The black church taught our family the meaning of han. #Ferguson

This is where we return to the black church. In 2010, Allen Temple Baptist Church hosted the widow and son of Tien Sheng Yu, one of the Chinese American men beaten to death on the streets of Oakland by African American youth, for an act of public reconciliation. As Allen Temple’s website puts it:

The Prophetic Justice Ministry reached out to the bereaved widow and to activists from Oakland’s China Town who were also concerned about the media’s manufacturing and manipulation of conflicts between the two communities.  Within a week of the initial incident our human response to this problem led us to invite them to our worship services for prayer and expressions of condolence from our congregation. Our Vice-Mayor Ms. Jean Quan attended with Ms.Yu and leaders from the Asian business and law enforcement fields.  This event was not covered by the larger media, however, it was extensively covered in Asian print, electronic, and cyber media.

At the service, congregation members who had been victims of crime were asked to stand together with Yu’s widow.

That was a profoundly performative act. In the same way that the Rev. J. Aflred Smith, Sr., taught my family the meaning of han, the congregation at Allen Temple Baptist Church said to Yu’s widow and son that han is not merely an Asian American concept. It names the pain that we all share as people of color, and as James Baldwin repeatedly pointed out, this means that white people share it too:

The only thing white people have that black people need, or should want, is power — and no one holds power forever. White people cannot, in the generality, be taken as models of how to live. Rather, the white man is himself in sore need of new standards, which will release him from his confusion and place him once again in fruitful communion with the depths of his own being. And I repeat: the price of the liberation of the white people is the liberation of the blacks — the total liberation, in the cities, in the towns, before the law, and in the mind. (The Fire Next Time, p. 341-342 in the Library of America edition of Baldwin: Collected Essays).

‘We cannot be free until they are free,’ Baldwin stresses elsewhere (p. 295). We know that we are not free because we have han. We don’t know how to get rid of the han because we are stuck in the private consensus. The private consensus demands that we balance the rights of private communities, which is another way of saying that we must continue to repress the han by balancing it out among special interest groups, of which racialized communities are supposedly a part. This balance is threatened by continued public reporting, which means that journalists in Ferguson have experienced the state of exception from the police as much as the African American protesters and their allies.

For us to be free at last, the private consensus must be unraveled. How? you ask. My answer: maybe the black church should teach us.

Oh, and I didn’t wait to write about Ferguson. See here.

#TPCIU