“Identity”

A sermon by the Rev. Shana Lynngood

All Souls Church, Unitarian

Washington, D.C.

Sunday, 13 January 2008

This morning I have two readings to share with you.  The first is an excerpt from what I think is a fantastic piece of writing by a woman named Claire Huang Kinsley.  It’s a piece entitled “Questions People have Asked Me; Questions I have Asked Myself,” and the essay is written in question and answer format:

Question Number One:  What do I look like?  You don’t look very Chinese; you don’t look Chinese at all; I thought you were part Inuit.  Your mother’s Chinese?  Really?           

Question Number Two:   Do you mind me asking what your ethnic background is?  I’m half Chinese.  And the other half?  You know, regular, normal.  [Laughter] A friend of mine knows a little boy who, on being asked this question said, “I’m part Jewish, part plain.”      

Question Number Four:  Your father’s white?  Really?  This question doesn’t belong in this piece.  No one has ever asked me this.

Question Number Five:  What do they see, and why?  People often assume that I am white, nothing but white.  What gets to me, though, is, if after finding out that their assumption was wrong, they nevertheless figure that it was inevitable, that this assumption was entirely a result of the way I look and nothing to do with the way they see.

I was once trying to talk about this with a white acquaintance of mine and she said, “I don’t usually notice what race people are so much as other things like the way they express themselves.”  And you know, I didn’t say this then, but I’ll say it now:  Maybe you didn’t notice because you’ve never had to notice.  How often have you ever scanned a roomful of faces in the hope of spotting someone who might, just might, have the same racial background as you?  When you see another white person in the subway or the supermarket, do you ever feel a tug, an impulse to go up to that person and say ‘Are you white?  You are?  What’s it been like for you? [Laughter]

The second reading is from the novel, Caucasia, by Danzy Senna.  The novel tells the story of two mixed-race sisters, Birdie and Cole, who end up being separated as young girls, each to live with one of their parents.  Birdie can and does end up passing for white while she lives with her mother growing up.  And Cole grows up quite differently with their black activist father.  Toward the end of the novel, this section takes place and it’s when Birdie, after many decades of being apart from her father, finally has a conversation with him in depth.

He took my arm and led me toward the living room.  On the wall near the bookshelf hung an elaborate chart my father had made, a chart with the words “Canaries in the Coalmine,” written in black magic marker at the top.  It depicted a row of pictures of mulattoes throughout history.  I recognized Alexander Pushkin, Philippa Schuyler, Nella Larsen, Gene Toomer.  Xeroxed photographs of their sallow faces above the dates of their lives and, beneath their face, brief descriptions of their desolate or violent deaths.  The last column of the chart was a snapshot of Cole and me.  My father had hand-written our names, “Birdie and Cole Lee,” beside our birthdates.  Under the last column, where the others had their fates written, there was a blank space.  He explained to me his theory, that the mulatto in America functions as a canary in the coalmine.  The canaries, he said, were used by coalminers to gauge how poisonous the air underground was.  They would bring a canary in with them and if it grew sick and died they knew the air was bad.  My father said that, likewise, mulattoes had historically been the gauge of how poisonous American race relations were.  He pointed to the chart.  “See, my guess is that you’re the first generation of canaries to survive, a little injured perhaps, but alive.”

A sermon on identity.

The impetus for this morning’s sermon came, as it often does, from a conversation with a congregant.  A member of the church recently informed me that several people had, again and again, had the same conversation with them, a conversation that ended with the same question:  “How does Shana identify?”  Well, while I don’t consider myself a person shrouded in mystery, or feel as though I am less than forthright about who I am and about how I came into, or should I more accurately say, worked hard for, the sense of self that I have, the congregant’s question reminded me that I hadn’t spoken in awhile in a very direct way,  about race from the pulpit.  And I also felt that question as an invitation, a request if you will, for me to speak frankly about some of my own struggles to forge an authentic identity, an identity that felt true to the fullness and to the complexity of the legacy bequeathed to me by my parents and by my ancestors.

