{"id":36250,"date":"2024-03-07T10:00:16","date_gmt":"2024-03-07T18:00:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/?p=36250"},"modified":"2024-03-10T16:09:49","modified_gmt":"2024-03-10T23:09:49","slug":"36250-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/36250-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Escaping The Trap"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cThe Identity Trap\u201d<\/em> by Yascha Mounk is a book that I didn\u2019t want to read but, ultimately, I\u2019m glad I did.<\/p>\n

I was born and grew up in Cape Town, South Africa in the darkest days of apartheid. I was born with a number assigned to me that identified my gender as male and my race as \u201cColoured\u201d. This was a term used for people who were racially mixed. Everyone in South Africa had an identity card with a number. My race number was 01. I lived a few miles from Robben Island while Nelson Mandela was imprisoned there and in 1968 my family was forced to move from a racially mixed neighbourhood to a \u201ccoloureds only\u201d area. My uncle\u2019s beautiful family house, on the ocean, was seized and his family was relocated to a ghetto apartment block. It was a violent, unjust, and unrestful place.<\/p>\n

Then, when I was 10 years old my world changed after my parents immigrated from South Africa to Canada. My dad was demoted from his job as a foreman in a printing shop and made to train his new boss who was fresh from Europe. It was too much for him to take, so he left his home, and we landed in Vancouver to start a new life. All I wanted was to fit in with the racially diverse crowd in Vancouver. I didn\u2019t want to stand out as a kid. I lost my accent as quickly as I could and tried my best to distance myself from my heritage as much as possible. I was grateful for the opportunity to live in a non-segregated society.<\/p>\n

I didn\u2019t realize, when I moved here as a kid, that Canada had treated its indigenous peoples with a very similar approach. It too segregated its indigenous people into reserves. I later learned that South Africa patterned its segregation strategy upon Canada\u2019s model.[1]<\/a> Heinous crimes were committed against our first peoples. I\u2019ve met people who can\u2019t walk into a church because of the crimes committed against them by the church in residential schools. A lot of that story is still being uncovered. Just recently, 200 unmarked graves of children who died in a residential school were found in Kamloops, British Columbia. As much as my dad wanted to escape apartheid in South Africa, he unknowingly moved to a country that provided South Africa with a model for apartheid and politically supported apartheid.<\/p>\n

Mounk\u2019s book touches on a raw nerve for me. I appreciated Mounk\u2019s analysis of what is happening in society. He coins the term \u201cidentity synthesis\u201d as a phenomenon that has occurred as the result of a confluence of thought streams that include postmodernism, post-colonialism, and critical race theory. By \u201cidentity synthesis\u201d he means the \u201crole that identity categories like race, gender and sexual orientation play in the world.\u201d[2]<\/a> I do think that the people who are motivated by these ideals have a genuine desire to remedy the serious injustices that continue to plague us. I am grateful for their hearts. However, they reject universal values and neutral rules like free speech and equal opportunity, and they insist on making forms of group identity more central.[3]<\/a> As a result, they have created a progressive apartheid (apartheid means apartness) in which people are segregated by gender and racial identity as a remedy for racism. Thus, the identity trap. To solve racism the focus on identity and separating people from one another based on identity has the opposite effect.[4]<\/a> His solution is to focus on equity and universal values, while respecting the identity of each person.<\/p>\n

What does the church have to offer to this conversation? I couldn\u2019t help but reflect further on my personal identity issues and how I have tried to resolve them through my spiritual formation as a follower of Jesus. I carried a lot of anger and shame. I hid a lot of my cultural identity. First, I had to recognize my identity was \u201cin Christ\u201d and not in my race. Paul, writing to a divided church in Galatia wrote, \u201c<\/sup><\/strong>So in Christ Jesus, you are all children of God\u00a0through faith,\u00a0for all of you who were baptized into Christ\u00a0have clothed yourselves with Christ.\u00a0There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free,\u00a0nor is there male and female,\u00a0for you are all one in Christ Jesus.\u201d[5]<\/a> I had to name the shame and wrong labels that I carried with me from growing up in South Africa. I had to offer forgiveness for the wrongs that were committed. Regularly, I must still embrace the truth of who I am in Christ.<\/p>\n

Claiming my identity in Christ has been a hard-fought battle, but I think this is where the gospel comes into play as we address the culture we live in. As I became rooted in my identity in Christ, I could truly embrace who I am as a human being and my unique identity. The gospel doesn\u2019t make me less of who I am, it makes me more of who I am as a human being.<\/p>\n

I appreciated this book but I think his solution, while good, is limited. He writes, \u201cTo build a just world, societies should strive to live up to their universalist aspirations instead of abandoning them.\u201d[6]<\/a> While this is true, I believe that humanity doesn\u2019t have the power to do this apart from the transforming power of Jesus. As a survivor of South African apartheid, I\u2019m grateful God has rescued me from the Identity Trap, and so much more.<\/p>\n

[1]<\/a> Yves Engler \/ December 26 and 2013 \/, \u201cOur Shame: Canada Supported Apartheid South Africa,\u201d accessed February 14, 2024, https:\/\/canadiandimension.com\/articles\/view\/our-shame-canada-supported-apartheid-south-africa1.<\/p>\n

[2]<\/a> Yascha Mounk, The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time<\/em> (London: Allen Lane an imprint of Penguin Books, 2023).Kindle, Introduction.<\/p>\n

[3]<\/a> Mounk. Kindle, Introduction.<\/p>\n

[4]<\/a> Mounk.Kindle, Introduction.<\/p>\n

[5]<\/a> Galatians 3.26-29<\/p>\n

[6]<\/a> Mounk, The Identity Trap<\/em>. Kindle. Chapter 14.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cThe Identity Trap\u201d by Yascha Mounk is a book that I didn\u2019t want to read but, ultimately, I\u2019m glad I did. I was born and grew up in Cape Town, South Africa in the darkest days of apartheid. I was born with a number assigned to me that identified my gender as male and my […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":204,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[3011,2957],"class_list":["post-36250","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-dglp03","tag-mounk","cohort-dlgp03"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36250","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/204"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36250"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36250\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36554,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36250\/revisions\/36554"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36250"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36250"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36250"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}