Insagram live with Rebecca Wheeler on Collective Identity and Advent

Danielle kicks off by asking Rebecca what “collective identity” means to her. 

As a Black American woman she has a sense of herself as a part of a community that is larger than herself. It is a community she can rely on and one that she feels a strong sense of responsibility to the collective as a whole and the people in it. 

Danielle wonders what collective identity mean for the Mexican Americans community, feeling that Latinx or Latin Community is too big. “It’s more specific to country and culture and ethnicity…” in the way our identity id developed and in the way we think about Advent.

Rebecca is mindful as Danielle is speaking around the American or US way of thinking around race and ethnicity. There’s a tendency to put things into boxes, she says the census is a perfect example: there’s no place for you to identify as “Mexican” or “Cuban” or “Puerto Rican”, you have to pick Hispanic. She said she refers to herself as a Black American Woman and for African American, there is the loss from the transatlantic slave trade of the ability to name a particular country or tribe. She’s aware of the differences in their stories and each of their ability to name who they belong to, who’s their tribes. 

Rebecca says “Black American Woman” when she identifies herself because she has been to the continent of Africa more than once. She’s knows that her roots are in African but she is aware that there is something distinctly American about her orientation to the world. She remembers visiting Nigeria and when they began to de-board the plane, her blue-covered American Passport gave her preference to exit the plane first. “It might be the first time in my life I’ve ever had a sense of privilege.” She had the distinct and keen awareness that this was because she was American. In the US she doesn’t feel privileged as a Black person living here. And while she cognitively knows her roots and ancestry are in Africa, she is very aware of the second part of the hyphen (in African-American.)

Danielle mentioned an article that Rebecca sent her saying, “Collective identity refers to the shared definition of a group that derives from its members common interests, experiences and solidities. It is the social movements answer to who we are locating the movement within the field of political actors.” Danielle remarks it is both very specific as well as nuanced. 

For Rebecca, she remembers turning on the news to see that at the death of Philando Castile, right on the heels of Alton Sterling, that there was a shooting of police officers in Dallas by a Black male. She remembers feeling those three events like it was her own family. Even though she never met Philando Castile or Alton Sterling; she’s wasn’t in Dallas… Her sense of belonging in and to this community, seeing something happen to any member of the community, whether they act or are acted upon, she feels the sense of “this affects me” and needing to understand her reaction and responsibility. How do I pass what I know of this to my two teenage children?

Rebecca came of age when Affirmative Action was in it’s heyday, and when the country elected the first African American to the Oval office. There is almost a sense of perhaps we have already reached these moments of overcoming, that perhaps the racial violence as she has known through the Civil Rights Movement is over. But then Treyvon Martin. Then Sandra Brown. Then Michael Brown. And a long list of names. So when it came to Philandro Castile and Alton Sterling, she knew she needed to talk to her kids, because she is raising them in a time when racial violence against them is a very real thing. 

At that time of Philandro, her son was still a kid (8 years old) and she thought “I have more time, he’s just a little kid.” Except Tamir Rice was her son’s age when he lost his life in park as a police officer mistook his nerf gun for a real gun. Rebecca had a sense was that perhaps she didn’t have to talk to her daughter because “girls are more safe then black men” except Sandra Bland was a Black Woman (and also a member of her same sorority Sigma Gamma Ro, a historically Black). The sense on the morning of Philandro was that “I am out of time and I need to educate my kids about the world that they grew up in. It’s looking like Barak Obama is more of an anomaly and a Trevon Martin is more of a common occurrence in their world. That is where collective identity hit both as a trauma and a need for a person, who belongs to a community that is victimized in that trauma, to actually protect my kids and arm them with a sense of awareness so they can protect themselves.” Rebecca says this is a part of collective identity development: How do we make meaning out of the traumas we see? And how do we pass and interpret that meaning to the next generation?

To make meaning of the Trauma for Danielle, from her cultural perspective, when Adam Toledo was murdered in the Chicago area, with the exception of the massacre outside of a Walmart in El Paso, it was the first experience she had where she knew someone’s name. Usually we don’t know their names, thinking of the lynchings along the border, usually there are no names unless you’re in the thick of it. Collective identity and orientation around trauma from her perspective has been around how do we bury it? How do we hide it? How do we make sure the story is not re-told because at some level they cannot bear that it happened in the first place.

Having this conversation illustrates the difference in their collective identity experience and orientation to trauma, offering a broader context to understand what’s happening internally for individuals as well as the White Supremacy in the world. 

Culturally we respond differently to trauma, Rebecca says. And each culture calls its members to respond. In the African American community there is an active campaign called “Say her Name” (or Say Their Names) and it is a call for the community to tell the stories over and over again so the name doesn’t disappear. This comes from a want and a need to control their own narrative for fear that the Establishment will tell a false/untrue narrative. This causes her to ask both, what is the larger establishment asking us to understand the narrative to mean? And what is our cultural orientation asking us to do about the narrative?

Rebecca returns to Danielle’s comment about “the names you don’t know” referring to the hundreds of kids at the US-Mexico border who are separated from the parents and are lost in the foster care system in the US; we don’t know their names or where they are or even the names of the relatives they travelled with to the US … We cannot reconnect them with their family. She wonders, how will we metabolize this in the generations to come, the generation of kids that were lost in that space?

