An Intersectional Response to Esther Meek
The beauty of what Esther Meek has invited us into through her essay “The Other” is a consideration of the interdependence of knowing. Pointing us to the relationship between a mother and child, she reminds us that we need one another, that ultimately knowing requires a relationship with an other: “Knowing in its natal and native form requires the other, responds to the other, honors the other, and obediently serves the other.”[1]
Even at this very beginning of life, a baby is rooted in a history and social context and yet blissfully unaware. In fact, being blissfully unaware is part of the gift of being a baby—babies do not need to know their history and context. And yet, how a mother and child interact is deeply affected by the social, historical, and cultural contexts into which the baby is born.
I was born and raised in Hawaiʻi[2] to parents who were themselves children of immigrants. I am third generation Chinese American; my grandparents moved their lives from our ancestral home in South China to islands in the middle of the Pacific. My maternal grandfather initially came as a teenager with his father to work for economic reasons in the 1930s, as they were affected by the Japanese invasion of China. My paternal grandparents came by boat in the mid-1950s with my father and his two sisters in tow, having fled Communist China for political reasons by way of Macau, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.
Although I am only beginning to learn more about the details of my own family’s history in indirect ways, the more I learn, the more I am able to see how the time and place my grandparents were from and the time and place (milieu) I was born into shape the way I see and understand the world around me.[3] Meek’s assertion that knowing is interdependent means that the ways I come to know—in the here and now—are shaped by those who came before me and those presently around me, whether I am conscious of it or not.
Yet how aware are we of our own histories and stories? And just as importantly, how curious are we about the histories and stories of those around us? A posture of being curious and willing to share one’s story with another may require, as Meek urges, a philosophical awareness, but I believe we also need to consider and continue to develop an interdependent self-awareness, that is, an awareness that takes account of our positionality and social location in relation to an other.[4]
Who am I in relation to you? What do we know of each other? And what is the nature of our relationship to each other? It is with this interdependent self-awareness that we situate and posture ourselves within the structural and historical realities in which we find ourselves. These realities include various constellations of power relations that thus require us to view ourselves in a multidimensional—an intersectional—manner so that we do not collapse into well-trodden, existing patterns of the status quo. Such collapsing prevents us, despite our best desires, from moving toward a kingdom vision of healing and shalom, a vision that honors the dignity and humanity of all. Although Meek does not explicitly say this in her essay, what I hear undergirding her words is Jesus’s subversive or queer vision of the kingdom, particularly as he shares in his Sermon on the Mount (see Matthew 5–7).[5] I resonate deeply with Meek’s call to recognize the necessity of the other among us—indeed we need each other more than ever if we want to see “effective efforts to bring shalom [and hope] to the world” and to be a part of the “healing of our time.”[6]
In light of all this, my response here to Meek calls us to an intersectional self-awareness of our social location and positionality. Understanding how our historical, social, and cultural contexts affect the way we see the world, our place in it, and our associated privilege and power are all a part of how we relate to others, know others, and can be known by an other. I hope to encourage conscious and intentional choices so that we can collectively and collaboratively realize what Meek is inviting us toward, both societally and among the community at The Seattle School of Theology & Psychology—to be rebuilders and healers.
Multidimensional Understanding: Our Historicity and Intersectionality
Unpacking the call for an interdependent self-awareness of our social location and positionality includes at least two main types of multidimensional understanding: (1) knowing our history (i.e., who we are and where/who we’re from) and (2) recognizing that our place in this world occupies multiple positions at once that correspond to a level of power and agency (i.e., intersectionality). By way of definition, an individual’s social location describes a combination of factors, including gender, race, social class, age, religion, ability, sexual orientation, nationality, and geographic location. An intersectional approach recognizes that these factors of our social location are not mutually exclusive but that they interact and intersect with each other, resulting in varying levels of privilege and penalty or social inequality.[7] This way of understanding our social location invites us to see ourselves and others as multidimensional beings; I am not just an Asian American woman but an educated cisgender professor. There exists within my own social location and positionality both power, privilege, and also places where I feel the tension of social inequality.
