Diversity and Displacement: Where the Search for Identity Begins

Growing up in a homogenously Asian church, in the suburbs of Irvine where everyone was rich—and well, Asian—I’ve always had a hard time understanding my own identity. The problem is, everyone is of the same socio-economic class, same race, same culture, and mostly the same sexual orientation. I was always told by older people when I dealt with all kinds of struggles to “put your identity in God and not in other things”. This advice was offered for a whole range of contexts: putting your identity in God and not in “worldly relationships”, putting your identity in God and not in what your peers think of you, putting your identity in God and not your work—the list goes on. However, now that I’ve uprooted from the anti-diversity of Irvine and haphazardly replanted myself in the unfamiliar culture of South LA, I’m starting to believe there has to be more than just simply “putting your identity in God” and not in other things.

As much as Christians tell people that things would be better once you’ve “put your identity in God”, there’s a hole in this philosophy. Truth: it is unhealthy to derive your identity from what other people, the media, or the workplace tells you. But on the other hand, if you completely ignored the qualities you were made with, you would end up losing all sense of self—allowing confusion to settle in. What people who come from a homogeneous community are never exposed to is how important it is to explore why we were made with the qualities that make us individuals. If all we see of the world is just more people like ourselves, then how can we truly discover what makes our identities unique? And as much as God wants our identity in Him, it is unlikely that He intends for us to ignore the different identities we have. I wasn’t born an Asian-American woman by mistake, and I wasn’t brought up in the luxuries of the suburbs so that I could be unaware of the fact that I’ve been privileged my whole life.

The sad truth about homogeneous communities (especially churches) is that they lack vital necessities for growth. Displacement and diversity are very crucial to understanding oneself. People get into conflicts with similar friends and feel that they have been displaced and are experiencing diversity between each other. Sure, we have struggles all the time because no one is wholly like us. In reality, however, that type of interaction pales in comparison to being suddenly thrown in to a completely different culture.

In many churches I’ve seen, one huge gap between what the church should be doing and what it is actually doing is the idea of many different people being united under a common vision: Jesus’s Kingdom. Instead, people who don’t seek out diversity keep attracting the same type of people and what results is a pile up of people who think and talk alike and are equally ignorant of their lack of identity. Perhaps if we actually explored our own identity with people who were culturally and in every way 180 degrees different from us, we would finally begin to comprehend what we were made of and who we were made to be.