty of coercion is present instead.   

This is not the only time the Song’s lead woman describes her “brothers” controlling her body. In the Song’s final chapter, we read them saying:

We have a little sister,
And she has no breasts;
What shall we do for our sister
On the day when she is spoken for?

If she is a wall,
We will build on her a battlement of silver;
But if she is a door,
We will barricade her with planks of cedar. (NASB, 8:8-9)

In these verses, men alone speak. We do not hear the Song’s lead woman discussing her body. We do hear the men referring to the woman’s genitals as a “wall” (i.e., premarital chastity) and a “door,” a common Near Eastern image that alluded to a prostitute. As Gafney writes, the “brothers” work “to constrain and confine her.”

And this male coercion returns us to it’s first appearance in the song, verse six. For there we read that the lead woman has not cared for her own vineyard—her own body. Because her “brothers” forced her to labor outdoors, the sun burned her. It harmed her beautiful black body. And in act of resistance, the woman rebukes the Jerusalem’s daughters for trying to inflict similar pain by staring at her. She is black. She is beautiful. She is unashamed of herself and refuses to internalize negative class associations with field labor. And she is tending to her vineyard, she is loving her body and her beloved. “It is time,” Gafney writes, “to tend our own vines and their sweet, luscious, intoxicating fruit.”

Conclusion

Let’s consider one final contrast between Longman’s and Gafney’s readings. Longman argues that “In spite of some ambiguities, [Song of Song 1:5-6] is clear about two matters: (1) the woman considers her dark skin unattractive, and (2) her dark skin is not her natural skin color but rather the result of a tan.” Both claims run afoul of verse five’s celebration of blackness, which verse six never negates. Taken together, Gafney argues, these verses teach that “Black is beautiful. Blackness is beauty. Blackness is worshipful. All blackness is divine. It is the imprint of the holy darkly radiant God in whose image we are created.”

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About Dr. Nathan Luis Cartagena

A son of the US South (Mom) and Puerto Rico (Dad), Dr. Cartagena is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Wheaton College (IL), where he teaches courses on race, justice, and political philosophy, and is a fellow in The Wheaton Center for Early Christian Studies. He serves as the faculty advisor for Unidad Cristiana, a student group working to enhance Christian unity and celebrate Latina/o cultures, a scholar-in-residence for World Outspoken, and a co-host for the forthcoming podcast From the Underside. He’s also writing a book on Critical Race Theory with IVP Academic.

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The Patriarchy and the PhD: What Female Faculty Experience in the Classroom

Written by J.N.T

He said he thought about killing me. He said it with serenity and certainty. You know the ways your voice might crack and quiver when delivering a shameful confession? His didn’t. It was as though the thought of killing me gave him peace. I smiled. I said, “good thing you didn’t,” and I giggled.

I was alone in a classroom with him. I was standing behind a mobile podium;

I can push it into him and make a run for it.

How many steps would it take me to get to the door?

I have heels on, what if I trip and fall while making a run for it?

Can I use my phone? No, it’s in my purse and not within reach.

I don’t want to die. I have a young son, and the tragic murder of his mother would scar him for life.

“God help me,” I prayed. I slowly removed my heels.   

None of the workshops, trainings, or educational resources I completed prepared me for this moment. I only knew that I was alone with a student who daydreamt about killing me, and I had to “diffuse” the situation. I pretended his words were insignificant, his shouting was normal, and his foul language was ordinary. My words to him were careful, soothing and endearing. Thirty minutes later, he thanked me for listening and walked out. 

It took my mind about twelve hours to register what had happened, and it did so in my sleep. I left that encounter feeling physically exhausted, but not much else. It was as though my brain couldn’t immediately process what had transpired, and it became numbed. Then, in the middle of the night, I dreamt that he came into my classroom and shot me dead. “It was just a dream,” I thought. A few hours later, as I walked into campus, my body started shaking and tears flooded my eyes. My body had finally woken up, and it was terrified.

Women face disproportionately more violence in the workplace as compared to men, and the vast majority of perpetrators are men[1]. This is, in part, due to unequal power relations that position men as the ones with the most power. Women that work in accommodation and food services, retail trade, manufacturing, health care, and social assistance are the most vulnerable to workplace harassment[2]. In most situations, there is a power imbalance where, not surprisingly, the individual with less power is often the victim and the individual with less power in our society tends to be female. This type of harassment that comes from the “top-down” is well-documented and well-researched.

Academic contrapower harassment (ACPH) is a term that I recently came across as I attempted to find solace in research after another male student became hostile, defiant, verbally aggressive, and threatening. According to the article Women Faculty Distressed: Descriptions and Consequences of Academic Contrapower Harassment (2016), ACPH “occurs when someone with seemingly less power in an educational setting (e.g., a student) harasses someone more powerful (e.g., a professor).” In this study, women faculty reported significantly higher levels of stress-related illness, anxiety, difficulty concentrating, and wanting to quit as a result of intimidation, bullying, and harassment from students.

Check, check, check and check.

As I was reading this article, I couldn’t help but notice that the findings resonated almost in identical form with my own experience. My trauma manifested itself through insomnia, low appetite, being hyperaware of my surroundings, and feeling tremendously anxious in the classroom. Violence has this effect on humans. It disturbs your mind, harms your wellbeing, destabilizes your sense of security and contaminates safe spaces.  