When speaking of social location, I suggest that knowing our history—who we are and who we are from—is important as it initially orients us to our place in this world and how we see the world. Unless we examine and choose to learn about our own history, we take it for granted and see it as normal—that is, perhaps, until we encounter someone else who isn’t like us! My social locatedness as an Asian American woman from Hawaiʻi means I am a product of a particular family history, as well as cultural history. Growing up as an Asian American in Hawaiʻi meant that racially I was a part of the majority in a Pacific Islander or Hawaiian culture, which is vastly different than if I had grown up anywhere else in the United States.[8]
Learning to become aware of the histories we embody, both intellectually and existentially, is necessary for us to situate ourselves. And yet there is a difference between merely having a sensibility about our lived histories and taking the time to learn about our stories and their impact on us individually and collectively, along with the complexities and contestations of those stories. We must be able to name the things truthfully if we are indeed to be healers and rebuilders! This is also a deeply theological task. As Daniel D. Lee puts it, “We cannot meaningfully ask the theological question of what the gospel means [and how to realize a kingdom vision of seeing an other fully] in a particular context if we cannot even grasp the scope and boundaries of that context.”[9] In other words, we can only begin to see ourselves clearly by locating ourselves socially and historically.
One tool to help us better understand our social location is Lee’s Asian American quadrilateral. In his book, Doing Asian American Theology, Lee proposes a multilayered hermeneutical rubric that urges us to look at Asian Americanness through “the intersection of four closely related themes: (Asian) heritage, migration experience, American culture, and racialization.”[10] By giving us four dimensions through which to understand our social location—rooted in a particular historical context—Lee allows for complexity and not the reduction of social location to only one thing (e.g., race [Asian] or ethnicity [Chinese]); he places our context within a time and place. For me personally, this means recognizing that my family’s migration experience from China to Hawaiʻi was during particular global-political issues and local issues.
Choosing to engage the various aspects of our historicity is part of developing a “critical consciousness” (conscientizaçāo). For Paulo Freire, this includes both reflection and action toward change and transformation/equity (i.e., “bringing shalom to the world” and “the healing of our time”). This requires that we learn the histories that have been erased—the histories that are not taught—so that we become more aware of both ourselves and others around us.[11] Engaging these histories and stories brings nuance and contours to our social location and uncovers the subsequent power relations that come with it. How we know and relate to an other is not separate from these realities.
In fact, being aware of our social location is one thing, and sharing our histories and stories with others is another thing entirely; such sharing requires a level of trust and vulnerability. As we share our histories and stories with each other, we must be aware of the fact that within the bodies of those around us are stories of resilience and creativity and grief and loss. The histories and stories we are a part of involve contestation—wars, violence and loss—and redemption among and between ourselves and our ancestors.
I don’t need to look too far into my family history to see the complexities in which the ancestors of my community interact in contentious ways: the Japanese invasion of China, the US overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy, WWII and the incarceration of Japanese Americans by the American government, just to name a few. As Mari J. Matsuda writes, “Bringing one’s genealogy to one’s work is more than a demonstration of respect for one’s ancestors. It is a claim that theory reflects social position and experience, and it is a critique of theory [and theology] that fails to disclose the particularities of its origin.”[12] This means we must all face the questions: Are we aware who is among us and the histories and knowledge they carry with them? Are we aware of our own histories and the generational/ancestral knowledge of beauty, loss, and redemption that come with us? Can we begin to see how sharing this knowledge with each other might bring greater depth to our community? How it may require us to rebuild bridges of past hurt that we might have been previously unaware? Trust, after all, is an iterative process of being willing to be vulnerable in knowing and sharing.[13]
All of this matters because the relational knowing Meek talks about does not happen in a vacuum. Rather, there are structural and historical realities that affect the nature of the power and relational dynamics in which we find ourselves.[14] Intersectionality recognizes the power that comes with the varying aspects of our social location and does not allow us to simply be one part of our social identity. The beautiful and difficult task at hand is to not just know who I am (i.e., my social location) and who I am in relation to an other (i.e., my positionality), but to work toward an interdependent self-awareness—a multidimensional critical consciousness that recognizes where our histories and stories interact with each other, both at the level of the individual, as well as the group/community (e.g., those of us here, at The Seattle School).
