Identilation

I feel like yesterday's post needs a bit of clarification because it's founded in a couple of days of training and a couple of basic assumptions.

The first assumption is that every person on the face of the planet is created in the image of God, no matter their ethnicity or gender.  Indeed, it is the only biblical stance to take that every ethnicity and gender are required to fully encompass the fullest image of God.

This means, of course, that those of us who can identify as multi-racial individuals are every bit as made in the image of God as anyone else.

But if every ethnicity is expressing a certain aspect or aspects about God's image, we've got to know how to identify as whole members of every ethnicity we're a part of in order to be fully identified within God's Kingdom. He created me as the multi-racial person I am, and to that end, I can't become a fully realized human being in his Kingdom without knowing exactly what that means for me.

What's also true is that God has placed every person on the planet into a certain place that has a dominant culture and it's that culture to whom each and every Christian is called to be a minister.  Our ability to function within a dominant culture is measured in what we call assimilation.  An individual's ability to own his or her own ethnicity is identified as identity.  People generally fall on a spectrum of identity and assimilation co-ordinates on a graph where one is the x axis and the other the y.

All of that means that the most useful people in God's Kingdom are those who can fully embrace the person God made them to be, including their ethnicity and the gifts it brings (so, having a high identity) and also those who are able to to function within the context of the dominant culture...having high assimilation.  Because I look and was brought up white, I'm very high assimilation, and I can mostly claim to be a high identity white, but my failure to fully claim the wrongs of the white race in the past (specifically as they pertain to the oppression of native people on this continent) because I feel like a good bit of that was oppression against my own ancestors means I can't be a truly high-identity white person...and that means I've got to figure out how to have any degree of "highness" in my native identity.


I hope that clarifies some.

-Zack

"I put in work and it's all for the kids, but these cats done forgot what work is"
-DMX