Chavella T. Pittman[3] found that women of color experienced significant defiance to their authority as well as threats and harassment from white male students. Although the term academic contrapower harassment suggests that women faculty hold all the power when compared to students, Pittman indicates that female educators of color experience their classrooms with power, as faculty members, and powerlessness, as women of color; meaning that in a patriarchal racist structure, white male students preserve and react to women faculty within the conferred power they possess in broader society. This too echoes my experience at a predominantly white institution (PWI). My student aggressors have all been white males. The students who have made intimidating comments, behaved defiantly in class and submitted appeals to contest a grading decision have all been white and have all been male. In a recent grade appeal request, submitted over Christmas break, a male student who failed to submit nineteen assignments and decided not to take the final exam, emailed me two weeks after the semester concluded, demanding an explanation as to why he failed the course. In his appeal he wrote that I was “non-responsive” to his emails, referring to the fact that I had not immediately responded to the email he wrote to me while I was on Christmas vacation.

Male students don’t often consciously target female professors; they are not telling themselves, “I can harass this professor because she’s a woman”. This behavior, not frequently displayed towards male authority figures, is a manifestation of their socialization. Their status as men has been symbolically and socially elevated to the extent that aggression towards any women seems acceptable, and this narrative is reinforced in Christian spaces. I worked in public institutions for seven years before being employed at a Christian university, and I experience significantly more harassment from evangelical male students. In The Making of Biblical Womanhood (2020), Beth Allison Barr explains that women’s subordination “became embedded in the heart of evangelical faith. To be a Christian woman was to be under the authority of men” (154). Many church traditions ban women from teaching, preaching, and mentoring male adults. I wasn’t raised in the church, so when a pastor at the first church I attended told me that I couldn’t teach Spanish to missionaries because there would be male students in that group, I laughed. I genuinely thought he was joking. My smile soon disappeared after I realized that he wasn’t trying to be funny, and that he preferred to send a group of English monolingual speakers to Latin America with no linguistic knowledge of the Spanish language than to submit his male congregants to the teachings of a woman – a woman with a Ph.D. and extensive pedagogical training. Many Christian students attend these kinds of churches, and these are the messages that have been instilled in them since childhood. It is not a coincidence that evangelical male students undermine their female professors and ground their aggressions in the evangelical faith. After all, “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing Christians that oppression is godly. That God ordained some people, simply because of their sex or skin color (or both), as belonging under the power of other people. That women’s subordination is central to the gospel of Christ” (Barr 173). 

Most recently, a student I repeatedly asked to leave the classroom, after he became verbally aggressive, assured me that I was just “being too emotional,” a phrase that seemed pulled directly from the How to be a Sexist Manual. These aggressions are, of course, psychologically disturbing, but they are also very time consuming. I wrote numerous emails, recounted the details of the encounter to several individuals across campus, and had at least six meetings. I spent approximately ten hours actively dealing with this incident, hours that were taken away from class preparation, grading, and research.

Studies have found that women of color faculty have heavier teaching loads compared to male and white female professors, are expected to engage in considerably more nurturing service responsibilities (Pittman 2010), and full-time female faculty earn $18,370 less yearly compared to their male counterparts[4]. Furthermore, research suggests that college students have an unconscious bias against female professors and faculty of color that is reflected on student evaluations. In a 2015 experiment published by the Innovative Higher Education journal,[5] students rated online professors with a male name significantly higher than those with female names, regardless of the actual identity of the professor. Students tend to comment on the personality, appearance and competence of female instructors to a much higher degree than that of their male teachers. Studies have also revealed that students rate white faculty more positively than faculty of color and believe that faculty of color are less credible (Reid 2010[6]; Hendrix 1998[7]). This poses a disadvantage to female professors of color because student evaluations are commonly taken into consideration for hiring, promotion, tenure, and other career opportunities, despite the overwhelming evidence of bias.

Many of the disparities that women of color face in academia and beyond remain unquestioned because they are normal practices of white-centered patriarchal organizations. The institution of higher education was built as a space for white men. Seventy-six percent of all faculty in institutions of higher education are white[8] and at Christian colleges this number is even higher – 83.8% (CCCU 2021). More strikingly, Latinas comprise only 3% of all university professors in the United States (NCES 2018). Universities claim to have a desire to diversify their faculty body, but seem unwilling to make institutional changes that create environments where all faculty can thrive and feel safe.

Academia is supposed to be a place driven by sound research and Christian academics should be concerned with engaging in scholarship that helps human beings flourish. When faculty members and administrators of faith are presented with convincing data, produced by a reputable study, that women are being disadvantaged and disrespected in the workplace, the next logical step is to inquire into what can be done to improve their experiences. However, this course of action is too rational and too unfavorable for patriarchal structures. I witnessed this phenomenon unfold when a group of researchers shared their findings of an institution’s gender climate study.  A white male immediately interjected and asked if these findings were truly representative of the female faculty experience at large. Then, a woman complained that her experience had not been included in the study and therefore, claimed that the findings were incomplete. The whole meeting was spent explaining the research methods used in the study and convincing certain people of the findings’ legitimacy. Actionable steps were not discussed. The study did not fit the ideals of patriarchy and as a result, it was dismissed.  

Women’s accounts are often disregarded, even when the research supports their claims. An absurd amount of time is spent questioning the veracity of their experiences to the point of exhaustion. Men are often not held accountable because women are not believed. In many instances, women prefer not to report workplace harassment because of the tiresome amount of time it will take for the claim to be considered and the fear of being alienated, fired or being blamed as the victim.[9]

“Why does this commonly happen to me?” I said aloud to a supervisor as I shared details of an encounter I had with a student who became threatening. In my heart I knew the answer, but I was seeking some empathy from a female leader. Her response shocked me: “Maybe it’s because you set boundaries.” She theorized that male students often turned violent towards me because I establish firm boundaries, do not let their misconduct go unnoticed and the result is that I escalate the situation. Following this explanation, I (the victim) had done something to provoke the student (aggressor). Victim blaming reinforces sexist notions that women are responsible for men’s violent actions. Admittedly, for a brief second, I entertained this thought. I’m aware of the literature that speaks about victim blaming as a product of patriarchy. I’ve counseled other women on many occasions not to blame themselves for the abuse that was inflicted on them, yet I entertained this notion, if even for a brief second. Why? People tend to be more accepting of these sexist rationales when given by people of authority. If a person that society regards as intelligent, wise, and ethical is making such claims, these statements become more compelling. Consequently, evangelical leaders (men and women) have a higher degree of responsibility to counsel women in ways that do not reinforce misogynistic notions that will retraumatize women. Also, it is often these individuals who have the authority to ensure that the abuser is held accountable.