This move toward an interdependent self-awareness is ultimately an intersectional approach that refuses to collapse down into the binary either/or thinking of oppressed and oppressor. Instead, intersectionality recognizes the complexity and multidimensionality that “race, class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, nation, ability, and age operate not as unitary, mutually exclusive entities, but as reciprocally constructing phenomena that in turn shape complex social inequalities.” This is not easy. It is difficult to practice, and yet it takes seriously Freire’s restoration of humanity as an “act of love” that requires action and not just conversing about the complexities of our individual family’s histories and how they might intersect and contend with an other’s. “To affirm that men and women are persons and as persons should be free, and yet to do nothing tangible to make this affirmation a reality, is,” as Freire says, “a farce.”[15] Indeed, this is where the rubber hits the road: when we face the reality that our shared lived histories might in fact contest with each other. This is where our relationship with an other in light of—and perhaps in spite of—our histories rub up against each other. Will we be willing to sit in the discomfort and grief and see it as an invitation to learn?[16] As we hear the history of an other, are we willing to listen and share our own histories with grace and truth, especially in the complexities and contestations where our shared histories interact? Or will “we remain caught in the adolescent strategies of avoidance and heroic striving”?[17] That is, do we only want to hear the redemption and gloss over the pain and suffering our ancestors might have caused or experienced? Do we want to just fix it without giving space for the hurt to be told, held, and lamented?
In the working out of my own story, I have been faced with the uncomfortable realization that the history of my family’s migration to Hawaiʻi coincided with a larger rise of Asian settlers in Hawaiʻi, ultimately at the expense of Native Hawaiians. I will not elaborate further on the various historical and geopolitical intricacies here, but suffice it to say, an intersectional approach does not allow me to claim only a marginalized identity as an Asian American and stay in the binary of oppressor and oppressed. This realization also requires me to consider the “complex dimensions to the histories of the early Asian settlers [to Hawaiʻi] and their descendants,” namely my family’s story. It requires me to “also acknowledge the ways that [I am a] beneficiar[y] of US settler colonialism” and to consider my role and “obligations to the indigenous peoples of Hawaiʻi and the responsibilities that Asian settlers [I] have in supporting Native peoples in their struggles for self-determination.”[18] The call to interdependent self-awareness as critical consciousness is an invitation to no longer claim innocence or ignorance. Specifically, it requires me (and my family) to revisit and interrogate with new awareness my story, my role, and also my relationship with an other in the lands that I grew up and call home. It is a call to grieve and to lament together. It is an invitation to see anew and imagine (with kingdom vision) what the restoration of humanity as an act of love might look like—again, this is a theological task!
Seeing Ourselves Wholly
Meek’s call to more robust interpersonal connection brings up uncomfortable and often unspoken questions. Who am I? Where am I? Who is this other in relation to me? And who am I in relation to them? By posing these questions, I am not attempting to ask existential questions—those are important too. Rather, the questions I have explored here are ultimately sociological and theological ones that are essentially rooted in an intersectional inquiry that pushes us to see beyond one dimension, pushes us to be attentive to power relations and social inequalities.[19] Ultimately, this is a call to seeing ourselves wholly—individually and collectively; interdependently. I am suggesting that we take an intersectional approach to viewing ourselves in relation to an other so as to make explicit the historical and structural context we find ourselves in—including our positionality, social location, and the power dynamics that are implicit to and constrain how we relate to one another. We must remember that we are “historical beings” and “practice tak[ing seriously our own and others’] historicity as [our] starting point.” It is then by explicating and problematizing the implicit we can really crosscut, subvert, and contest the status quo in a way that Meek is calling us to, namely a kingdom vision of “hold[ing] the other in regard and attentive empathy.” In this way, we can “enact regard-filled encounter[s] with the other, with philosophical awareness and intentionality, to the healing of our time.”[20]
The consequences of not situating ourselves and examining ourselves in light of our intersectional positionality are dire. Avoiding this call leads us toward a naive, idealistic vision of the future at best. At worst, it perpetuates the status quo masked as an insidious false and theoretic hope whose “vision dismisses the pain of reality right now.”[21] This is a distorted vision that is unwilling to see oneself and an other as a whole. For true interdependent knowing to take place, we must see ourselves more wholly. How do we honor this in ourselves and in each other? How do we honor where we are from and the histories we are from, even and especially in their complexities and contestations with those in our very communities? It is only as we see ourselves wholly that we can also see an other empathetically and intentionally.