But I also want to take that request a little bit further, take it another step.  I want to do more this morning than simply talk about me.  I want to examine whether there are lessons from my living, from my own personal story, that might hold some insight for us as an All Souls community, as a community that’s doing some of its own wrestling with how to figure out a way to live up to and into a full and rich identity as an institution that has been committed for generations, to its very core, of being a diverse and a richly multicultural community.

So my question for us this morning is, does my own personal multi-ness, if you will, illumine our shared path toward beloved community?   I’ll begin with a little bit about me, trying to get at the heart of that question, “How does Shana identify?” with two vignettes from my own life, the first quite a bit in the past and the second as recent as a few weeks ago.

When I was growing up, there was an ongoing debate in my family, specifically a debate I had with my first cousin and my father.  My first cousin, Jennifer, is an interesting person.  She’s about as similar and dissimilar from me as any one person could be.  You see, she is also studying for the ministry, albeit at Fuller Theological Seminary, outside of Los Angeles which is a very conservative, Christian seminary.  And she is very dissimilar from me in the sense that she has always been very much into pop culture and fancy clothes.  I like to think we both have similar, wonderful singing voices.  But she and I share a very similar life story.  Our fathers, you see, are fraternal twins; our mothers both white Americans, our parents both divorcing when we were young children, each of us growing up primarily with our single-parent mothers as a result.

My cousin had strong feelings about who we were, about what was possible for our lives and about what we could choose about our identities and what we couldn’t.  And so Jen and I would go back and forth in many conversations in her room, listening to the latest popular R and B songs that she would sing at the top of her lungs.  She would often tell me that we had only one choice to make about who we were to be in this life.  Our conversations sounded something like this.  Me, saying, “But we’re mixed.  We have these two different heritages, these two different sides of our family, and can’t we, shouldn’t we, aren’t we obligated, to embrace both?”  And her saying something like, “Shana, that’s really nice; it’s a wonderful sentiment.  And it’s true that we’re mixed.  But what do people see when they look at you?  Not when they get to know you.  Not when they have time to talk with you and hear something about your life story.  What do they see when they look at you?”  I said, “Well, I guess they think I’m bla . . .”  “That’s right! [Laughter] And that’s all there is to it,” she said.  “We’re black.  That’s all anybody sees and, as far as the world is concerned, that’s what’s true.  That’s what’s real.  And that is the life that we have.”

So that was my cousin’s voice in one ear.  And then I had my father’s voice in the other.  My father was convinced, perhaps in a very self-serving way, that being who I was was one of the greatest gifts he could have possibly given to a child.  “Being mixed-race,” he said, “was wonderful and fabulous, this unique opportunity.  You are a bridge,” he said.  “You understand and see things in this world in a way that few other people can.  What a great and wonderful thing to give to the world, to share what you see, to be a whole person.”  So that was my father’s voice, ringing in my other ear.  And for years, I waged my own interior debate, echoing their words, trying to figure out who was right, for clearly our culture told me again and again, someone had to be right and, therefore, someone had to be wrong.  And it took me years, years, to realize that they were both right, to realize that both things were true, that I could choose to embrace the reality of my mixed-ness, in its gloriousness, as my father described it, only and as much as I was equally willing to embrace the impressions and the assumptions and the judgments that required me to understand and acknowledge that I was, and will always remain, black.

So to answer the congregant’s question, posed to me many weeks ago, “How do I identify?”  I identify as mixed-race and as black.  We claim what we know, which is to say what we live.  And we claim what we see in ourselves and in others.  And for some reason, those of us on the border, those of us in the middle of multiple worlds, have to somehow figure out how to claim both.

The second story is about a New Year’s Eve party that my family and I attended, wonderfully dubbed “New Year’s Eve in Paris,” because it was a party for families with small children who needed to celebrate New Year’s at six p.m. [Laughter] So we went with our toddler out to a suburb which shall not be named, to New Year’s Eve in Paris.  I noticed, as we were talking and getting to know some of the guests at the party, that there was only one other family of color attending this party, a gentleman with his son, Miles.  Miles and I had a conversation early in the evening in which I asked him his age and he told me he was not four, as I had guessed, but four and a half.  [Laughter]  As I spoke to another person at the party about Miles and the preponderance of four-year-old boys who appeared to be at this party, she made an assumption which has been made many times in my life, but very poignantly for me this time around.  She assumed that Miles was my son and that this African American man at the party was my spouse.  Once again, I found myself put in a box, divided in half, pulled out of my own family, assigned to a side and a place, assigned very much, really, to a life that was not my own. 