I was told that the university had to ensure that the student who assaulted me was cared for, and that the institution embraced a non-punitive model of discipline. At this point, I was frustrated, and I replied, “That’s great. And how is the university caring for me? What consequences will this student face for his behavior? How is the university keeping him accountable and deterring him from committing further acts of aggression?” Accountability is not vengeance. Discipline is not assault. Caring for someone does not mean ignoring their wrongdoings. Spiritual language is often utilized as a method to reinforce male dominance and female culpability. Grace is code for “overlook what was done to you,” forgiveness signals “do not seek justice,” and compassion is equivalent to, “brush it off, they were just having a bad day.” The message: if you don’t overlook what was done to you, if you do seek justice and you refuse to just brush it off, then you are not graceful, forgiving or compassionate, so you must be a bad Christian woman.

Aggression against women extends to all spheres of society, and women of color bear the double burden of racism and sexism. Evangelical leaders – both men and women – commonly emphasize female submission and rigid gender roles. We must understand the harm that this messaging is causing in the lives of countless women and realize how this rhetoric is being used to inflict violence on women. Jesus empowered women; he did not come to this earth to “put them in their place,” treat them as inferior to men, or reinforce the gender inequality present in Jewish society. Jesus disrupted gendered expectations, and in so doing, showed the love of God to these women. There are many “sympathetic” leaders who simply shake their heads and cross their arms. They believe that Jesus holds both men and women in the same esteem, but this belief is not acted upon – it does not materialize. What value does a belief actually carry if it is not grounded in action? In my experience, the policies were inexistent, the process was unclear, and the consequences were vague. The policies that did exist were there to protect the “integrity” of the aggressor, rather than ensuring the safety of the victim. Accountability is crucial and institutions must also be held accountable for their inaction.

A female colleague told me, “I don’t have much power,” speaking as to why she had remained silent for so many years about her own experiences. It was the same woman that was now advocating for me. While many of us may not hold significant power in our respective spaces, we do hold collective power. This is an invitation to action. This is an invitation to utilize our collective voice. Por nosotras. Por nuestras hermanas.

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Footnotes

[1] Institute for Women’s Policy Research and U.S. Department of Justice, Office on Violence Against Women.

[2] Center for American Progress

[3] Race and Gender Oppression in the Classroom: The Experiences of Women Faculty of Color with White Male Students (2010).

[4] Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (2018).

[5] MacNell, L., Driscoll, A. & Hunt, A.N. What’s in a Name: Exposing Gender Bias in Student Ratings of Teaching

[6] Reid, Landon D. The Role of Perceived Race and Gender in the Evaluation of College Teaching on RateMyProfessors.com  

[7] Hendrix, Katherine G. Students Perceptions of the Influence of Race on Professor Credibility.

[8] National Center for Education Statistics (2017).

[9] U.S. Equal Opportunity Commission (2015).

Is Your Bible Anti-Black

Editors Note: Throughout this essay, “black” refers to the color while “Black” refers to the historic racialized community.

“Our theology never comes from a blank space.””

— Elizabeth Conde-Frazier, Atando Cabos

“The reclamation of racial beauty in the sixties stirred these thoughts, made me think about the necessity for the claim…Why did [Black beauty] need public articulation to exist?””

— Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye

Christians are people of the Book, the library of sacred texts that we call the Bible. The Old and New Testaments contain the inspired word of God. They are, as the apostle Paul writes, God-breathed (2 Timothy 3:16). And so, they are “useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting, and training in righteousness.”

Yet none of these inspired texts was God-breathed through a modern language. Each was originally etched in Hebrew, Greek, or Aramaic—not Mandarin, Arabic, Portuguese, or Spanish. Unless you read the former ancient languages, you encounter the sacred page through the veil of translation.  

But even translators of the original biblical languages encounter scripture through a veil. What New Testament scholar C. René Padilla writes about interpreters applies to translators: “Interpreters do not live in a vacuum. They live in concrete historical situations, in particular cultures. From their cultures they derive not only their language but also patterns of thought and conduct, methods of learning, emotional reactions, values, interests and goals.” Translators are socially situated readers and interpreters. Their contexts and commitments—to say nothing of character—infuse their handling of Scripture. As Padilla argues, “whenever interpreters approach a particular biblical text they can do so only from their own perspective. This gives rise to a complex, dynamic two-way interpretive process depicted as a ‘hermeneutical circle’, in which interpreters and text are mutually engaged.”

Recognizing these dynamics, New Testament scholar Esau McCaulley calls for Bible publishers to hire multi-racialized and multi-ethnic translation teams. McCaulley writes:

I’ve discovered that people of color and women have rarely led or participated in Bible translation. On one hand, this doesn’t trouble me much. It is hard to mess up the story of the Exodus, distort the message of the prophets or dismantle the story of Jesus. It is all there in every English translation.

On the other, I believe it matters who translates the Bible, and that more diverse translation committees could inspire fresh confidence among Christians of color….