Danielle said what she wanted Rebecca to say to her is that collective identity doesn’t involved trauma and there is a pure form of it, but what she is hearing from her is that collective identity is nuanced and connected. There are parts of collective identity and trauma that are together and painful, and yet we’ve created ways to deal with it. At the same time, it’s important to know how trauma has shaped collective identities. 

Rebecca said there probably is a pure form of collective identity that isn’t touched by trauma but what’s hard to orient identity around is dealing with a hyphenated existence: “African-American.” For her that means a people who exist only out of the trauma of slavery, but for that there would be no orientation African-American. Rebecca said it’s hard to imagine a collective identity that isn’t marked by trauma and she admits that is coming out of her story. Its just hard to imagine an identity that isn’t borne out of trauma. 

It’s the same for Danielle and yet she wants something different. Longing for something different feels especially connected to Advent. For Mexican-American community there’s a sense of “we were here first;” indigenous communities colonized by Europeans and then recolonized/colonized again by the so-called “United States Americans.” How do you find your identity in that? It paralyzing: that’s where we come from but where do we go from here?

Talking about the good or generous parts of collective identity, Rebecca turns to “what’s on the table at Christmas dinner?” For her it is a reflection of my identity as African-American: macaroni and cheese, collard greens, candied yams. These recipes are connected to a long line of Black women who learned to make something fantastic out of nothing. When she makes these dishes, it is a shout out to these women (Mama Bland in West Virginia!). The table is a reflection of cultural identity and pays homage as a celebration, but it comes with a hint of trauma. 

For Danielle, she didn’t know about Posadas growing up because her family had become Evangelical and viewed Catholic as not Christian. There is a Catholic Tradition that is starting actually right now on these dates where you go to someone’s house and there is a call and response of singing asking if there is any room in the inn, the house that you’re visiting. There’s usually candles and a gathering of people singing at a house and once the singing is done you go in the house and eat or have a traditional drink. You do this over a period of nights, going to different houses on different nights and it’s a retelling of the story of Mary and Joseph were trying to look for space. Danielle thinks when you put this tradition up against what’s happening with the immigrants at the border or displaced Mexican Americans, it feels so relevant; it’s this migrant pattern of looking for space; “where is there space for us? Where can we come eat?” When she started participating in this tradition a few years ago it was like a deep breath. 

For Rebecca, that moment came 5-6 years ago when she was listening to a sermon by a Black preacher who re-told the story of Jesus from the perspective of a Man-of-Color who was wrongly accused, wrongly convicted and then wrongly executed. For the first time she understood her orientation as a Christian in a different sense. She recalls in Scripture it says we have a God that understands us; that we have a high priest that has been where we are, so when we go before Him, we can go with confidence. To understand that Jesus was the first Man-of-Color who was wrongly accused, wrongly convicted and then wrongly executed… makes the following Tamir Rices, Michael Browns, Treyvon Martins take on an entirely different orientation for her. There’s a sense that she follows a God that understands the pain of that story, the depth of what it costs and this has opened up Advent for her in a new way. 

Danielle said she had not thought of it in that way, but the idea that our cultures can add a search for belonging and an identity that Jesus came into the world and was set up from birth to have to endure this injustice. This changes the story of his birth. It changes the impact. 

Rebecca agrees.

Danielle continues, it changes the legacy that would have left with Mary and Joseph… Joseph was the adopted dad. 

“Yeah, the baby daddy.” Rebecca adds. The other thing that comes to her mind in a conversion story of an East Indian man, who talked about what drew him to Jesus was the story of the nativity. As a Black American with a Baptist background, the nativity is about Mary, Joseph and Jesus. But this man the thing that drew him to the Gospel was the three kings of the Orient who traveled far. In that reference what he saw is the traditions of his people and their deep reverence and understanding of the stars and the celestial bodies that comes out of the religions that are native to his people. In that one small piece of the story that often gets over looked in an American Orientation, this man saw an invitation to his entire people to go on the search for the child. And when they reached him, they would be welcomed.  Rebecca has never forgotten that story and how amazed she is that someone from an Eastern country saw themselves in the story, a piece that she may skip over. 

Danielle asks, what does this tells us about the importance of collective identity in engaging not only our own stories but also the advent story and how we actually do need to hear from one another?

Rebecca is struck by Revelation 7:9 where it says that every tribe and every tongue will be present at the thrown of grace. What is noted in this passage is ethnic identity and collective identity – of tribes and people groups. We noted not by gender or age not even by faith but by our collective identity based on ethnicity. Jesus shows Himself in each people group that is unique. Somehow my picture of God is incomplete if every tribe and every tongue is not present, and the story of how God shows himself in that culture is not told, I’m missing something of the God I serve. What Rebecca learned from Danielle today from her orientation as a Mexican woman is the story of looking for a place to belong, as one as an invitation to an immigrant. I learned something new about Jesus today and that makes my picture of God a little more fuller. This is my sense of what we need.

Danielle says this is the beauty of being in community. It is invitational to know where you come from and it’s an invitation to know Jesus, your faith, and to know your own face more. It’s not the circle of people facing out with swords saying you can’t come in.

Rebecca says, yes an invitation to know my own face AND an invitation to know your face better. It’s also an invitation to know the hands, voice and face of God in a more complete sense because of the way He shows himself in different cultures.

Well, first I guess I would have to believe that there was or is an actual political dialogue taking place that I could potentially be a part of. And honestly, I'm not sure that I believe that.