Interdependence is a call to recognizing the diversity among us, not only in our race, ethnicity, or pigmentation but also in our skills, gifts, and talents.[22] These types of coalitional efforts are feminist and queer. They crosscut the hegemonic patriarchy, the white male dominance of mastery and control, and the heteronormative way of doing things. These kinds of coalitions toward interdependence are a call towards equity, trusting, and belonging. I’ve argued elsewhere that trust is a process of being willing to be vulnerable to another; it is an iterative process that includes knowing and sharing. None of that speaks of efficiency or comfort.[23] This work must be intentional, uncomfortable, and coalitional. And that means it will take time and a concerted effort to stay in it, to keep gazing and seeing and knowing with eyes of hope. Indeed, “May we enact regard-filled encounter[s] with the other, with philosophical awareness and intentionality, to the healing of our time.”[24] And may we honor who we are, who we come from, and who we are together wholly.
[1] Meek, “The Other: Returning to Our Natal Philosophy in the Mother’s Smile,” The Other Journal 38.5 (2024): 9.
[2] I have chosen to use the ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi (Hawaiian) spelling of Hawaiʻi to honor the people and place indigenous to the land where I was born and raised.
[3] This notion that we are shaped by the environment around us, including its social, historical and cultural context, and that that shaping in turn helps us to see our role within the world is what Pierre Bourdieu calls “habitus.” Habitus is the internal framework that one develops through being and acting in a social environment and the way this affects our understanding and experiencing of everyday life. See Bourdieu, “Habitus,” in Habitus: A Sense of Place, ed. Jean Hillier and Emma Rooksby (Ashgate, 2005). Habitus, encompasses “the evolving process through which individuals act, think, perceive and approach the world and their role in it” with respect to their position in society (Cristina Costa, Ciaran Burke, and Mark Murphy, “Capturing Habitus: Theory, Method and Reflexivity,” International Journal of Research and Method in Education 42, no. 1 [2019]: 20,https://doi.org/10.1080/1743727X.2017.1420771).
[4] Paulo Freire would call this awareness a critical consciousness (conscientizaçāo), the “practice of co-intentional education. Teachers and students (leadership and people), co-intent on reality, are both Subjects, not only in the task of unveiling that reality, and thereby coming to know it critically, but in the task of re-creating that knowledge. As they attain this knowledge of reality through common reflection and action, they discover themselves as its permanent re-creators. In this way, the presence of the oppressed in the struggle for their liberation will be what it should be: not pseudo-participation, but committed involvement” (Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed: Fiftith anniversary edition, 4th ed. [Bloomsbury Academic, 2018], 104 and 69).
[5] This notion of status quo is something akin to Michel Foucault’s notion of power relations and its habituation of particular patterns and “disciplining bodies into peculiar though ostensibly normal practices” (Jonathan Tran, Foucault and Theology [T and T Clark, 2011], 23). “Power is less about prohibiting individuals from doing what they want and more about getting them to do things while believing they want them. Thus, power here is less about repressing certain tendencies and more about habituating relations within local patterns, habits, and ways of speaking” (Tran, Foucault and Theology, 23). Additionally, I state this kingdom vision explicitly here because it is important to situate our theology as well so that we can add that dimension into our awareness. Taking this theological aspect for granted, especially in places with legacies of the evangelical church, like The Seattle School, can mean collapsing into using theological language without giving room for it to also be interrogated in the same intersectional ways I am calling for in this response. I have Felicia Tran to thank for this insight.
[6] Meek, “The Other,” 2 and 11.
[7] Patricia Hill Collins, “Intersectionality’s Definitional Dilemmas,” Annual Review of Sociology 41 (2015),https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-soc-073014-112142.