The insight, experience and skills of female scholars might open our eyes to nuances that a committee of all men might miss. Christians for whom English is a second language might highlight ways in which our word choice is unclear. Similarly, [B]lack Christians may call to mind neglected aspects of the text. 

McCaulley supports his call for diverse translation teams by considering English translations of Exodus 12:38, beginning with the King James Version. When Israel leaves Egypt, “a mixed multitude went up also with them” (KJV). McCaulley notes that “Nearly all scholars agree that the original Hebrew meant to highlight that an ethnically diverse group of people left Egypt with the Jewish people. This group could have included Egyptians and other ethnic groups, such as the Cushites.” So, whereas “The translation ‘mixed multitude’ isn’t necessarily wrong,” McCaulley argues, “It simply does not communicate the power of this simple verse in a way that would be understood by those reading today. If I were translating the passage, I would say that ‘an ethnically diverse crowd’ went up out of Egypt.”

McCaulley’s alternative translation is a mild corrective of the KJV. He does not deem it wrong nor unfit for its time. Instead, McCaulley argues that it and modern English translations that speak of a “mixed multitude” leaving Egypt (e.g., ESV) neglect linguistic frequencies that carry important conceptual and contextual insights for today’s English readers.

I affirm McCaulley’s call for racial, ethnic, and gender diversity in translation teams and his proposed alternative translation of Exodus 12. I’d like to extend both by arguing that anti-Black racist ideas have crept into English Bible translations. To see what I mean, let’s turn our attention to the King James’s translation of a verse in Song of Solomon.

Is Blackness Beautiful?

Song of Solomon begins on an exuberant note. After noting that it is the song of songs and belongs to Solomon, the song’s primary female figure professes her enthusiasm to be with her beloved.

Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth: for thy love is better than wine.

Because of the savour of thy good ointments thy name is as ointment poured forth, therefore do the virgins love thee.

Draw me, we will run after thee: the king hath brought me into his chambers…(vv. 2-4)

A supportive, enthusiastic chorus enters the text to celebrate this highly anticipated joining. “We will be glad and rejoice in thee, we will remember thy love more than wine: the upright love thee” (v. 4). All is right. All rejoice.

The text turns to the female’s first self-description. Here’s the original Hebrew, reading right to left:

שְׁחוֹרָ֤ה אֲנִי֙ וְֽנָאוָ֔ה בְּנ֖וֹת יְרוּשָׁלִָ֑ם כְּאָהֳלֵ֣י קֵדָ֔רכִּירִיע֖וֹת

Here’s how KJV reads: “I am black, but comely [beautiful], O ye daughters of Jerusalem, as the tents of Kedar, as the curtains of Solomon” (v. 5) Those who read Hebrew will recognize that the KJV has failed its readers.

The failure comes in verse five’s opening. The KJV’s translation team renders “שְׁחוֹרָ֤ה אֲנִי֙ וְֽנָאוָ֔ה” as “I am black, but comely [beautiful].” But as Old Testament scholar Wilda Gafney observes, this translation choice is grammatically impossible. The conjunction וְֽ at the start of וְֽנָאוָ֔ה means “and”—not “but.” Moreover, as Gafney argues, because there isn’t a “but” in Hebrew, authors writing in Hebrew must compile “a bunch of stuff to make a disjunction”; they can’t simply use a conjunction that means “and.”

Gafney realized these linguistic truths as a child. From a young age, she loved learning languages and desired a more direct relationship with the biblical text. As she compared the Hebrew and KJV, she saw “it was wrong in the King James Bible that I grew up with, where it said, ‘I am black but beautiful.’” This sparked a second realization:

The people translating [that passage] could not see blackness as beautiful, and so their whole identity [as self-identified white men] went into that one conjunction saying, ‘in spite of being Black, she’s all right.’ But that is not what the text said. And so that was the first place where I understood that people make choices when they translate [the Bible], and those choices affect what we hear [from the text].     

McCaulley’s alternative translation of Exodus 12:38 mildly corrects the KJV’s. Gafney’s alternative translation of Song of Solomon 1:5 is a damning corrective of the KJV. It highlights that the KJV’s rendering is wrong—and layers anti-Black racist ideas onto the biblical page.

The KJV’s Racial Context

Gafney claims that the KJV’s translation team injected their anti-Black sentiments into the KJV. For many, this claim is jarring. Congregations that use the KJV rarely discuss the translation’s racial context (or content). The same holds for academic treatments of the text. David Lyle Jeffery’s, Alister McGrath’s, and David Norton’s books on the KJV say nothing about the text’s racialized context (or content). None have an index entry on “race,” “whiteness,” or “white supremacy”—let alone a sustained discussion about the anti-Black translation of Song of Solomon 1:5. Though from different parts of the globe—Canada, Ireland, and England, respectively—none of these racialized white authors ensured their books addressed the KJV’s racial dimensions. What Gafney noticed as a youth, they overlook in their mature academic writing.

Given these ecclesiastical and scholarly omissions, a word about the KJV’s racial context is in order. Let us consider two aspects of this context: international anti-Blackness and anti-Blackness in contemporary English literature and theatre.

Starting in the fifteenth century, a racial scale that prioritized “whiteness” informed European imperialism. The first recorded slave auction makes this clear. Reflecting on the year 1444, Portugal’s royal chronicler Gomes Eanes de Azurara writes:

[On] the next day, which was the 8th of the month of August, very early in the morning, by reason of the heat, the seamen began to make ready their boats, and to take out those captives, and carry them on shore, as they were commanded. And these, placed all together in that field, were a marvelous sight; for amongst them were some white enough, fair to look upon, and well proportioned; others were less white like mulattoes; others again were as black as Ethiops [Ethiopians], and so ugly, both in features and in body, as almost to appear (to those who saw them) the images of a lower hemisphere.

