the race-wise family
an interview with michelle ami reyes about her new book with helen lee
I am incredibly excited about this new book from my good friend Michelle Ami Reyes and Hellen Lee! I had the chance to read a pre-release copy of The Race Wise-Family: Ten Postures to Becoming Households of Healing and Hope this March and found so much joy in its pages. I sat down recently with Michelle to talk more about it:
[[This transcript has been edited for length]].
Amar: Can you trace the story from the release of your last book, Becoming All Things, to this text?
Michelle: I was actually in the middle of writing, Becoming All Things [when] Helen and I got to talking about everything from book writing to theology to Christian publishing and we stayed in touch. About four months later, so this was June of 2020, I submitted my manuscript to Zondervan — and I got an email from Helen. It felt kind of serendipitous if you will. And she reached out and said, Hey, you know, now that you've submitted your manuscript would love to talk with you about this idea of co-writing a book together that would specifically equip families to raise race-wise and by extension culturally conscious children and you know, There in 2020, there really wasn't that much that we could think of that was written along these lines that was geared for parents.
2020 changed a lot of thinking for folks, you know? 2020 was when we saw the spike in anti-Asian racism. It's when George Floyd was murdered we also saw the murders of Brianna Taylor and the murder of Ahmaud Arbery. Christian parents that year specifically had folks asking, like, how do we talk about what's happening on the news with our kids?
How do we explain racism? How do we engage as Christian families with the issue of racial justice or racial injustice? What is makes me excited about writing this book together is being able to create a practical handbook for parents that really empowers them to give their children basic steps to understanding racial dynamics and how to respond in kingdom mindedness, God's kingdom-mindedness if you will.
A: What scholars and writers influenced your thinking in writing this book?
M: I'll say on the one hand or that I do not know of any books written for Christian families by Asian American Christians, let alone Asian-American Christian women! So I think there's something really special happening in this book, myself being a second-generation Indian American and Helen being a second-generation Korean American.
In terms of scholars and thinkers, there are two theological texts that I come back to. They were texts that were very formative for me in my own journey of forming a theology of race and culture and Scripture. The first is J Daniel Hays’ From Every People and Nation: A Biblical Theology of Race And the second is Dr. Jarvis Williams’ Redemptive Kingdom Diversity: A Biblical Theology of the People of God. And you know, there's a lot of folks—a lot of Christians even—who know about race and culture in terms of social, political, legal theory. But not every Christian can really map out the significance of these topics from Scripture. You know me and you know my work, I'll be the first to argue that we need to be engaging in a wide variety of disciplines to discuss race and culture including cultural anthropology and philosophy.
But as followers of Jesus, if we're not simultaneously deepening our knowledge in God's word, our homiletics for justice and unity in this world will become a bit wonky at times. And so we have to keep coming back to God's word and we need to be in conversation with people writing about God's word on these issues.
For me, it was Hayes that helped me first see that we retain our ethnicity and our culture and the new heavens and new earth. And that was really earth-shattering for me. Because it was the first time that I began to see that my cultural identity has spiritual significance in the here and now. Christians should, in fact, be seeking to live [this] out—this heavenly reality in the here and now. And so the question of course is how do we do this?
My first book Becoming All Things and now The Race-Wise Family with Helen seeks to offer an answer, at least that's our prayer is that it is answering those questions. I hope everyone at some point in their life has that book or that person that helps them see Scripture in this way.
A: What is the future of Christianity in our world? What do you think it looks like? And what does faithful Christian witness look like today?
M: I would say the future of Christianity is brown and we need to start re-imagining a more colorful evangelicalism because in many ways, what we've seen over the last few years in 2022, the “white evangelical” movement has, by and large, become an irrelevant demographic in the United States. You know? White evangelicals are defined more now by their disengagement with certain issues including racial justice, regarding the LGBTQ community, overlooking the plight of women and immigrants, conspiracy theories.
White evangelicalism is a social and cultural entity that black and brown Christians have intentionally disassociated from. And so in their own spaces in line with the Bebbington framework, if you will, Black and brown Christians have developed this anew—even in how they call it evangelical, if you will, it's, it's an orthodox faith that's positioned at the intersection of culture and race. White evangelicals need to be listening and learning from the ways that Black and brown Christians are already developing and re-imagining the future of evangelicalism. It's already being re-imagined the question is, are you listening?
And so, faithful Christian witness for me includes celebrating what it means for me to be a second-generation Indian American woman at the intersection of my faith and culture and making space. We as believers need to better understand that we each express our faith through our own unique cultural expressions. And that's a good and beautiful thing.
What Michelle and Hellen have written is one of a kind. It is practical and concrete but also filled with grace and hope. It is a resource I wish existed years ago.
In a cultural moment when some choose to avoid conversations of racism and injustice at the dinner table, Lee and Reyes call parents to lead their children in these often-divisive conversations and model for them how we might find “healing and hope” in a world where these are both rare to find.
The Race-Wise Family releases on May 17, 2022. You can pre-order it here.