So how does the church which lives into the missio Dei understand “others”? When I was a child we often sang a song which clearly marked that humanity is divided into four races as we sang “red and yellow, black and white they are precious in His sight, Jesus loves the little children of the world”. The “other” in this case is clearly marked by the color of skin as a distinction of what many call “race”. For many years (primarily the mid 1800s to the mid to late 1900s), Anthropologists categorized human groups in terms of "race" on the basis of visible physical characteristics, such as skin color, height, hair and facial features. The common categories used were, "Negroid, Mongoloid and Caucasoid", and "black, brown, yellow, red and white" . At first glance, classifications like "white, black, brown, red, yellow", seem to reflect a natural phenomenon, linked to geography in which physical characteristics reflect one’s origin. Thus, “the children of the world” were easily distinguished in these four categories, linked to geography, so that we understood that Red people were native American, Yellow were Asian, Black were African and White were north American and/or European. We thus linked this song and these “racial” categories to mission activity to these exotic, and needy people “over there”.
There is no denying that physical characteristics correspond to geographic location and physical characteristics of people from Japan, for example are easily distinguished from people from Nigeria. During the colonialist time, however, value of superiority or inferiority was attached to these characteristics, thus giving a justification for dehumanizing humans to the point of slavery, or killing others in acts of war. From the mid 1800’s leading up to Nazi Germany a plethora of scholars perpetuated theories that race was an indicator of value or status. In an address at Syracus University Marshall H. Segall notes that famous early "scientific racists" were non-anthropologists, like Huston Stewart Chamberlain ("Foundations of the Nineteenth Century"), le Comte A. de Gobineau ("Essay on the inequality of human "races", 1884), and Hans Gunther ("The Racial Elements of European History") in which Gobineau makes qualitative differentiation in race when we states that a "race" is "marked off from every other human group through its own proper combination of bodily and mental characteristics."
Arthur de Gobineau's essay, The Inequity of Human Races included such extreme statements as "for a very considerable number of human beings it has been impossible and will be forever to make even the first step toward civilization." and it is impossible "to overcome the natural repugnance which man, like animals, harbors for miscegenation." (Gobineu 1915: 28)
Representative of the rhetoric leading up to Nazi Germany which also demonstrates a qualitative differentiation based on “race” and which places his own identity in a decisively elevated state is that of Nazi race theorist, Herman Gauch who stated "non-Nordics are more closely allied to monkeys and apes than to Nordics.... Non-Nordic man occupies a midway position between Nordic men and animals, next to the apes. ... he is not a man at all...., but only a transition." (Gauch,1934:281)
Even after the atrocities of history seen in human slavery, Jewish extermination, and ethnic cleansing, which arose out of these type of racial theories, and even after the concept of race which distinguishes humanity into separate races has been refuted on a large scale, race continues to be one of the most divisive and destructive aspects of modern society.
To date, Christians (as well as society in general) struggle with how to perceive “the other” in a globalizing world in which the boundaries between “us” and “them” are not always clear. More often than not, these differences are based on perceptions we have heard, seen or learned from photos, novels and other sources rather than perceptions based on actual self encounter.
In White by Law, (Lopez, 1996) Ian Lopez describes legal cases from the first part of the 20th century which worked to define who was white enough to naturalize as a citizen. To adequately describe ethnicity in terms of White or Black is impossible. “Whiteness” Blackness or any other “colorness” for that matter is a complex undertaking. “Races are not biologically differentiated groupings but rather social constructions. Race exists alongside a multitude of social identities that shape and are themselves shaped by the way race is given meaning.” (Lopez,xiii). What is white or black therefore depends on many factors beyond the Melanin that is present in one’s skin pigmentation. The lengths in legal terms as well as other terms to define who is white based on physical or phenotypical definitions therefore is a false homogenizing category. According to a study conducted by Syracuse University, “World-wide research on genetic diversity shows that all human populations possess practically the same genetic variants; we all have the same ancestors,” and yet we are each amazingly unique.
According to this study, it is estimated that 80 billion human beings have lived on Earth over the time since our common origin. With the exception of true identical twins, never have any two among them have had exactly the same genetic heritage. Thus, each is unique.
To each generation, the parents transmit a novel combination of their genetic variants to their children. This "genetic brewing" results theoretically in as many possible individuals as there are combinations of all the genetic characteristics.
To therefore, simply divide humanity in four colors or to try to make qualitative categorization of “others” by the hue of their skin, the texture of their hair or any other description other than social or cultural constructs is oversimplification and erroneous at best.
