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On July 14th, 2010, I leave Kemet to head to Ghana, Togo and Benin. I have just finished leading a two week study tour here and now I head further south into the continent of Africa to lead another study tour in three more African countries.
Our annual study tours are offered to expose African Americans to the cultures, the histories and the stories of African people on the Continent of Africa and African people who live in Diaspora. During this year’s first two study tours, the Annual Revival at Trinity Church is taking place.
As I sat in my room looking at the Pyramids in Giza I thought about the revivals in the past when I was serving as pastor of Trinity UCC in Chicago. One particular Revival (2006) and our contact with people from “another country” during that revival came to my mind; and I want to share a reflection that I wrote back then as a result of that exposure.
It was published in our TRUMPET magazine and some of you have read it. For those who have not seen it before, please read it carefully; and as you read it, enjoy!
I am asking you to do more than enjoy, however. I also ask you to think! Reflect and see “When and Where [You] Enter” in this story of different people, different cultures, different stories, different perceptions, different perspectives, different stereotypes and different ways of building bridges of understanding in the family of God
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“Sharing Truth and Shattering Myths”
On Father’s Day 2006, I had two incredible assignments to fulfill – - both on the same day. On the morning of Sunday, June 18th, we had seventeen German visitors who came to worship with us.
These were not your typical “tourists” from another country. These were students and leaders from the German community who had never been to an African-American worship service. I had to meet with them for an hour before service to try to explain to them what it was they would experience as they entered our Sanctuary for worship in a context completely alien to anything with which they were familiar.
I had the assignment of sharing the truth of the African-American experience with persons who were clueless as to the African perspective on the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, the Middle Passage, assimilation and mis-education. I had to share the truth of our experience with them and shatter myths that they had in their heads about us. I had to do it, moreover, in less than an hour.
At four o’clock in the afternoon on that same Sunday, I had to meet with twenty Korean pastors and perform the same tasks. This time, however, I had the daunting obstacle of a “language barrier.” Most of the pastors present did not speak English and I had to talk with them through two different translators.
As I wrestled with how best to accomplish that second task, I remembered the history of the Korean people being abused by the Japanese. I remembered the stories I had read of Korean women being raped by the Japanese. I remembered the horrible recounting of the stories of the lives of Koreans who were abused by the Japanese and how the Japanese looked down on them as inferior.
Jesus told Peter that “flesh and blood had not revealed” those truths unto Him. I am convinced that flesh and blood did not reveal those insights unto me. It was the Holy Spirit who guided me into an hour and forty minute lesson wherein I tried to get Korean pastors to understand the similarities between their experience as persons who were oppressed by the Japanese and our experience as persons who were oppressed by the Europeans.
I shared with them some truths that none of them had ever heard or read before. Koreans are not taught about the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. Koreans are not taught about how we were brought into the “New World” in bondage.
Koreans are not taught about how we had our culture taken from us, our languages take from us, our religions taken from us and our identity taken from us. Koreans are not taught about the Middle Passage.
Koreans are not even taught about the slave ships and the experience of being brought here as cargo on a slave ship. I had to share those truths with them and shatter the myths they had of what it was to be an African American.
Their myths are based on media images of Oprah Winfrey, Bill Cosby, Michael Jordan and Michael Jackson. The pastors who were with us thought (prior to our time together) that African Americans were simply white folks in a darker hue.
They knew the stereotypical, smart-aleck opinions many of us have about them. For instance, when I told one member I had to meet with some Koreans they said to me, “Can I get my nails done while they are here?”
Just as we are seen as being big, black bucks with a special dose of “athleticism,” red-hot mamas who have an insatiable desire for sex, and a bunch of entertainers and singers, gang bangers and dope dealers we have the same stereotypes of Koreans as “those people” who do nails and who take over parts of our town selling their foods and taking all of the money out of our community. Those are dangerous myths on both sides of the ethnic fence.
Some of us have been to Korea, so we do not have as negative a stereotype in our minds when it comes to Korean people and Korean culture. We have “soft stereotypes.”
We see Koreans as the people who make those fantastic suits for such low prices. We see Koreans as followers of Reverend Sun Yung Moon or Reverend Cho – - a deeply religious people who either have fantastic mega-churches or some sort of strange theology that is going to unify not only North and South Korea, but the entire world!
