“You’re really nice and normal. Not like other intercultural students.”
The words were meant as a compliment. Most of my missionary kid friend group would have taken it as an insult. For me, the comment was merely one of many. Throughout my life, I have been on the receiving end of many oddly similar comments: “You’re nothing like other only children,” “You aren’t at all like other homeschoolers,” or even, growing up overseas, “You aren’t like other Americans.”
It’s a weird position to be in. How should you respond to a compliment that simultaneously insults a huge part of your identity? “Thank you?” “How dare you?” “Pardon me while I collect my numerous thoughts?” It’s an uncomfortable situation to be put in. Yet, especially when it comes to issues of cultural background or identity, I believe it’s a situation that really matters. Not as an excuse to attack, but as an opportunity to turn something hurtful into something beautiful.
There is a lot of context to statements like the one I faced that day. On one hand, the speaker genuinely intends them as a compliment. In my own experiences, with maybe the occasional passive-aggressive exception, the person making the generalization honestly intends for their words to build the other person up. Often these situations come at the hands of friends, family members, peers and others who don’t think through the meaning of their words. That’s what makes them so hard to deal with. It isn’t the person’s opinion of the individual that needs to be addressed. Instead, it is their negative generalization of the others.
I’m not sure I have ever met someone who never ‘othered’ another group, including myself. It is so easy to think that, when several people with something in common rub me the wrong way, that kind of people are just like that. That they are so caught up in themselves and their own way of being that they don’t care about someone else’s. And, even more foundationally, that others who fall into that kind of people will act just in the same way.
When I was younger, I used to think statements like this were alright as long as they were true. In my own teenage brain, it was fine to think that all monocultural Americans were fake in their interactions because many of the monocultural Americans I had met appeared fake to me. But this thinking doesn’t just lead to stereotyping and unfair judgment; it also strips real, breathing human beings of their humanity and value as individuals. It looks at someone in a crowd and says, “Why see you as a person created in the image of God when it is so much easier to see you as part of them?”
Still, knowing that statements like these are harmful is only the first step. Knowing what to do when someone actually puts you in such a situation is much more difficult. When my own awkward moment came last semester, I chose not to address it. I knew the person who made the comment fairly well, and because it came more from a place of slap-happy humor than any malintent, I decided to just let it slide. Looking back now, though, I wish that I could go back and change that conversation. Not to attack her for insulting a group that I am a part of, but to step into a greater purpose. To, through my words and actions, become a connecting point between differing worlds.
It is easy to see being torn between two views or realities as something undesirable. No one likes being ‘stuck’ in the middle, even if we value both sides. But what if, rather than being a curse, we began to see those overlapping worlds as something else? What if, especially for us Christians, being stuck in the middle is actually God’s calling to help bridge the differences that divide his people?
Reflecting on my own life, I am aware that I have faced these situations more than most. Especially as a missionary kid, I have always been followed by the sense of being in between, but that feeling doesn’t just come with locations or cultures. It can be found in belonging to two different friend groups. Two different denominations. Two different political ideologies. I believe that, as Christians, we should step into the discomfort of those “betweens” that God has placed us in, to thank him for the awkward comments that open doors to speaking the truth and, more than anything else, for the calling he has given us to help connect his people within this divisive age.
Photo courtesy of Unsplash.
