Reclaiming Mixed Identity and Dignity

By Katie Nguyen

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here is a need perhaps now more than ever for the wide range of our beautiful Mixed stories and voices to be heard. Stories often peppered with questions of belonging…Is there space for my whole story? What box do I check? Where do I fit? Why do I fit nowhere and everywhere? Even using the term “Mixed” to describe the multiracial experience is an act of reclaiming dignity and space for ourselves.

As Reclaim begins our journey highlighting and amplifying the wide breadth of the Mixed AAPI Christian experience in America, we want to remind our Mixed brothers and sisters that there is space for you.

Conversations about racial injustice in this country tend to be most often polarized into only Black or White. If it’s a particularly thoughtful conversation, the collective imagination may expand to also include Asian and Latino experiences. However, rolling up our sleeves to wade into the deeper waters of shedding light on the Mixed experience is almost always overlooked. The best we get is an attempted shoehorning into whichever culture the majority folks decide we fit “best” into, often leaving us with the feeling that we don’t truly belong anywhere.

No racial, ethnic, or cultural group is a monolith and bringing in Mixed voices to an already complicated, messy conversation seems like it would only serve to make things messier and even more complicated. However, it’s precisely this perceived weakness where our strength as a community lies. Being Mixed does not mean you are part of one culture and part of another; being Mixed means being fully you, as well as the full mix of the entirety of your ethnic and cultural background. You are wholly, uniquely you: A whole, Mixed, beautiful creation bearing God’s image. Our Lord himself is the embodied epitome of what it is to be Mixed: fully our triune God and fully human. Folks with Mixed backgrounds have the gift of bringing an inherently expanded perspective into any room we walk into simply by being our fully embodied, Mixed selves.

Over the course of the next few months as AACC invites you to engage with us in this expansive, no-size-fits-all topic, we hope you’ll be able to hear elements of other people’s experiences as a Mixed AAPI Christian that resonate with you. We’ll be hearing from different Mixed brothers and sisters in regards to relationships, families, finding your place in church spaces, navigating blending different family traditions, and that’s just the beginning. We also hope we can begin engaging in this storytelling process to widen the perspective of what it means to bring your cultural and ethnic background into conversations about your faith for anyone who reads these articles. Whether you’re here because you resonate with these sentiments, or because you want to seek how to expand your own perspective through listening, we hope this series can serve as a source of encouragement and edification for you.

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Katie is a bi-racial Vietnamese/White pastor, writer, & teacher who leads Sol Life, a joint Youth Ministry between two churches in the historically marginalized Eastside of Austin. She is currently completing an M.A. in Christian Leadership at Dallas Theological Seminary and earned her B.A. in English with teacher certification from Texas State University.