All depicted are slaves; not all are equal. Some are “white,” and therefore “fair to look upon, and well proportioned.” Others are “less white like mulattoes,” and, apparently, deserve little discussion. Others still are “black,” and hence “ugly”—as if they had come from Hell itself. Here is a scale that advances white supremacy and anti-Blackness.

European colonizers repackaged and disseminated Azurara’s scale as they constructed pigmentocracies—governments for and by those deemed “white.” Historian C.R. Boxer notes that, although Portugal and Spain respectively granted mesticos and mestizos a positive colonial status, “both Iberian empires remained essentially a ‘pigmentocracy’ . . . based on the conviction of white racial, moral, and intellectual superiority—just as did their Dutch, English, and French successors.” Race scholar and sociologist Howard Winant similarly observes that these European colonial powers believed they were “the whites, the masters, the true Christians.” And historian Winthrop Jordan succinctly captures this trend among the British, highlighting that, during the seventeenth century, English colonists treated “Christian, free, English, and white” as metonyms. For them, each word was equivalent.

The racialized language Jordan details has antecedents in English literature that’s contemporary with the KJV, which was published in 1611. In 1578, the widely read English travel writer George Best offered a damning account of “the Ethiopians blacknesse.” While discussing his Artic voyage, Best argued that, because Ham had sex on the Ark, God cursed Ham and his descendants to be “so blacke and loathsome that it might remain a spectacle of disobedience to all the worlde.” Thus, Best championed a racialized curse theory which linked Blackness to ugliness and hypersexuality. Similar anti-Black ideas populate William Shakespeare’s plays.

The first Black character in Shakespeare’s plays is Aaron, the evil, deceptive, hypersexual, murderous Moor in Titus Andronicus (1594). The most famous Black character in Shakespeare’s plays is also a Moor: Othello (1604). Iago, Othello’s ensign, despises the Black Othello for marrying the White Desdemona. “For that I do suspect the lusty Moor/Hath leaped into my seat,” Iago claims. And while talking to Desdemona’s father, Iago says Othello is “an old black ram/…tupping your white ewe.” Iago later tricks Othello into believing that Desdemona has betrayed him. Before Othello kills Desdemona, he cries, “Her name that was fresh/as Dian’s visage, is now begrim’d and black/As mine own face.” After Othello learns that he unjustly killed his wife, Emilia, Desdemona’s maidservant, declares: “O! the more angel she. And you the blacker devil.” The Tempest’s (1611) Caliban also recapitulates the conceptual linking of Blackness and Satan that filled European theatre. Caliban is the bastard child of an African witch from a “vile race” and a demon. Caliban is also hypersexual.

Other English playwriters also employed anti-Black ideas and images. Ben Jonson’s The Masque of Blackness (1605) is especially important for our discussion. Commissioned by King James I, Jonson’s play was the most expensive production made in London. Premiering in the luxurious Whitehall Palace, the play is the story of twelve ugly African princesses of the river god Niger. The princesses learn that they can be “made beautiful” if they go to “Britannia,” for there the sun “beams shine day and night, and are of force/ To blanch [make white] an Æthiop, and revive a corpse.” White women, including Queen Anne, played the Black princesses. How? They used blackface.

White supremacy and anti-Blackness occupied a privileged place in European imperialism and English literature and theatre. Shakespeare and Jonson composed and presented plays that drew upon, shaped, and perpetuated anti-Black and pro-White English sentiments. These international and cultural realities were pillars of the KJV’s racial context. 

Returning to the Song of Solomon

The KJV’s anti-Black translation of Song of Solomon 1:5 reflected its cultural context. It also shaped other cultures around the globe and across the centuries. The U.S. is a case in point. As historian Mark Noll argues, the KJV was the U.S.’s national book in the nineteenth century. Biblical language and allusions filled U.S. public discourse, and “the vast majority of public Bible references came from a single translation”—the KJV. It was this translation that filled debates about the U.S.’s slavocracy and global racialized chattel slavery. Moreover, it was this translation that became a staple in African American congregations and homes. Recall that Wilda Gafney grew up on the KJV. So did Esau McCaulley.

I grew up in a [B]lack Baptist church that revered the King James Version (KJV). Whenever it was read aloud, the congregation rose to its feet. But the KJV was more than a book read on Sunday. It shaped the culture of Southern black Christianity. Its thees and thous permeated our parents’ extemporaneous prayers. It marked the rhetoric of our most powerful preachers.

McCaulley argues that his experiences are common for Black Christians in the North or South. “If Flannery O’Connor can say that the South is Christ-haunted, then we can say that [B]lack Christianity is haunted by King James.” We hear this haunting hum in James Baldwin’s and Toni Morrison’s books and essays.

The KJV may also haunt modern English Bible translations of Song of Solomon 1:5. Consider these twenty-six translations (emphasis added):

Like the KJV, fourteen of the twenty-six versions offer a grammatically impossible translation with “but.” Four others offer a similarly impossible translation of “yet.” Only eight versions correctly translate the text’s “and.” Consequently, eighteen of these modern English translations—an arresting sixty-nine percent—give readers a wrong translation that perpetuates an anti-Black idea about beauty that the original Hebrew rejects. Thus sayeth the Lord, indeed.

