E7 First Person Charlottesville - Pastor Michael Cheuk

CL: Welcome to First Person Cville, the podcast. I'm your host, Charles Lewis. I’m also the co-host of In My Humble Opinion from 101 Jamz.

Today we are joined by Pastor Michael Cheuck. He’s the author of an essay called, “In Charlottesville's Summer of Hate, a Chinese-American Pastor Found His Place in the Struggle for Civil Rights.”  Pastor Cheuk and his family immigrated to Shreveport, Louisiana from Hong Kong in the early 1970s. He was in elementary school at the time, in a town where hardly anyone looked like him.  MC: And that experience really shaped and formed my desire to really fit in, to assimilate. Having said that, though, the model was white America. I quickly picked up some of the assumptions of like what it means to be a “good American,” how one should speak, how one should act, how one should dress - in the context of Shreveport, right. And so I'll tell you one story. We lived in a neighborhood that was built right after World War Two. And it was a declining neighborhood. There were white folks, there were Black folks, you know, a handful, a couple of Asians, because my uncle and his family lived literally across the street, right. We were eating dinner and I heard a knock on the door. So I kind of made our way up to the front and kind of peeked out the window. And I saw this Black man. I didn't know who he was. And I looked a little bit further down and there was kind of a car and maybe the hood was up, you know. And I froze. All four of us just went quiet as a mouse. And we just did not respond. And then after a while, that person went across the street and knocked on the door and one of our Black neighbors opened the door. And a couple of minutes later, you know, they were trying to start his car.  CL: Right, right.  MC: And I came to the realization that, my goodness, I was probably... 10 or 12? I hadn't been in the States for that long. But there was this assumption that, “Oh, strange Black men are dangerous.” And somehow that message that was never explicitly told to us got embedded into my psyche.  CL: So where do you think that that internalization came from? And what part do you think that experiences like that play into your understanding of race relations now? MC: That's a very good question. because and i have to confess, right it was a long time ago, so there wasn't like a moment. or… But I do believe that it was kind of like in the air that I breathed. I went to First Baptist Shreveport, and that is a church that was quite affluent. There were no Black people. And so I think part of it was my own insecurity. A part of it was, you know, like wanting to kind of attain that level of respectability. And I think on the flip side of that then is like, “Well, maybe I either should not really relate to or have an openness to kind of have a relationship to some of the kids who are Black in my own street.” And those are some of the things that I think culturally, looking back, I can see how my path kind of diverged. And I took the path of, “Let's try and assimilate myself into the white kind of standard.” CL: Fast forward to 2015 and Pastor Cheuk was living and working in Charlottesville. He got a call from another pastor in town who wanted to bridge the he saw gaps between religious congregations — gaps in diversity and inclusion that Pastor Cheuk had grown up with.   MC: The Charlottesville Clergy Collective came together after the shooting at Mother Emanuel. Pastor Alvin Edwards, pastor of Mount Zion First African Baptist Church here in town — former mayor and school board chair — he asked himself the question, “If something like that, that happened at Mother Emanuel, were to happen at my church, what would I do and who would I call?” He started calling the pastors that he knew for a breakfast to come, and he asked that question. When he asked it, we looked around each other and then Alvin dropped the bomb, the mic, whatever, and said, “I would call none of you because I don't really know you. So: what do you think about us coming together regularly, monthly, to have conversations, to build relationships? So that at the very least we get to know one another and we learn to trust each other more. So that if and when, God forbid, something awful happens, we might have, we can support one another.” So that was in 2015, right? And then Trump got elected in 2016, and we began to like, “Oh, you know, there's just certain things that we need to do to be more public instead of just getting together for breakfast and talk.” And then we had the beginning of 2017. There was so much more activity and interest from other faith groups and other faith leaders saying, “Hey, this Unite the Right thing, right, or this KKK coming is not good. What are we going to do about it? What are you all thinking about doing?”  CL: Now you stated in your writing that that initially um you were not going to respond to the Unite the Right rally.  MC: Yeah! CL: why did you decide to respond the way that yo