Peacemaking: Living into the mystery of another’s identity

Kathryn and friends

​Taking a break from a peacemaking seminar are Lidia Matabaro (Burundi)

Kathryn Smith Derksen, and her husband, Dan, are serving with SADRA conflict transformation in South Africa through Mennonite Mission Network. They help to facilitate peace education trainings in schools, communities, and with pastoral leadership.

In my work with Southern African Development and Reconstruction Agency conflict transformation, I’ve realized many people have distanced themselves from reconciliation and the hard work of deep healing. But, I am also fascinated by something I heard during mediation training that seemed particularly innovative: Stereotypes are the gaps between real and perceived identities, and reconciliation helps to reduce that gap.

Identity work is slippery. In defining ourselves, we carry identity with our strongest emotions. It is very easy to become defensive when talking about identity. Do Black people see me as more than a White person? You can’t tell by listening to me talk or by looking at me that I was born in Africa. How would you know that only one of my grandparents spoke English as a first language? Then, there’s my pacifist and Mennonite upbringing that shaped my values – and my growing up years in East Palo Alto, California, a city with one of the highest homicide rates in the nation at that time.

Along with the children of African-American, Latin American and Pacific Islander heritage from my neighborhood, I was bused to White high schools as part of a desegregation policy in the 1980s. Black kids wouldn’t sit next to me on the bus because I was White, and White kids wouldn’t sit next to me in class because I lived among Black people. So I know what prejudice and fear look like; but from a young age, I could also recognize our common humanity.

My sister and I were the only two White kids in our elementary school of more than 700 students. There, we learned about our civil rights heroes, with special assemblies for Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. One skit we did every year was a reenactment of the Rosa Parks story about the woman who refused to take her place standing in the Black section of the bus. It’s a beautiful story of conscientious objection that led to change, and I loved the story, especially because there was a heroine.

I asked the teacher why I always had to be the bus driver. I didn’t like to always be the villain in the story. Could I play a different part? This made her laugh, but she said I just needed to be the bus driver. It was not until many years later I put it all together. My community, still raw from the pain of the civil rights movement just 20 years before, could not cast me as a different character. There were parents who were vocal in their disapproval of a White girl even being at their school. My teacher both stuck up for my right to be there, and made me the bus driver.

Today in South Africa, Black and White neighbors continue the hard work of trying to understand each other’s perspective. SADRA has initiated a local cross-community dialogue where Oscar Siwali, our director, lives. Leaders of Black and White bordering neighborhoods sat down together and started to get to know each other. I have been facilitating, using John Paul Lederach’s Little Book of Conflict Resolution, where he talks about how to build new relationships and break old patterns of relating. He underscores the importance of identity, saying, “In my experience, issues of identity are at the root of most conflicts.”

How we relate to others has everything to do with how we define ourselves. If after defining ourselves we decide that it is not worth investing in a relationship with those who are different from us, then discussions about reconciliation and restitution become academic.

If reconciliation is working to close the gap caused by stereotypes, now is the time to work at that, both here in South Africa and in the United States as you live in the election aftermath. Anyone working to expose the gaps between perceived and real identities, who can stay patient and listening instead of defensive, and who can live with the mystery of contradiction, is actively engaged in peace-making.