Black is Beautiful

Biblical translations matter. They help or hinder our ability to encounter God and creation. They rebuff or retrench idolatry. They foster or fizzle love of self and neighbor. Song of Solomon teaches that black is beautiful. The Song’s primary female figure is beautiful and black. There is no contrasting conjunction here. Rightly encountering God and creation require seeing and feeling this truth. So does rebuffing the historic idolatry of whiteness. So does Black self-love and love of our Black neighbors. A diverse translation team populated by members with the lived experiences, communal ties, and interpretive skill of a Wilda Gafney would empower English Bible readers to experience and celebrate these God-breathed truths.

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About Dr. Nathan Luis Cartagena

A son of the US South (Mom) and Puerto Rico (Dad), Dr. Cartagena is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Wheaton College (IL), where he teaches courses on race, justice, and political philosophy, and is a fellow in The Wheaton Center for Early Christian Studies. He serves as the faculty advisor for Unidad Cristiana, a student group working to enhance Christian unity and celebrate Latina/o cultures, a scholar-in-residence for World Outspoken, and a co-host for the forthcoming podcast From the Underside. He’s also writing a book on Critical Race Theory with IVP Academic.

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The Grace of Babel

Very few Latin@s in the Christian faith know the importance of small town Ruidoso, New Mexico. There, in a little hacienda in the late 80s, a group that would become some of the leading Latin@ voices in theology and biblical studies made a choice that changed the Brown Church for the next thirty years. The scholars gathered to imagine a new theological association for Latin@s. They discussed the challenges facing Latin@ immigrants to the US and the faith experiences of their people. Nestor Medina had the opportunity to interview Orlando O. Espín, a participant at this gathering, and he summarized the group’s decision by writing: “Aware of their differences and of the wrong perceptions they had of each other’s communities, they decided to downplay the differences that divided them and instead emphasize the suffering and marginalization they had in common” (emphasis added).

Downplay the differences. Emphasize the common struggle. This became the standard style for Latin@ theology in the US. To downplay the differences, the group of scholars adopted mestizaje as a central hermeneutic for understanding Latin@ identity and experience. Three decades later, theologians are asking if flattening the differences between Latin@s made certain struggles – like that of Afro-Latin immigrants who face the “double punishment” of anti-immigrant and anti-black bias – more difficult to overcome. By disaggregating the category “Latinos,” these younger academics reveal the greater challenges facing Latin@s made invisible by the homogenizing work of the past. Many today argue for a dispersion of Latin@s into smaller, specific designations rather than larger monolithic categories. Perhaps it can be said that Latin@s need the scattering of Babel. It’s time we speak in different languages.

For many, the Tower of Babel is a story of curse and punishment. The people in the story gathered to build a city and a tower to reach the heavens. After reviewing their project, the Lord thwarted their work by changing their tongues. Unable to speak to one another, the people scattered across the earth. It is common for this reading of Genesis 11 to be accompanied with a reading of Pentecost (Acts 2) as the reversal of Babel. In Genesis, God cursed the people into language diversity; in Acts 2, the Holy Spirit makes people understand one another. Several biblical scholars have challenged this reading of Babel and Pentecost, and it is important to reconsider these stories in light of the question of Latinidad. How are Latin@s one together? Must our oneness equal sameness? Must we focus only on our commonalities while ignoring our differences? How might a rereading of these stories provide a new biblical vision?

Eric Barreto points to the particulars of Acts 2 to note the disconnect between it and Babel. If God intended to reverse a curse, would God not have caused the people to speak the same language? Instead, the Holy Spirit causes those diverse speakers to hear and understand the good news in their own tongue. Language diversity remains intact. Therefore, it seems unlikely that God intended language diversity as a punishment, and the Holy Spirit does not appear to be undoing such diversity. If Acts 2 honors the diversity of languages, how does that change the way we read Genesis 11?

Pablo R. Andiñach proposes that we read the story of the Tower of Babel as an anti-imperialist story. He observes in the story an ironic use of the name Babel that relies on similarities in different languages. In Akkadian, the city is named Bab-il, which means the “door of God.” This was the short form of the full word, babilani¸ “the door of the gods.” A careful reading of Genesis 11 notes the motivation credited to the builders of the city. They wanted to make a name for themselves (v. 4). These builders, says Andiñach, were attempting to establish their supremacy by declaring their city as the gateway to the gods. Their city was to be the city, and their empire was to be endorsed by the gods connected there. It was their intention to establish this city as the seat of power. Already, Genesis 11 foreshadows the hegemonic vision of domination embedded in Babylon. The Hebrew writers mock this city when they write that God scattered the builders, and it is for this reason the place is now named Babel (Hebrew: confusion). God renames. God does not choose Babylon, nor does God permit the imperialists to absorb all peoples into their kingdom. The empire has been confused, scattered, left in disarray. What does this mean for language diversity?

“Destroy, O Lord, divide their tongues; for I see violence and strife in the city.”

— Psalm 55:9

Andiñach argues that language control, like the naming of a place, city, or people, is tied to power. Babylon is the biblical name for the empire, one which Israel would later enter as prisoners of war. The Israelites would one day be forced to speak the language of the empire, forced to live under the cultural hegemony of its oppressors. Genesis 11 is a foreshadow of God’s intention for Babylon. God condemns Babylon’s supremacy claims. God scatters the empire, and in doing so, God privileges those the Babylonians would eventually oppress. The story indicates God’s intention for the world. God does not want monolithic absorption into the empire’s ways of being. Instead, God forced the peoples back out to continue to fill the earth with teaming and flourishing. Language diversity is what God intended for the world. Babel was dismantled because it threatened God’s intended order. The rest of the Hebrew Bible cyclically shows God destroying Babylonian echoes; wherever monolithic violence is the dominant form of being, God dismantles it.