[8] Hawaiian history itself is complex, filled with beautiful and not so beautiful aspects of colonization and forced takeovers (see Liliuokalani, Hawaii’s Story by Hawaii’s Queen (Mutual, 1990).) The history and the process of Hawaiʻi becoming the fiftieth state in 1959 is related to the rise of Asian Americans economically and politically—this is not without its own complications and complexities (see Candace Fujikane and Jonathan Y. Okamura, eds., Asian Settler Colonialism: From Local Governance to the Habits of Everyday Life in Hawaiʻi (University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2008).
[9] Lee, Doing Asian American Theology: A Contextual Framework for Faith and Practice (InterVarsity Academic, 2022), 57.
[10] Lee, Doing Asian American Theology, 57. Although Lee’s contextual framework was developed to help Asian Americans become more aware of the complexities of their identity, Lee’s Asian American quadrilateral is applicable beyond Asian Americans, as the reality of our shared history in the United States is that we all have an ethnic or cultural heritage—our ancestors have migration experiences (unless, of course, we are Native), and we are indeed affected by US culture and racialization. Arguably, the insidiousness of whiteness is that it has robbed our white friends of their history, culture, and migration stories, all in the name of being just white. A critical consciousness here is an invitation to reclaim and relearn the stories that have been erased.
[11] Freire, Pedagogy, 104; and Meek, “The Other,” 2 and 11. Also, although the field of Asian American studies has been around for more than four decades, it is surprising how little of Asian American history is found or taught as a part of US history; Asian American history is US history. A good place to start, among many others, is this PBS docuseries: Renee Tajima-Peña and Eurie Chung, “Asian Americans,” ed. Jeff Bieber et al. (PBS, May 2020), https://www.pbs.org/weta/asian-americans/. Also see, Erika Lee, The Making of Asian America: A History (Simon and Schuster, 2015).
[12] Matsuda, “Beside My Sister, Facing the Enemy: Legal Theory out of Coalition,” Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 (1991): 1187,https://doi.org/10.2307/1229035. Also, see Liliuokalani, Hawaii’s Story.
[13] See Jermaine S. Ma and Paul R. Hoard, “A Tale of Two fears: Negotiating Trust and Neighborly Relations in Urbanizing Turkey,” Journal of Contemporary European Studies 28, no. 3 (2020),https://doi.org/10.1080/14782804.2020.1730161, https://doi.org/10.1080/14782804.2020.1730161.
[14] Cathy Park Hong said it best when describing the Asian American experience in relation to our position in US society and culture: “Asian Americans are fortunate not to live under hard surveillance, but we live under a softer panopticon, so subtle that it’s internalized, in that we monitor ourselves, which characterizes our conditional existence. Even if we’ve been here for four generations, our status here remains conditional; belonging is always promised and just out of our search so that we behave, whether it’s the insatiable acquisition of material belongings or belonging as a peace of mind where we are absorbed into mainstream society. If the Asian American consciousness must be emancipated, we must free ourselves of our conditional existence” (Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning [One World, 2020], 202).
[15] Collins, “Intersectionality’s Definitional Dilemmas,” 2—note that Collins outlines a number of guiding assumptions that she finds common among the knowledge projects utilizing intersectionality. Despite the general consensus of the definition of intersectionality, she notes the epistemological challenges present in using intersectionality as an analytical strategy. I only address one of these guiding assumptions here. See her article for the list of all six; and Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 50.
[16] See Matsuda, “Beside My Sister.”
[17] Francis Weller, The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals and Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief (Berkeley North Atlantic Books, 2015), 9.
[18] Candace Fujikane, “Introduction: Asian Settler Colonialism in the US Colony of Hawaiʻi,” in Asian Settler Colonialism, 6 and 7. Also see elsewhere in Fujikane and Okamura, Asian Settler Colonialism.
[19] See Matsuda, “Beside My Sister”; and Collins, “Intersectionality’s Definitional Dilemmas.”
[20] Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 84; and Meek, “The Other,” 11 and 9.
[21] Cindy S. Lee, Our Unforming: De-Westernizing Spiritual Formation (Fortress, 2022), 69.
[22] J. Derek McNeil, in conversation during Advancement Tactical Team Meeting, April 18, 2024.
[23] See See Matsuda, “Beside My Sister”; and Ma and Hoard, :A Tale of Two Fears.”
[24] Meek, “The Other,” 11.