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Even as we code and write and do art, we have to acknowledge that we don’t do these things in isolation: the CATLab is a program embedded in a certain time and place. More than that, we are all humans whose embodiedness and particularity matter—no one gets to be a human being in the abstract. In the last few weeks, we’ve been sobered by the fact that this is a dark and difficult time. We’ve interrupted our normal projects and processes to take the time to reflect on how to move forward. As our director Zak said:

“This is a trajectory-shifting moment. This has nothing to do with the coding; we’re just owning it as responsible citizens.”

An advantage of being a small group is we have been able to take action quickly while still giving everyone space to contribute. We’re certainly not perfect, but we’re making a sustained effort to learn and grow. Our world is realizing that we need more understanding, but understanding only comes through sharing and listening. We thought this might be a fitting moment to give a few of our team members space to reflect on recent events. Our first two stories both come from members of our creative team: Sharon, our designer; and Noah, our videographer.

Sharon: Seeking Identity and Justice in God

As a Korean American who was born and raised in Turkey, Sharon began her journey of understanding racism in the US when she started college in California. As she spoke with friends and had her own encounters with racial issues, she began to see the structural nature of racism more and more clearly: “This is general, it’s systemic, and it’s something that affects all of us, wherever we come from, whatever our backgrounds are.”

Thus, as terrible as they were, the recent killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery didn’t surprise Sharon. “This isn’t anything new,” she said plainly. “The call for justice has been going on for centuries…  It’s been named this whole time, but people haven’t been listening.” What’s unique about these incidents is not that they happened, but that people and cities and institutions finally seem to be paying attention. Sharon attributes at least part of this increased attention to the fact that the pandemic has kept many people spending more time at home and on social media than ever. This “brutal reality” is no longer something that people can ignore.

As for herself, Sharon said she’s been reflecting a lot on her own experiences as an Asian American. Sharon said she “experienced microaggressions and fetishization as a woman of color,” mostly little things that seem like “small comments that don’t mean anything,” but which she says demonstrates that people either don’t know or don’t care about the impact they might have on others. She also talked about the anti-Asian sentiments that have arisen in the last few months: “Chinese-American communities and restaurants and businesses have suffered because of it, as well as all sorts of Asian Americans just because of the way we look, just because the virus started in China.”

Even as she identifies as a person of color, Sharon has been thinking about the privilege that comes from her “proximity to whiteness,” saying, “I find this particular responsibility to stand up for my sisters and brothers as a non-Black person of color and to amplify their voices.” As we’ve been having many hard conversations at the CATLab in these last few weeks, Sharon has been one of the main people encouraging our group “toward tangible steps to make changes.” She added:

“I hope that this conversation will continue, that it won’t just be a fad and we’ll move on with “normal” content… I hope that we reframe that and make it our normal to highlight and support and lift up people in the community who are less heard and marginalized.”

Sharon noted that helping the CATLab take even “baby steps” in pursuit of justice has been hard work, especially because these kinds of conversations are emotionally exhausting. In order to take care of herself, she said, “I’ve been trying to not be on my phone and much and to just do other things like paint or play piano or spend time with friends or watch K-drama.” Most importantly, though, she has had to consistently root herself in God: “I personally need to continue to decolonize my own thoughts and actions, my faith, my identity, and see Jesus in this above all to know that my identity is not solely based on what I look like but is based on who God says I am.”

Turning to God also reminds her of the bigger picture of justice. At the core of this work is that “Jesus is the hope of the world, and he is redeeming all things.” Sharon emphasized that even as we seek to make the world a better place, we need to be humble. A simple prayer that she shared was, “Lord, show me that my sense of justice isn’t always your sense of justice.” Even if we think of ourselves as well informed and ready to change the world, “we need to check our pride and know that God’s ways are way higher and greater and more perfect than ours ever will be.”

 Even as we seek to better ourselves and the world around us, there are always more things to learn and more ways to grow. In Sharon’s words, “The journey of justice will take our whole lives.”

Noah: Gaining Perspective Through Art and Listening

When Sharon described how Covid-19 and social media helped amplify the message of recent events, she more or less described Noah’s story. His first reaction to George Floyd’s death was simply sorrow. In these past two weeks, however, he said he’s been able to “look deeper, beyond just the death of an innocent person, and to see the bigger reasons behind it.”

For Noah, a key factor in gaining this understanding came from seeing the way these issues have exploded on social media. Usually he turned to Instagram as a place to relax, connect with people, and gain inspiration; but after the death of George Floyd and the resulting protests, posts about racial justice flooded the platform from “cover to cover and story to story.” Although he found this inundation of information and emotion somewhat overwhelming, Noah remarked that such a display might be “necessary” to get the attention of people who hadn’t previously been open to engaging with systemic racism.

These weeks have been a lot to process, but Noah also said they were “very educational.” As a white male, he has been trying to figure out where he fits into the conversation on race. He has expressed an intense desire to grow as a person and understand how to view racial justice well. At the same time, he acknowledges that “it may not be my specific place to always take action everywhere.” One of the things he’s been learning is where it’s appropriate to act and “where you should just sit back and listen to people.”

He added that we shouldn’t feel guilty for “not occupying every lane,” but that there are a lot of ways to help and we need them all. Noah said he was inspired and encouraged by “seeing other people online, especially from the Christian community, take a stance on racial justice.” He said this topic often gets avoided, but “our calling as Christians and followers of Christ is to stand up for the widowed and the orphaned and all those who are marginalized.” Even as he seeks to follow that general calling, he’s also responding to this situation as an artist, saying:

“As a photographer, every time you pick up the camera, you get the opportunity to get a new perspective.”

Having gained some of these new perspectives over the weekend of George Floyd’s death, Noah came into our work week feeling “on edge” about simply moving forward with the content we’d planned. Our director Zak captured the sentiment when he said the script for our tenacity video was “written last week, before the world exploded.” The language and message simply didn’t ring true anymore, and we realized we needed to completely rethink the project.

Our creative team took the whole first day of our work week to have discussions about how to respond to the events unfolding in our world. We were concerned not just about our public response (as weighty as that felt), but about how that response would translate into our daily, embodied lives. On Wednesday, we spent the whole morning in conversation and reflection, taking the focus away from our normal tasks. And on Thursday, four of us got together to completely rewrite the video script. It took an hour and a half, but together we produced something much stronger than what any of us could have come up with on our own. Noah said he was encouraged to see the way we truly worked as a team despite interacting entirely online.

Noah said he really appreciated the way the CATLab made space for people to share different thoughts and experiences. He also emphasized the importance of admitting that we may not always know the right things to say but “giving each other the grace to work within that and teach each other and learn from each other.” Similarly, our developer Kristen said that our conversations as a team “made a dark situation into a listening and understanding opportunity.” Despite the heaviness of what we’ve been processing, Noah said, “it’s been an awesome way to connect [and] grow together beyond what we could have even imagined.”

In Sum

These are only two stories from our team, and we want to acknowledge that everyone has a unique reaction to this moment in history. But as Sharon said, these issues affect all of us, even if they do so in different ways. We need to remember that justice is bigger than just us and that our identities go beyond the way we look. Noah gives us an example of what it means to learn faithfully and humbly. No one person has to do everything, but we all have to do our part. Each of us needs to look at who we are and where we’re placed—whether that’s as artists or activists, biologists or baristas—and figure out both the unique ways we can grow and the unique contributions we can make.

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