We must be cautious about how we judge the Latin@s of the past as they faced the empire’s monolithic violence. In the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, the US was operating an assimilationist vision for racialized minorities. This vision dates back even further to the early 1900s, as Daniel Burnham and other prominent city planners imagined field houses where immigrants would be taught the “American way of life.” These field houses would also host language classes, and it was Burnham’s vision that immigrants be required to attend these classes. This vision didn’t fully materialize in Chicago, Burnham’s city, but the spirit of this planning continued in similar political programs. The goal was to produce one way of being, according to the logics and visions of white leaders in power. In the face of assimilation programs like these, the scholars of the past resisted by naming themselves and honoring their own traditions and cultures. The protection of identity and culture is, in part, what drove the Latin@ scholars meeting in Ruidoso to collaborate. To understand their decisions, they must be reviewed against the Babylonian operations of the US.

Latin@s and Asian Americans

As mentioned earlier, the hacienda meeting is the origin of mestizaje as a significant theological tool for Latin@s in the US. Those present chose to use Virgilio Elizondo’s work as a central hermeneutic for understanding the Latin@ experience. To this day, mestizaje remains the dominant way of understanding Latin@ identity. We are the mixed people of the borderlands. Those who are ni de aquí, ni de allá (not from here or there). We are, according to the logic of mestizaje, neither white nor black; we are “brown.” Mestizaje presented the possibility to speak of our in-betweenness. The usefulness of the identity marker was its gathering power. Latin@ theologians from Cuba, Mexico, the US, and Puerto Rico could now speak as one “mestizo” people. They could live under one name.

This decision is not strange for its time. In the late 60s, student activists in California went on strike for an ethnic studies curriculum. In an interview for Asian Americans Generation Rising, Penny Nakatsu says she heard the term “Asian American” for the first time in 1968 while attending these strikes. The 60s and 70s were a time of coalition building, of gathering people from diverse nationalities under a single name. With their larger numbers this group could apply political pressure to get their needs met. Like the Latin@ theologians, Asian American students were most concerned about the shared suffering and marginalization of their peoples. They gathered to resist a common oppressive regime.

In 2021, Asian American, Latina/o, Hispanic, and other similar designators are contested by politically active students and scholars who share the motivations of their counterparts in the 60s and 80s. Today’s activists use a greater diversity of identifiers with the expressed desire of advocacy for unseen groups. This commitment is an echo of the past, but many in this younger generation believe the terms of the past are too homogenizing. Too monolithic. Among Latin@s, some even accuse the scholars of the past of essentializing the Latin@ identity. Essentialism is the inflection point. Yet the turn to more specific identities may not solve the essentialism problem. In a video about the erasure of black Latinas from reggaeton music videos, La Gata suggests we reinstate the brown paper bag test to ensure sufficiently dark Afro-Latinas are cast; Afro-Latinas with the potential to “pass” are her concern. In a desire to do justice, she risks essentializing Afro-Latinidad around the boundaries of pigment.

Missed in the tension between generations is the origin of the essentializing/naming problem. The marginalization of distinct groups in the 60s, which demanded a gathering response, and today’s homogenizing of minorities into a single “othered” group, which demands a scattering response, are both operations of white supremacy. These machinations are part of what Emilie Townes refers to as the fantastic hegemonic imagination of the US. “The fantastic hegemonic imagination traffics in peoples’ lives that are caricatured or pillaged so that the imagination that creates the fantastic can control the world in its own image.” The fantastic is not limited to works of art, marketing, or media. Townes argues that images of and about minoritized peoples shape the very fabric of the everyday. Yolanda M. Lopez reveals this most vividly in her 1994 art installation The Nanny, from the Women’s Work is Never Done series, in which she sets the uniform of a nanny, often worn by Latinas, between two marketing posters depicting white women exploiting Latinas. The marketing, in this case a tourism ad and a wool fabric promotion from Vogue magazine, continues to perpetuate an imagination that negatively shapes material conditions for the most abject.

Artworks like The Nanny demonstrate what Townes calls the cultural production of evil. The ads, uniform, and other elements of the installation demonstrate the way little everyday things perpetuate evil imaginings of minoritized peoples; they maintain the fantastic hegemonic imagination. The ubiquity of things that perpetuate this imagination ensures that everyone internalizes it. Townes again: “It is found in the privileged and the oppressed. It is no respecter of race, ethnicity, nationality, or color. It is not bound by gender or sexual orientation. It can be found in the old and the young. None of us naturally escape it, for it is found in the deep cultural codings we live with and through in US society” (emphasis added). How, then, do we avoid the cultural production of evil that consistently marginalizes whole collections of diverse peoples? How do we resist the fantastic hegemonic imagination and its tendency to group, name, and define people according to its own image? How do the generations work together to resist the empire?

ESSENTIALISM AND WEST SIDE STORY

In the 60s, when Latin@ scholars chose to live under a single name, they did so to gain greater political power within a system that ignored them unless they assimilated. The system, however, turned their gathering efforts into a tool in the fantastic hegemonic imagination, and it was used to perpetuate visions of Latinidad that further marginalized the people it named. This is perhaps most evident today in Spielberg’s recent remake of West Side Story. During a recent panel discussion with leading Puerto Rican scholars, Grammy-nominee Bobby Sanabria shared about his involvement on an advisory board that consulted Spielberg, Tony Kushner, and their team on the cultural issues to consider for their remake. Sanabria explained that the original film resonated with him personally because he remembered having to join a Puerto Rican gang in the 50s “to protect ourselves from the white gangs that didn’t ‘dig us’ too much…” He continued, “it’s a reality that happened and is still a reality today.” Brian Eugenio Herrera, another panelist, pushed back, noting that the reality of gangs was and is certainly true, but the impact of West Side Story is that it filled the US imagination with images of Caribbean Latin@s as criminal gang members.

