Lessons From a Sunday School Song

Jesus loves the little children.

All the children of the world.

Red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in His sight.

Jesus loves the little children of the world.

After the past few weeks, I’m beginning to believe we haven’t really learned much about one another beyond lyrics.

Imagine the little white child handing the black child a slice of watermelon while trying to speak Ebonics.

Or the little white child handing the yellow child a piece of wood while asking her to karate chop it in half while using an “Asian” accent.

Or the little white child handing the red child a feather while pretending to use a tomahawk and making “Indian warrior” noises with his hand on his mouth.

And all of this happening in front of the church during a Sunday service.

Never mind that so few of us, myself included, attend a church where that is the norm Sunday after Sunday (and where are the brown kids?). Just picture it.

It would be a little…um…weird…uncomfortable…awkward…inappropriate. How would you describe what you are feeling?

Now imagine all of these little children of the world growing up and showing up at church, and during the passing of the peace you watch a white person come up to me, an Asian American woman, and speak to me in a fake Asian accent.

What would your reaction be? What would you be feeling or thinking? Would you do anything? Should you do anything?

***Now, this exact scenario has not happened to me. At least, not yet. But who knows. The Church has a strange track record on taking one step forward and a leap backwards. Look up Rickshaw Rally – a vacation Bible school curriculum. Or Deadly Viper – a Christian leadership book and movement taken down by a small “online activist group”. Or…never mind.

After the past few weeks, I’m beyond feeling weird, uncomfortable, and awkward. Please, dear readers, don’t be afraid. Invite others to join us here. I promise, I may be angry, frustrated, hurt, and confused, but I won’t bite. I promise.

Sa-I-Gu. April 29.

It’s been 20 years since the LA riots.

For me it was one of those “I will remember exactly where I was” moments – sitting in a hotel in Indiana after interviewing at a newspaper. I was a graduating senior, still waiting to get a job offer, collecting rejection letters (editing them in red and hanging them on the apartment refrigerator), and hopeful. For those of you old enough to have seen the riots unfold live, do you remember where you were and what you were feeling?

I watched footage of the verdict. The crowd’s response. I watched the footage of the beating and the rescue. I watched as a broken system cowered away from the angry protesters and left entire communities without “protection”. I watched the footage of looters begin to tear apart Koreatown, and I listened to news commentators talk about race relations in terms of Black and White.

And when I got back to campus a few of us from the Asian American Christian Ministry got together to pray and sit. There was one underclassman whose family owned one of those stores in Koreatown. We prayed with him as he wondered whether or not he should fly home, and whether or not there would be a store or community left by the time he landed.

And while Koreatown burned, so few of our voices and faces were included in the images, the public discourse, the whole picture. Perhaps the coverage was different in CA, but in the Midwest we were at the mercy of national news distributors and so much of the coverage focused on Black and White. Yellow was expendable, and not part of the problem nor the solution. We seemed expendable. And I felt ignored, and then I realized I wasn’t just sad and scared. I was angry.

It solidified my desire to be a journalist, and to be a different voice in some newsroom somewhere. It’s why I’m still so committed to challenging college and university students to consider how living out the Gospel in their everyday lives will help bring about God’s kingdom come and his will be done on earth as it is heaven.

Because April 29, 1992, was far from heaven.