Racism and Reconciliation - A Rare Success Story
For the last couple of weeks I've been thinking of something to write here about the Deadly Vipers book controversy. Part of me waited on writing anything because I wanted to see how it played out and how or if it would be resolved. A bigger part of me didn't write anything because the blogosphere has already been exploding with commentary surrounding this controversy, including the blogs of the people directly involved. Furthermore, they have been able to cover it in a far more eloquent manner than I could. I've finally decided to write something because there's a small chance that you haven't heard of any of it and at the very least, I want to be able to share the story with you because it's a story of living out the way of Christ under pressure to compromise, a story of reconciliation between members of the body of Christ, and a story that offers hope for an even greater beginning than one that the original authors of the book had originally dreamed of.
Here's the cliff note summary of the controversy. In 2007, two caucasian authors Mike Foster and Jud Wilhite, released a book called "Deadly Viper Character Assassins: A Kung Fu Survival Guide for Life and Leadership". The book focuses on radical integrity and grace and enemies (or "deadly vipers") that threaten to "assassinate" our character. The authors innocently decided to use a kung-fu theme throughout the book to get their message across. The theme however was poorly executed playing off of asian racial stereotypes. Recently, the marketing of this book has taken a step up and stereotypes in the book carried over to the marketing of it. This caused an uproar in the asian community who were exposed to this book for the first time. Prominent leaders in the Christian Asian-American community called for the authors AND the publisher, Zondervan, to publicly apologize and remove the offensive material completely, going as far as calling for the complete removal of the book from store shelves. The story of a controversial book being released, offending a group of people, and the protest of that group calling for a public apology and removal of the book from store shelves is not a new story. This particular story, however, is obviously interesting because of the message of this book (radical integrity, grace, and character) and the people involved on the opposing sides (followers of Christ who are striving to live a life that Christ calls to live - one of radical integrity, grace, and character). What I think made it even more interesting was this was like a movie happening in real-time. Both believers and even non-believers, knew what the right thing to do was and they were waiting to see if the parties involved would do it. This was a very public opportunity for prominent figures in the Christian community to either walk the walk and demonstrate the priority of doing that over the priority of money and pride, or to succumb to the pressures of the world and of their flesh.
The controversy initially escalated so much that there was a mediated conference call between both sides. Tempers flared up and people said things that they probably shouldn't have. Ultimately, the authors did issue a public apology and removed online media that played off of the racial asian stereotypes. The publisher, Zondervan, however at that point had not apologized as they were still trying to figure out the right course of action. Meanwhile, the Asian-American leaders were still pressuring them to respond. Last week, Zondervan did something unprecedented. They not only publicly apologized, they took the book completely off store shelves and took down the book's site deadlyviper.org. Furthermore, they appointed an editor-in-chief who is responsible for preventing editorial mistakes like this moving forward in the future.
If you want the trail of the story, straight from the source follow these links.
- It all started with this open letter to Zondervan.
- The controversy heated up and escalated into a conference call between the authors, representatives from Zondervan, and leaders of the Asian-American community.
- Intelligent and insightful posts like this and this (from Eugene Cho, one of the Asian-American leaders speaking out on the book) offered perspective on what the problem was and the greater problem of ignorance and racism.
- The authors apologized on their site (as of right now, the site has been taken down and replaced with a statement from the authors so no link available to their initial apology).
- Eventually, Zondervan apologized and issued this official statement.
If you're interested in going deeper, I'd highly recommending you follow these blogs (as a start):
In the big scheme of things, this is a just a tiny dent in the deep issues of ignorance and racism that have existed, and still very much do exist, for ages. But "success stories" like this are so rare (or never get public exposure) that it's worth sharing because it's stories like this that give us hope that through the power of Christ, a power in which people prioritize their walk with Christ over their own desires, there is a path to reconciliation and hope for justice.