The image produced by the film is not of gang life as self-defense but rather gang life as violent criminality. Over the 60 year period since the release of the original film, young Afro-Latinos have resisted this perception. What had been impactful for Sanabria was poison for the next generation. The problem, as explained by Herrera, was the development of an aesthetic archetype, a permanent caricature of what it means to be Puerto Rican. The film may have portrayed something specific to its time, but this image became the universal, essential description of Latino youth even beyond Puerto Ricans. With the release of this remake, the question of essentialism returns to the fore.

RESISTING THE AESTHETIC ESSENTIALISM OF BABYLON

The debate about West Side Story runs along the grain of the generational tensions already described here. An older generation praises the film; a younger generation resists it. Some within the older generation perceive positive power in it. A younger generation feels debilitated by it. Herrera rightly notes that the film, like the scholars of Ruidoso, set the style for what it means to represent Latin@ people. The scholars of the hacienda in Ruidoso also set the theological style for Latin@s, adopting mestizaje as their tool to downplay their differences. To resist the empire today, however, perhaps what we need to do is release the hegemonic controls of style and aesthetic. Again, we need the grace of Babel and the affirmation of Pentecost.

Victor Anderson, Professor of the Program in African American and Diaspora Studies and Religious Studies at Vanderbilt Divinity School, observes a similar generational tension in the work of his black students. According to Anderson, students continue to ask questions he thought were resolved by the previous generation of scholars. Questions like, “What makes one black? Must black scholarship be political? Are black films, literature, and arts anything produced by a black person? To what extent may black scholars embrace multiculturalism as a mode of difference and remain distinctively black? Is not there something about being black that is shared with no other race?” These questions echo contemporary questions about Afro-Latinidad and Latin@s more generally.

Instead of essentialized styles that restrict the identity to one form, Anderson proposes that black scholars conceive their work as expressions of the manifold manifestations of blackness. For Anderson, blackness should be understood as an “unfinished state” and a “complex subjectivity.” By unfinished state, Anderson is suggesting that the final, definitive word on black identity remains unsaid. Each new generation contributes to the shape and formation of black identity; they add another manifestation to the manifold. Complex subjectivity is an acknowledgement that each person within a group is multi-site, connected to other worlds that shape their identity. As Emilie Townes puts it: “we do not live in a seamless society. We live in many communities – often simultaneously.” Together, the ideas of these scholars point to a post-Babel world that affirms the desires of both generations and opens to a diversity of peoples.

The story of Babel and Pentecost reflect God’s affirmation of a diversity of peoples. Again, Babel is not a curse into diversity, nor is Pentecost a reversal into homogeneity. In both stories, God affirms the minoritized other and does so in contrast to the empire. (Pentecost serves as an early encounter between the Church and Rome.) How do we reconcile the two generations and avoid the essentializing tendency of Babylon? There are at least three lessons presented by the scholars discussed here.

1)    Resist the fantastic hegemonic imagination inside us

Emilie Townes stressed the real possibility that the hegemonic imagination can be internalized. This is just as true for the older generation as it is for the younger. Is it possible that the older generation failed to see the inherent essentialism in their advocacy? Yes, of course. However, to critique them without acknowledging the ways they resisted hegemonic forces of assimilation in their own day is to reduce their story. Is it possible that contemporary discussions about Afro-Latinidad risk essentializing blackness in Latin@ communities? Again, yes. But, to ignore the ways black experience was made invisible since mestizaje became an archetype would align us with the empire’s tendency to erase and assimilate. All peoples are non-innocent regarding the empire. To remember the Latin@ story in detail, that is part of our resistance. To acknowledge what inspired students in California to adopt “Asian American,” to remember why Latin@s adopted mestizaje, to remember why their differences were less important than their shared struggle, this is what’s required if we are to collaborate against the empire’s operations.

2)    Celebrate “Complex Subjectivity” as the grace post-Babel

While trying to explain her womanist theo-ethics, Emilie Townes writes, “life and wholeness (the dismantling of evil/the search for and celebration of freedom) is found in our individual interactions with our communities and the social worlds, peoples, and life beyond our immediate terrains.” The point is that diversity does not equal a society without seams. Diverse communities, however distinct, continue to have points of intersection. And, as Townes says so well, wholeness demands we work within our distinct group and with others beyond our tribe. We can delight in and celebrate the gift of Babel, the gift of diversity in language and peoples, while still connecting along the seams of connection. To say it differently, we can now celebrate the differences instead of downplaying them. This celebration should parallel our continued work against our common struggle. Celebrate difference. Resist the common struggle. That should be the formula going forward.

3)    Work in the Everyday (lo cotidiano)

For Latin@ and Black scholars, the everyday is the location for resistance. The artwork of Yolanda M. Lopez reminds us that the fantastic hegemonic imagination of the empire produces everyday objects of evil. So, our resistance must also operate in the everyday. Everyday we must be attuned to the ways our imagination is being shaped, and everyday we have an opportunity to make otherwise worlds. As non-innocent, complex subjects who live together in the grace of God’s work in Babel and Pentecost, we can create virtuous cycles of cultural production that set people free to live into their language and identity. Everyday arts, everyday products, everyday words can liberate people from the monolith. Everyday rituals can point people to the Word that judges Babylon and sets its captives free to testify of His goodness in their tongue and tribe.

About Emanuel (Ricky) Padilla

Emanuel Padilla is president of World Outspoken, a ministry preparing the mestizo church for cultural change. Emanuel is committed to serving bi-cultural Christians facing questions of identity, culture, and theology. He also serves at The Brook, a church on the northwest side of Chicago, along with his wife Kelly.

Follow him on Twitter to learn more.

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