I hope you enjoy this conversation with Grace (who is currently 19 and a freshman in college). Like the last time she and I did this, remember that her perspectives are her own and don’t represent all others like her (or even her siblings). But I know you will find her thoughts informative and interesting!
When you were a Tanzanian kid growing up in Tanzania with American parents, what did you know about American Black History? Did you feel any connection with it?
We read books as a family about the black struggle in America, like Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry and The Watsons Go to Birmingham. But I didn’t feel a connection to them. I remember thinking that Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglas were really cool, but I was not African-American so they weren’t my people.
I knew about the East African slave trade because we visited museums in Zanzibar and Bagamoyo, which were places that were a part of the slave trade. It was flabbergasting to see that it really happened to people, because even now, as a history major, it’s amazing that we as a human race treated other humans like that. But East African slaves did not go to America. [They primarily went to the Middle East or were enslaved within Africa for exports of ivory or other goods.]
[We moved to the United States in the spring of 2020, shortly before the George Floyd riots that summer.] When we first moved here, I was in Target walking around without Mom, and this guy who was an older white man in a motorized wheelchair, stopped me. He said, “I just want you to know that Black Lives Matter and I believe that.”
I said, “Thank you.” But I wanted to say, “But I’m African.” Because I didn’t feel a connection with the movement at the time.
People assume that I am African-American. I don’t have an African accent; I sound like my parents. My love for other accents may have gotten me into trouble because I do use African-American vernacular all the time. So I can sound as if I’ve been raised in an African-American home. But I don’t always have the heart to explain the entire story, so I let them go ahead and believe that.
When Kisa joined my school sophomore year, that changed a lot for me. [Kisa was an international exchange student from Tanzania.] She helped me to embrace that part of myself and be proud of my identity as a Tanzanian.
How do you see the distinction between African-American and African?
If you have an ancestry of your family coming here due to slavery, then that’s what I count as African-American. African-Americans have their own culture of music and food. There’s also the impact of GI Bills and other forms of racism that have affected them. Things like gang life have been a part of African-American culture but not African immigrants.
African immigrants (like me) have a different culture. They stay much more African.
I went to church in Tanzania with Americans who worked for USAID. So when I think about foreign aid programs abruptly cut off, I think about those American families who uprooted their children to make a difference in developing countries and suddenly have no job. I think about local people employed by those agencies who suddenly have no way to feed their families. And, of course, I think about the impoverished people who benefit from those programs.
I hear Americans saying that this is justified because we need to help our own people first, that we have people in poverty here, people suffering from natural disasters. But then I consider how America’s foreign aid to other countries last year was only about 70 billion dollars. Which sounds like a lot until you consider that 70 billion dollars is less than 1 percent of the Federal Budget. Which still may sound like a lot until you realize that Americans spent 960 billion dollars on Christmas in 2024.
The United States has 4 percent of the world’s population and 30 percent of the world’s wealth. So do we have an obligation to help other countries? I think so. Especially when you consider that much of the world’s poverty contributes to our wealth — as in the cobalt industry in Congo.
On the other hand, living overseas has also made me very aware that government aid programs need much reform. I’ve read Dead Aid. I’ve read When Helping Hurts. But is drastically yanking the funding out under their feet the most effective way for reform? That just seems like a good way to create more instability and poverty.
I know hundreds of immigrants by name. I have Tanzanian friends who won the Green Card Lottery and now live in the States. As a school principal in Tanzania, some of my students were “anchor babies”—African or Asian children whose mothers flew to the U.S. to give birth solely to get their children U.S. citizenship. I’ve helped in after-school programs for children whose parents were undocumented. I’ve met refugee families who have built beautiful lives in America.
Even my children are immigrants, for goodness sake. I am intimately acquainted with the I-130, the N600K, the I-600, the I-485, and the B-2 visa applications, and I spent thousands of dollars to get them approved. I’ve scoured the instructions for these visas so carefully that I’ve sometimes known more about them than embassy consular officers or USCIS officers. The gray hairs on my head are named after visa applications.
So when I sense this mood of anti-immigration swirling around me, I take it personally. I see the faces of friends. I see the faces of my own children. And I know people would never say that my children aren’t welcome here. That my children aren’t those kind of immigrants. But that’s my point – all the clampdowns, loss of funding, and careless denigrating comments about immigrants don’t specify that there are many different kinds of immigrants. Refugees are not the same as asylum seekers which are not the same as illegal border crossers which are not the same as anchor babies which are not the same as adopted children.
Yet each has a face, a name, a story. Each is made in the image of God.
I think we all can agree, without a doubt, that we are not in favor of criminals and drug dealers and rapists immigrating to our country and that we need better ways of keeping them out. But when all the bad guys are thrown into the same pot as the vast majority of people who just want freedom and justice and a place to live without bombs and the Taliban and drug lords, I am indignant. On behalf of my friends. On behalf of my children.
As an American, I believe that strength comes from diversity of perspective and culture. With falling birthrates, the U.S. needs immigration to be sustainable. Plus, the U.S. economy is projected to increase by 9 trillion dollars in the next ten years because of the immigration surge.