The present reality in which many perceptions of others are based upon virtual rather than real sources does not preclude that historically society has based perceptions of those considered different from subjective sources which are influenced by motives other than objective knowledge of people. Denise Buell notes how those who viewed early Christians from outside Christianity perceived them as so peculiar that they saw them as a new ethnicity (Buell, 2005). Some have noted how Jewish people were perceived as a threat to power.(Hannaford 1996: 100ff). Often as a country goes to war, it will find ways to portray the enemy as animal like or not human in order to justify an attack. As a means to financial benefit, and progress, Africans were portrayed as cursed (Goldenberg,2003,Haynes,2002) and less than human in order to justify inhuman treatment even to the point of people such as Ota Benga who was put on display in the Bronx zoo or the countless number of men, women and children who were rationalized to be sub human and taken by force to serve those who decided that “others” must be inferior. When the nuances in humanity have been portrayed in qualitative terms, the result has been oppression, dehumanization, genocide, slavery and death.
The complexity of these realities coupled with perceptions of “the other” that come from a changing landscape of tourism and short-term mission present a formidable challenge for Christian mission as well as the churches’ ability to be a redemptive community. In many ways a distorted understanding of ethnicity has been fostered through the gaze of camera lenses, and through popular portrayals in the media and through short-term experiences.
Ethnicity and Current Trends in Mission Such as Short-Term Missions
In his book, The Rumour of Calcutta: Tourism, Charity and the Poverty of Representations, anthropologist John Hutnyk (1996) focuses a study on those who visit Calcutta. Hutnyk provides a wealth of parallel theory and implications to short-term missions since Hutnyk focuses on people who travel to Calcutta on a budget, mostly from North America, Europe and Australia. Like short-term mission travelers, budget travelers (or backpack travelers) come not to bask in the glory of the Raj, but to explore the underbelly of Asia and to do some volunteer work in order to alleviate their guilt. Hutnyk explains that although these travelers have the best of motives, like short-term mission travelers, they do not question the way they frame their exposure to Calcutta. They frame or represent what they see based on what Hutnyk calls “the rumours of Calcutta”. He states, “they have heard the ‘rumour of Calcutta, the imagery by which the city is known. For them the city is already enframed” (Hutnyk 1996, 163). This framing is similar to Edward Said’s argument that the colonializers often ‘orientalize’ the other based on ‘the rumour’. In a similar vein is Robert Priest’s article, Missionary Positions: Christian, Modernist, Postmodernist (Priest, 2001) which questions the ‘rumour’ related to the origins of term ‘missionary position’ as a means of orientalism or a way of enframing a ‘rumoured’ perception of missionaries. In the case of Calcutta, Hutnyk points out that budget travelers have a perception before they arrive (the rumour) which provides the framework by which they will experience the city. Similar to John Urry’s (2002) perception of the ‘tourist gaze’, Hutnyk says that this ‘enframing’ leads to a problematic aspect in which third-world tourism participates in a voyeuristic consumption of poverty (1996, 11). This consumption by what Hutnyk calls budget travelers or backpack travelers, who are parallel to short-term mission travelers, includes photographs and souvenirs, but also entails ‘good works,’ experiences, and cultural capital. The ties between Hutnyk’s work and short-term missions are unmistakable and disturbing. The interesting connection related to this study is that this class of tourists which Hutnyk describes are people who are critical of what he calls “modern lodge” tourists who are explicitly seeking their own comfort and a sense of similarity to their home. He also points out that these backpacking travelers are also in search for ‘authentic experiences’ (1996, 9), and a ‘once in a lifetime experience,’ which is often warped by ‘enframing,’. (Hutnyk )
The implications of how others are ‘enframed’ has impact on short-term as well as long term missions. A recent research project conducted by Robert Priest amongst MDiv students at ATS accredited schools (Priest, 2008) revealed that two thirds of the students surveyed had been on a short-term mission trip and 97% projected that they would be participating in a trip in the near future. With such a high percentage of people participating in short-term missions, it is highly probable that many of the people who enter missions as a life career will have had at least one short-term mission experience in their past. If Hutnyk’s thesis is correct, many of those who go on trips enframe their experience through a camera lens that perceives an aspect of ethnicity that will either reinforce the “rumour” of the location or in the worse case scenarios will repeat historical “errors” of dehumanizing or un dignifying others through a portrayal of the aspects of people which give social capital (or financial capital through giving) to the visitor at the expense of the captured image. Since many of these images and stories which are framed through these perspectives are repeated as short-term mission participants return to their home churches to report, the “rumour” is perpetuated until the myth of “the other” is greater than the real other.
A further implication may be for those who decide to make missions their life “career”. When ethnicity has become a backdrop to a personal experience, it is a challenge to transition from seeing people as scenery through a camera lens or as a mechanical means toward social capital toward entering into an incarnational relationship with real people.
Perhaps the greatest challenge for understanding “the other” in the 21st century will be for Christians to experience location and humanity ‘mano a mano’ in ways that work toward shaloam through incarnational models of living in context which are distinct models in which others are perceived with grace and with reality.
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