There is something distinct and soberingly otherworldly- in a very raw kind of way, that happens when you stand in a place where history was buried.
You feel the weight not just of what occurred, but of all the years people were asked to move on as if it hadn’t- as if a humans very dignity and rights weren’t dismantled, as if their stories didn’t matter, as if their consent and dignity were less than.
In April I joined a team from Kensington Church and Crossroads, led by Andrew Kim and Ben Shat walking in the footsteps of historic Asian American history, in the footsteps of very real and pivotal American civil rights. One such place visited was the grounds of Manzanar National Historic Site in California, surrounded by the Sierra Nevada on one side and decades of enforced silence on the other. As we walked the remaining grounds of the site, something in our group shifted. One could truly feel the longing and pain of a history erased in your bones, its stark contrast a historical stain in the beauty of the mountains around you.
Manzanar was one of ten concentration camps where the United States government forcibly incarcerated over 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II, the vast majority of them U.S. citizens. Entire families were given days to abandon their homes, businesses, and communities. They were relocated to wind-swept, barbed-wire enclosures in the desert, guarded by armed soldiers, stripped of their constitutional rights by Executive Order 9066. The word the government used was “relocation.” The reality was incarceration.
What strikes you standing there is not just the injustice itself, but the silence that followed it. Yet, history is repeating itself today like a silent scream even Edvard Munch would be hesitant to paint.
For further reflection, see this NPR article or the above ACLU piece.
Erasure is Its Own Kind of Violence
For decades, this history was not taught in schools. Many Japanese American survivors did not speak of it to their own children, carrying the weight of both the trauma and the shame that was wrongfully placed on them. The broader Asian American community, vast and diverse as it is, found its civil rights story consistently sidelined in America’s public reckoning with race- the model minority myth placed upon their shoulders. The broader civil rights movement of segregation, Jim Crow, and the liberation of black lives maybe gets a chapter in our history books. It’s why spaces like our Living UNDIVIDED cohort, and our history portions, carry such impact and weight. But, the relocation camps of WWII? If they’re mentioned at all, they get a paragraph- a footnote in the broader war narratives.
This is what erasure does. It rarely just harms the community whose story is swallowed, it harms all of us. It harms our very humanity.
When we don’t know the full story of what this country has done and what it is capable of, we lose the ability to recognize those patterns when they reemerge. We lose the capacity for empathy toward communities currently facing what others faced before them. Erasure makes all of us less human, less awake, less able to be the neighbors and leaders God is calling us to be.
The Asian American civil rights story, from the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 to the incarceration of Japanese Americans to the racialized violence that spiked during the COVID-19 pandemic, is not a footnote to the American story. It is woven into its fabric. And when we refuse to see it, we develop a kind of moral blindness that costs everyone.
But friends, if you know me at all you know my cry into the ether is often one of “Where are you, Lord? Where are you going?” I asked such questions as we traveled to the Manzanar gravesite memorial for lives lost, and then to the buried site where the camps church once stood. As we stood in a circle amidst the bramble and the bushes, with juice in plastic cups and crackers from the local Walgreens for communion, a clear theological word for this moment arose: injustice. And there within it shone a theological response: witness.
From Erasure to Empathy
One of the things we talk about in the UNDIVIDED community is that formation is not just intellectual, but it is embodied in our witness as believers. Something happens when you go somewhere, when you stand in the physical space where history unfolded and allow yourself to be present to it rather than ignorantly or apathetically protected from it.
Our group walked the west coast grounds of civil rights together, across different racial and ethnic backgrounds, and what we encountered was an invitation to move past just mere history. It was an invitation to let the pain of people we didn’t know become something that could live in us, not to paralyze us, but to sharpen our empathy and enlarge our understanding of what it means to pursue justice in the twenty first century as followers of Jesus.
Empathy that has only ever been theoretical will eventually fail you. It gets tested when the issue feels distant or politically inconvenient, when the community affected doesn’t look like yours, or when the cost of standing with them suddenly becomes real. I’d love to call you back to the Living UNDIVIDED cohort one more time in this moment, to a time where our team quotes Aboriginal activist Lilla Watson:
“If you have come here to help me you are wasting your time, but if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”
What forms empathy that holds is very often encounter, through presence by choosing again and again not to look away.
That is, in the most simplistic form, what a tour like this is for.
Heaven on Earth Isn’t Someday; it’s the Practice We Choose Today.
At UNDIVIDED, we believe that Jesus-followers carry the hope of a Kingdom where every person’s dignity is honored and human flourishing is possible. That isn’t just an eschatological hope, as something we wait for while the world around us burns. It is a present-tense calling. We are meant to embody activation of healing now, imperfectly and faithfully, in every space we occupy.
Standing at Manzanar, I felt that call acutely.
To live the UNDIVIDED way is to stay in the flow of what God is already doing in reconciling heaven and earth. It means refusing to let the divisions of history have the last word, but rather informs how we lament, and shapes how we use our voice today. It means doing the work of seeing, lamenting, learning, and acting, not as a program or a curriculum, but as a way of being in the world. It means letting the stories of communities different from our own actually land on us, reshape us, and move us toward one another rather than away.
The Kingdom of God is multiracial, every tribe and tongue at the altar worshiping the one true Lord of all. His table is long and everyone belongs. Getting there requires that we do the hard, holy work of uncovering what has been buried, mourning it honestly, and then letting that mourning become fuel for repair.
That is exactly what we experienced walking the grounds of Manzanar, and beyond across the west coast, from the groundbreaking of LA’s Filipinotown to the civil rights laid roads of San Francisco’s International Hotel- this beautiful mosaic of grief and hope was held together like locked arms in the fight of repair.
The silver lining I held in my grief was knowing that this trip was quite practically the beginning of something, and in no way the end. We are currently in conversation with our partners on the Asian American Civil Rights Tour team about what it could look like to open this experience to UNDIVIDED partners in the coming years, bringing cohort participants and church leaders into this kind of embodied, formative journey together.
While we aren’t quite ready to announce official registration details, we are dreaming, and we want you to be part of that dream.
If the story of this trip is stirring something in you, stay close. Sign up for our newsletter at undivided.us, and watch for what is coming. Come dream in community with me at our next Gathering.
Living UNDIVIDED isn’t about having the right answers, the right Instagram bios, or signs in our yards. It’s much more about how we choose to stay in the fight for healing, staying at the table, and staying in the flow of what God is doing to make all things new.
That work is not finished. In fact, in many ways it is just beginning.
Jasmin Sosa | New Partnership Development Manager