A Letter To My Son: Welcome to the In-Between | Sojourners

A Letter To My Son: Welcome to the In-Between

This is a letter to my son that I am not sure he will understand now, but it is one that I hope he will look back upon to give clarity to some moments of confusion and exclusion. But it is also a letter for a world that in so many ways wants something different, but cannot imagine how it prevents those hopes from becoming realized.

Dear Son,

You were only 10 years old when you saw that American miracle -- Barack Obama sworn into office as president of the United States of America. Innocence seemed to be reclaimed in that moment as so many heard, in the president's oath, centuries of guilt absolved. "To a post-racial future!" some exclaimed, hopeful for a unity that seemed so difficult to grasp even in our so-called enlightened time.

And yet, two years later you have come to discover the true "curse of ham," the refusal of difference that ferments beneath the surface of every society, that reveals us all to be more savage than civil. You have now glimpsed just how much we humans thrive on difference, how we seek it out even in its most subtle forms (and that 7th graders seem particularly adept at it!)

But, as these realities seem to so often reveal, our present is never quite the simple repetition of the past. You, the child of a mulatto man and a Korean-American mother, are the sum of many parts, places, stories and possibilities. In so many ways you encapsulate what many people hope for when they imagine a "post-racial" hope.

It has pained me so to see you discover that post-racial is, in sad fact, simply a poor recalibration of an awkward arrangement made long, long ago when there were only whites and coloreds. You have stumbled into a world where a few white boys will exclude you, call you black because you are not white, and a latino can call you a n----r without the slightest hesitation, his ignorance or his malice equally heinous crimes.

This does not have to be the end of the story, the end of our possibilities. But you should know the world you have entered and what peculiar space you occupy. Welcome to the nebulous space of the inter, the in-between, the not quite, to racial ambiguity.

In the first 12 years of your life, the question of who or what you were was a pleasantry, a curiosity. But somehow the innocent question of your identity seems to have more attached to it than you realized. Not looking Asian enough to be easily absorbed into the Asian table, not dark enough to find a home among African Americans, and, as some have felt willingly enough to tell you to your face, too dark to be white. Welcome son, to the neither/nor.

You are not the first and not the last to feel the constriction of this space. In fact, you are now a second generation "in-betweener" and sadly the world some of us hoped would emerge -- where the curiosity of the mulatto, the half-breed, would be no more -- didn't, and here we are.

If left to ourselves, perhaps we could hope for the space to become true individuals, to become our full selves apart from what others desire us to be or without the chains of cultural expectation.

But our world is not a world of endless possibilities and autonomous individuals. You and I are bound to each other. You and I are bound to those who refuse us and those who welcome us. All of these histories, realities, wellsprings of cultural achievement and tragedy flow through your veins, in your face.

You and I are people of the in-between, people who cannot easily seek to be simply "who we are" because our "who" is inexplicable without these peoples. Our life is not our own. We belong to many peoples, but above all we belong to God (of course you knew this was coming!) This makes us what some Christians have said, "foreigners in every land, and in every foreign land, a citizen."

If being post racial means anything, perhaps it is this: that we are always at home, and we are never home. If being a Christian means anything, it is that we are always at home, and we are never home, and because of this, the exclusion, the refusals we so often endure are never the entirety of our lives.

Much much love,
Your father

portrait-brianbantumBrian Bantum is assistant professor of theology at Seattle Pacific University. He is author of Redeeming Mulatto: A Theology of Race and Christian Hybridity (Baylor University Press, 2010) and numerous articles on Christ, identity, and race. Brian lives in Seattle with his wife, Gail, and three children. This post originally appeared on Eugene Cho's blog.