Navigating Racial Trauma in Christian Spaces
A Personal Journey of Pain, Reconciliation, and Hope
By Esther Kim (pseudonym), a theological student in Canada.
My body refuses to be close to white bodies. My self refuses to be in white spaces.
I never thought I would say these things, let alone feel this way. But I did. At least since moving from Spain to study in Canada.
I grew up as an ethnic-racial minority in a country with a long colonialist history. In the 1980s, my parents immigrated from Korea to Spain, where I was born. Being the only non-white kid in my class was a given throughout all my school years and even later at university. Hearing unsolicited comments and insults by strangers on the street was (and continues to be) the bread and butter of many non-white people living in Spain. If you read this while being in North America without knowing my full story, you might naturally assume I have a lot of racial trauma to deal with. The sad reality is that growing up as a child of immigrant parents in the 90s meant that neither my parents nor my siblings were aware of the concept of trauma. Living in a country where racial minorities were (and still are) powerless was challenging because there was no one to stand up for us. The most common coping mechanism was to pretend that nothing had happened. That’s why I never thought I would have to confront this kind of trauma. That is until I came to Canada to study.
Before I say more, I need to clarify that my experience is a personal one and is deeply shaped by my experience of racism growing up. Most of my fellow students have had or are having a great experience at our school, but I also know that I’m not alone when I tell these stories. It’s just that we are a very small minority with similar past experiences who see things differently because we know what it feels like to be marginalized. We tend to be more sensitive to the feeling of being excluded, rejected, and discriminated against. It’s not always easy to explain or justify these to people who have never experienced any form of discrimination.
When I decided to come to Canada to pursue theological studies, I thought I was walking into a Christian community where I could talk about church all day and meet and learn from mature Christian friends. I was naïve because I thought that a graduate theological school was where people who cared a lot about church were being formed to serve the church even more. And in all fairness, I did find a few friends who were like this at school. However, they were mostly non-white. I had very few white friends because most of the other white students had drawn clear boundaries between white and non-white students. I believe that most of them were not even aware of what they were doing, but it still hurt, and eventually, my self-confidence took a toll. Despite the racism I had experienced in Spain, I had never felt this way before. The difference was that it was usually strangers who would be overtly racist against me back in Spain, but the exclusion I experienced here at a graduate school in Canada was covert and by people who were supposed to be my siblings in Christ. In hindsight, this was probably the reason why the pain I felt was so excruciating. I couldn’t understand why a sister or brother in Christ would do this to me. Were they even Christians? And why doesn’t anyone else notice these things?
As a result, my first two years of school here in Canada were emotionally, mentally, and physically exhausting. Every time I walked into the school building, I had to pray for my heart to be protected (so I wouldn’t be hurt as much) and to be forgiving to others. I didn’t want to hate those who were making me feel that I didn’t belong there, but I found it hard to be around them, and I intentionally avoided being in the same space. Yes, my counselor told me that I needed to take up my own space, and yes, I did go through some trauma therapy. Unfortunately, those counseling sessions were not as helpful as I had wished.
While I was going through an emotionally difficult time at school, my life at church was completely the opposite. I have been blessed to be part of a church that wants to grow as a multicultural church and whose leadership is humbly committed to this vision. It has been a place of refuge, rest, and healing, and I thank God for his divine provision. Yet, this is where I found the disconnect. Is church supposed to be merely a safe bubble where one escapes when things outside are hard? This disconnect felt like déjà vu. It brought back painful memories of something that happened back home a few months ago.
In early March 2024, in Spain, a Korean woman in her late fifties was walking home at around 8:30 in the evening. She is married to a Korean Spanish person, has two daughters who are in their early twenties, and lives with them in a middle-upper-class neighborhood. As she got closer to her home, around ten teenagers sitting in a park threw a bottle of water at her, which reached her shoulder. The same kids had been bothering her family for a while now, although it never got physically close until this incident occurred. She asked them why they were doing this, and they started insulting her and saying all kinds of racial slurs. Then they pushed her around, and as she tried to film their faces with her phone for evidence, they kicked her and slapped her. They also threw sand and water all over her body and bragged about them being minors so the police wouldn’t be able to do anything to them. The incident ended with the woman being taken to the hospital by ambulance, her husband reporting it to the police, and her daughters trying to track them down for three to four hours that night. She was very traumatized, and her family was furious, with her daughters wanting revenge very badly. This is a Christian family that is very devoted to God and to the local Korean church. This is my own cousin’s family.
It feels like I am living in two different worlds. An outer world where we are hurt by behaviors and actions that make us feel we’re not from here, and an inner one (the church) where we do feel we belong, but where we separate ourselves from the outer one. The irony is that God seems to be more clearly present in the church, yet God doesn’t seem to be at work in our hearts for us to operate differently in the outer world. And how do we go about when we step outside of the church? We continue to see those who are racist against us as our enemies. And what about loving our enemies? Oh, they don’t even belong to the category of “enemies to be loved” because they are even further away from our minds and hearts when we are at church.
What is happening?
After years of struggling with the issue of racism, I have recently come to the conclusion that ethnic minority immigrant churches in Spain (like my home church) need to teach and talk about racism within the biblical story of God’s restoration of the whole cosmos (reconciliation with God, with others, with creation and with oneself). We should first help congregants experience God’s reconciling work through Christ and then also reach out to those who are racist against us. I have come to believe that the ministry of reconciliation is key for any church to be missional in its identity. It is not for the faint-hearted nor the impatient, but it can be a powerful witness to the impact of the gospel in our lives, individually and communally. Such witness will be much more effective when someone has been able to see the before and after of a reconciliation process. Yet our home church has been focusing on overseas short-term mission trips for years, instead of reaching out to our own neighborhood. Who are we choosing to witness to, serve, and love, and why? This is precisely the disconnect I was talking about earlier.
Daniel Lee writes in his book Doing Asian American Theology that “without engaging all aspects of our lives for God’s reconciliation, parts of ourselves remain under our own wayward control” (43). It is true that immigrant churches already have a lot to deal with in their everyday ministries, and I do not intend to minimize those. We would probably have to go through different layers of reconciliation before we reach the one on racism. Yet, I believe this is a crucial one, especially for second, third, and future generations who will continue to wrestle with identity and racialization as they grow up in a country where they are invisible in terms of voice and power.
Where does all this leave me then, especially in relation to my school? I recently organized an event for our church as part of my internship, and I talked about how we can move from hospitality to solidarity and finally to mutuality as a multicultural church. As I was preparing for the event, I actually spent more hours reflecting on my experience at this church, where I have learned (and hope to continue learning) so much from our pastors. I finally decided to integrate the idea of mutuality with the humility I have witnessed from them. I ended my talk saying: “living together … means making the effort to be vulnerable and let ourselves be known, and at the same time being gracious when the other can’t fully know all of us, because only God can.” These were God’s words for me as I get ready to step into my last year of the MDiv at my current school. This is God’s reconciling work within me so I can live out my faith in a more integrated way, without having to compartmentalize my life into separate worlds.