I actually felt a little bit sorry for this woman because we then had to have that awkward party dance in which I explained that, no, my family was actually the white woman and white child, which was actually even more awkward because then she had to get her mind around the whole lesbian aspect as well, probably then worrying that I thought she was both racist and homophobic.  [Laughter]  And I didn’t feel that way about her, and yet I wished in that moment that I could get out of that box.  Ironic as it is, since our government has only recently allowed me a box on our own census forms by which to describe my being, by which to describe my life.  But that moment at that party was another moment of being reduced out of convenience, being sort of trivialized and flattened to fit what seemed easiest in her own mind’s eye:  I must be connected to the other brown people at the party.

So friends, if there is a way in which I am still a canary in the American racial coalmine, it is in those ways that I see and notice, notice because I have to, not because I necessarily want to, the limits that we in our culture continue to set, our stubborn unwillingness to allow for complexity, to allow for ambiguity and self-definition.  What if this woman had turned to me and simply said, “Who is your family?”  And so it is with that knowledge in my heart that I want to say that wanting to know how I identify is a perfectly reasonable question to ask me, as long as I’m permitted to have my answer.  For sadly, when people ask that question, most often an answer, in fact what they presuppose is the correct answer to that question, is already waiting for me to simply walk into.  Others somehow seem very, very sure that what they must know about me, just by looking at me, is true and right.  I’m happy to say that, as canaries go, I think I’ve come through fairly intact, but not without a great deal of pushing through moments like that awkward one at the party, where I have to resist someone else’s definition of who I must be or should be, or am allowed to be.

Are you mixed race?  Really?  What’s it been like for you?  Nobody’s ever asked me that question.

So what does all this mean?  What does my story mean for all of us here at All Souls, for all of us who so fervently and ardently believe that in a pluralistic, multi-cultural world we all need to be able to go into multi-places?  It means that we need to welcome complexity and wholeness into our midst.  It means that we have to check our assumptions, not at the door because I’ve come to believe that that’s not possible, but to check our assumptions with one another.  It means that we have to be willing to make mistakes, to look foolish and more than once.  It means that we have to be open to being wrong.  We have to be open to trying new things, to meeting new people, to going out beyond old horizons.  We have to be willing to risk and to take a chance.  Sounds sort of abstract.  In fact I think most what it means is that we need to be willing to be transformed, willing to have ourselves and our beings changed, made qualitatively different by coming in contact with more and more people who are unlike us, really by being willing to care about and love people who are unlike us. 

So that’s my prayer for us as an All Souls community, really for us as a human community, that we will be willing to be changed by the presence of all who are part of our church family and all who might join us in the future, that we might find that we are inspired by the beauty and unique giftedness that each and every individual person’s story brings with it, that we might see that there is something divinely ordained in each person’s life.

I close with the fact that that beauty that we each possess is indeed a gift from something higher than any of us.  You may remember that in the very beginning of the biblical story of creation, God created us human beings in all of our complexity and all of our complicatedness.  And Scripture tells us this, which I’ve slightly adapted:  “So God created humankind in God’s image; in the image of God he created them, male and female, she created them.  And God blessed them.”  My friends, God has already blessed us in our many-ness and our multi-ness; we have been created as we were meant to be, as was intended by the holy.  The only problem is we have yet to catch up to that truth.  We have yet to see how blessed we are by difference.  So may we, indeed, come to see our many-ness as a blessing; may we be grateful for the diversity inherent in the human family and may we welcome that diversity into our lives and into our church.  We are transformed by that which we embrace.  So may we at All Souls stretch our arms as wide as they can possibly go, to embrace all who enter, to embrace all of all who enter.  May it be so now, and always.  Amen.  [Applause]