Those unfortunate misperceptions and stereotypes do nothing toward building community. They only perpetuate the wide chasms across which we try to communicate in an impossible no-win situation. We stereotype them. They stereotype us and we all live unhappily ever after in our own little mythical worlds.
I had one hour and forty minutes to shatter those myths while sharing with them the truth of the Middle Passage, the nineteen countries out of which Africans were brought into America as slaves, the triangular trade system which carried us through the Caribbean, the facts of the 30 million Africans who live in the U.S.A., the additional 30 million who live in Central America and the 80 million Africans who live in South America.
I had to share the truths of our experience and shatter the myths that they held concerning our experience (in an hour and forty minutes).
I talked to them about the similarities and the dissimilarities between our two stories (the Korean story and the Africa story, the Korean-Japanese story and the African-European story) and then I painted a picture for them of an analogy. I asked them to imagine a group of Korean men, women and children captured by the Japanese and taken away to Japan.
I asked them to imagine what those descendents of stolen Koreans would be like two-hundred and forty-seven years after having been contraband in the country of Japan.
After two-hundred and forty-seven years of living in Japan, the Korean natives would no longer be able to speak the Korean language. They would speak the Japanese language. If there had been a law passed by the Japanese making it a crime to teach any Korean how to read Japanese, they would have been illiterate Koreans.
That law was passed for Africans who lived in America and that is the problem we faced immediately following the Civil War. I also asked our visitors to imagine those Koreans no longer being called Koreans, but being called “Kopanese.” I asked them to imagine how conflicted those “Kopanese” would be mentally as some of them identified with their Japanese oppressors and some of them identified with their Korean origins.
I then went on to talk with them about how those “Kopanese” would have been assimilated and acculturated into Japanese culture, given a mis-education just like Carter G. Woodson described the process that confused millions of African Americans; and I then told them to imagine what the Japanese missionaries would have taught the Korean ex-patriots in terms of how they as Koreans should worship as the Japanese worshipped!
Slowly but surely I could see the light bulbs coming on in the eyes of our Korean visitors. They understood the parallel I was making and they then understood our story in a different light. One of the pastors said that he had no idea our two histories were so similar.
Another one of the pastors said I was hitting closer to home than I realized. There are 300,000 Koreans still living in Japan as a result of their oppression, the wars, the rapes, the kidnappings and the internment.
The most defining moment of my time with the Korean pastors, however, was when the Korean professor of Church History, Dr. Jae Won Lee, said to me, “You made up the name “Kopanese.” But, there really is a group of Koreans who are fighting the fight that you described fictitiously.
They are the cho chong nyon and they are trapped between the oppression of the Japanese and the “distancing” they experience at the hands of their own people who want to assimilate and acculturate into Japanese culture! The gyo-ru-min-dan are comparable to the Negroes who don’t understand why the cho chong nyon (those folk who consider themselves Africans) want to identify with Korea.
They say things like you have heard coming from the lips of miseducated African Americans, “I ain’t got nothing to do with no ‘Afack-a.’ I ain’t left nothing over there. My peoples is from ‘Miss’sippi!’” Just as the gyo-ru-min-dan want nothing to do with Korea, the Negroes want nothing to do with Africa!
As a result of their history of oppression and colonization, the Korean people living in Japan (and some in South Korea) are now divided into two camps. There are some Koreans living in Japan who want to forget all about their Korean heritage. (These are the gyo-ru-min-dan.)
There are other Koreans living in Japan (the cho chong nyon) who want to embrace their Korean heritage and who are looked down upon by the Koreans who have assimilated into the Japanese culture! Does any of this sound familiar?
Once we shatter the myths that keep us separated from others who are oppressed, one of the most powerful things that happens to us is our ability to share truths that we normally would never have thought of sharing becomes greater. We see parallels that we did not know existed.
We begin to learn stories of other people that are parallel to our own stories and we begin to share truth that helps us to build bridges across which we can walk in order to meet, embrace and understand other people in other cultures who are all a part of this tremendously diverse human family that God has created.
Sharing the truth of our story with people from another culture who speak another language enabled me to shatter some of the myths that separate us. It also opened my eyes to the bond of humanity that binds us in spite of our differing oppressions.
During this month of Revival at our church it is my prayer that the readers of this month’s Trumpet will begin to share the truth of their own story with other members of God’s family, shattering myths and seeing others at a deeper level for the first time in their lives!