Thickened Skin
A month ago, I went to an anti-racism seminar put on by BYU’s new up and running Office of Belonging. Derwin Gray, former BYU football player and Black pastor of the multiethnic and multigenerational Transformation Church, presented his recently debuted book How to Heal Our Racial Divide.
After the presentation, Gray held a Q&A session where Bella Hsiung, a Taiwanese-American student studying advertising at BYU, asked him a question. “You’ve talked about how people of color can become unoffendable by placing their self worth in Christ and His love but you have also talked about the validity of cultural and historical trauma.” She choked up halfway through and finished by asking, “How do people of color take care of their mental health while still maintaining the love of Christ?”
As a sophomore, Bella has been harboring that choked-up feeling for over a year since starting school here in the fall of 2021. “I either have to be unoffendable, or I stand up for myself and wear myself out emotionally,” Bella said about dealing with microaggressions.
Microaggressions?
How about, “Where are you really from?”
How about having your culture explained to you by a white returned missionary who served in Taiwan?
And how about hearing “You only got into BYU because you’re Asian” from a white student (just joking, of course).
But there is a grain of personal truth in every joke, humor disguising subconscious thoughts and feelings, right?
Mentioned naively and in passing or masked by a joke, these are the subtle but hurtful ways students have indicated to Bella that she stands out on campus–some students’ futile way of trying to connect that does more harm than good.
Though these comments were not intended to be malicious, the impact was hurtful and speaks volumes about many BYU students’ ignorance. This has been a common theme throughout Bella’s experience at BYU: interactions tinged with ignorance–unintentionally.
“People need to learn to walk the line of wanting to learn about my culture and giving it space and respect,” Bella said. “But in such a homogenous environment, it’s tough for the majority to grasp where to not overstep.”
Perhaps ignorance is steeped into the sidewalks and students of campus because of the predominantly white population at BYU and the surrounding congregations. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints is largely Americanized and, thus, largely white, where Utah is viewed as the motherland.
Until 1981, the Book of Mormon read that Lamanites who converted to the Lord “shall be a white and delightsome people” (The Book of Mormon, 2 Nephi 30:6) until “white” was replaced with “pure.” That word choice creates a black and white narrative (literally) that teaches that God cursed the Lamanites with dark skin for being unfaithful. Where does that leave BIPOC church members?
When discussing the Church’s Indian Student Placement Program which ran from 1947 to 2000, In 1960, Spencer W. Kimball said, describing Native American children who were fostered by member families: “The day of the Lamanites is nigh. For years they have been growing delightsome, and they are now becoming white and delightsome, as they were promised.” He claimed that the children who were taken from their reservation and placed in members’ homes had lighter skin than their siblings still living on the reservation.
The Church barred Black men from holding the priesthood, refused to seal Black families for eternity in the temple, and discouraged interracial marriages for years. The Church has acknowledged these grievances but has yet to release a formal apology, leaving BIPOC members to carry the burden of its racist history and, in turn, forcing them to develop a thick skin.
Because of the Church’s clear history of racism, being a racial minority in a Church setting–both on and off BYU campus–presents Bella with a minefield of microaggressions that she is forced to navigate.
These challenges were especially pervasive in Bella’s freshman ward. Wanting to connect, the Bishop would only ask her about the other Asian people in the ward and clumsily included anecdotes about his Korean friend, despite Bella having no connection to Korean culture. A member of the ward asked her if she spoke Japanese after learning she was Taiwanese. Sure, A for effort, yet it left Bella feeling reduced to her race. Are these the only ways people can connect with me? she thought to herself.
“I felt like people just saw me as the Asian girl,” explained Bella.
After a year of being the “Asian girl,” Bella found the courage to speak up during the Q&A section of Dr. Gray’s seminar “Creating Color-Blessed Conversations,” desperate for an answer on balancing the juxtaposition of staying unoffendable while validating hurtful experiences.
Dr. Gray responded first with empathy, validating the difficulty of being a person of color at a predominately white institution (PWI). He then told Bella that when your self-worth is in Christ, it doesn't matter what others say about you. In a PWI milieu, multifaceted expressions of prejudice have endless ways of creating trauma, so it’s crucial to unplug, disengage, and spend time around supportive people who understand your point of view. “Just because you go to a [religious] PWI doesn’t mean you weren’t created in God’s image,” said Gray.
After her question, a handful of students came up and embraced Bella. Dr. Gray even offered to pray for her. As someone who was able to close my eyes with them and hear the prayer for Bella, I can attest that it was a special experience–a beautiful testimony of the ways we can lift up and advocate for one another but also a testimony that the fight for racial equality is not yet over, especially at BYU.
“It was a very spiritual moment for me,” said Bella. “A stranger praying for me because he saw me struggling was a huge testimony builder for me.”
It’s time to turn the page on letting racist comments slide just because they were said unintentionally. Although institutional Church racial bans are no longer in effect, there are still cultural gaps stemming from unintentional offenses that still need mending. Rather than making BYU students of color develop an unoffendable thick skin, we all should let our actions be the catalyst for positive change. Institutions take time to change, especially religious ones. Institutional changes will follow our own, so every member of the Church and student at BYU has a duty to unlearn our biases, recognize the impact of our words, and lift up underrepresented voices. Leaving BYU better than we found it and cultivating a spirit of intentionality requires work from everyone. May we all be willing to commit to that today. In the name of Jesus Christ, amen.