As a Christian, I’m thrilled by the opportunities to live out the gospel in the lives of millions of people on our soil who might never be introduced to Jesus in their own country.
I can believe these things and still believe that an open border is not wise and that our country desperately needs immigration reform. (Trust me, I’ve experienced the dumpster fire of U.S. immigration up close and personal.)
I realize I may regret sharing these thoughts with the world. Our country has reached a frenzied pitch of political tension and the last thing I want to do is add to the noise. My prayer is to add perspective.
My fellow American Christians, I implore you:
Remember that to whom much has been given, much will be required. We are living in the most powerful, most wealthy country that has ever existed in the history of the earth. Even Americans who are struggling financially are still richer than more than 90% of the world’s population. We are the aristocracy of the world. It is true that we, as a nation and as an American Church, cannot help everyone. But when our country holds 30% of the world’s wealth, we wield an extremely powerful influence.
Let us not be flippant. Let us be sober-minded, recognizing our power and the responsibility that comes with it. Let us consider this responsibility with grave, thoughtful, careful, prayerful mindfulness. Let us not be guided by fear or by anger, by entitlement or selfishness, but let us hold the weight of what we have been given, remembering that one day, every American Christian will be held accountable for how we stewarded or squandered the vast freedom and wealth we have been given.
Let us remember that those of us who were born American and have access to a U.S. passport did nothing to deserve it. We won the DNA lottery. In God’s sovereign grace, He has chosen us to belong to this privileged country and time in history. Let us live as those who recognize the depth of the privilege we possess. And to whom much has been given, much will be required.
We may not have control over government policies or executive orders, but there is much we can control. We can cheer on reform but still speak well of immigrants, welcome and befriend them well. We can give generously and then give some more to international development projects. If we are involved in international business, we can choose justice and integrity over profit. We can advocate for America to welcome refugees – arguably the most deserving, most vetted, and the most vulnerable immigrants out there. And we can live our lives in a way that prioritizes the kingdom of God so much more than a kingdom on earth.
There was a lot I didn’t know when I adopted my children.
Since then, I’ve wondered a hundred times if we did right by our children when we adopted them. Adoption heals a wound, but I underestimated the depth of the wound and overestimated the ease of healing it.
Several months ago, I was asked to do a webinar on my advice for raising adopted children overseas. I turned it down. I can’t give advice on this because I’m still raising my children. Ask me again in ten years, and I’ll see if I have advice. Maybe only once I’ve heard what my adult children have to say about it.
For the bulk of their childhoods, Haven of Peace Academy shielded my children from the pain. They were different by being raised by white parents, but lots of children at HOPAC were different for lots of other reasons. Most were born in one country and raised in another, many were biracial, almost all knew what it felt like to navigate various cultures. My children were stuck between worlds, but so were all their classmates.
I ripped my children from Tanzania and dropped them into America in the spring of 2020, when the world had shattered into uncertainty, and racial anger that had festered for decades was exploding to the surface. We lived like hobos that spring with no place to call home, and the night in June that we arrived at my in-law’s house, there was a curfew over all of greater Los Angeles because of George Floyd rioting.
I wondered what world I had brought my Black children into.
Imagine telling your children about the things that people who look like you have done to people who look like them in the country you brought them to live in.
Of all the things a new mother stresses about, her kids’ hair is usually not one of them. But for me, it was.
I felt an invisible weight upon me that if I was to be a good mom to my girls, I must get their hair right. This was not a completely imagined pressure. I learned early on that in both African and African-American cultures, well-maintained hair is important. I already knew my competence as a white mother to two black daughters would be questioned in many ways. So I was determined to prove myself capable of at least caring for their hair.
I read Black hair blogs. I watched YouTube videos. I even bought and read a book on the subject. I tried a ridiculous number of hair products. Yet still, I was anxious. It was harder than I thought, and despite my best efforts, I could not turn myself into a Black hair artist.
Why did it take a war to end slavery in America, and not revival?
Are you familiar with the two Great Awakenings? In the 18th and 19th centuries, hundreds of thousands of Americans were turning to Christ. It wasn’t just lip service; society was transformed by Christianity. The Industrial Revolution, the modern missions movement, and even our unique political system are all credited to these revivals.
Yet slavery carried on, unchallenged. Human beings, made in the image of God, were bought and sold because of the color of their skin. Children were torn away from their parents, strong men were forced to work themselves to death, young women were beaten at the slightest whim. Even while Christianity was sweeping the nation.
Since the Great Awakenings brought about such stirring influence in politics, business, and individual character, why wasn’t there nationwide repentance over slavery?
Sure, many slaves were part of these revivals. And some abolitionist movements were awakened. But it wasn’t enough. Because it didn’t take revival to end slavery in America, it took war.
Yet even the war didn’t change hearts. Not long after the Civil War, Christians all over America enacted laws and policies that kept black people dehumanized, brutalized, terrorized for another one hundred years. While millions of Americans sang hymns and pledged allegiance to the Christian flag and sent missionaries to foreign lands, black Americans were being lynched in front of immense cheering crowds of men, women, and their children.
