Yesterday the Question of Identity (QOI) series stated with a banner statement I made about my identity.
That statement is the result of a number of years wrestling over the various appeals certain factors make for defining me. My nationality, my ethnicity, the football team I support, my church affiliation even my family name.
Here in the UK it’s Black History Month over October and between 2000 and 2009 I was involved in one shape or form in contributing to events involved with the month. Discovering more about your origins is a worthwhile task. Especially living in a country that won’t have it on the curriculum, it is important to do something to raise awareness that there is another narrative than the one set in the history classes that focus understandably on home interests.
What continues to concern me, however, is how that element of the identity and its links to the cruelty of slavery and the ramifications has completely dominated people’s concept of their identity. So they are not just a man or a woman, but they are a black man and a black woman and with that comes a whole heap of baggage with certain required responses to those within the ‘black’ community and those beyond it.
There is much to be grateful about the Caribbean and African influences that have shaped the community to which I belong, but it is not to be deified and set up as an absolute in itself.
For me it is not worth fighting or dying for. My relationship with Jesus is one that allows me to feel comfortable in my own skin and in my own cultural heritage, but actually take solace and place prominently my spiritual identity. That is certainly worth dying for, and it is certainly worth living for.
All those tribal, ethnic, cultural, national identities are temporal and in as much as they have beautiful things to offer in their diversity and contribution to the picture of humanity, they must not be used as an end in themselves. There is more to life than my nationality, skin colour, cultural background and in the light of Christ these things are routes to celebrating the glorious creativity of God for His glory.
For His Name’s Sake
Shalom
dmcd
Life With CD 