“Who are you?” That question is often connected to , “What are you?” The response can range from , “none of your business” to a lengthy, and proud recitation of one’s ethnic heritage. I land somewhere in between.

Being Latino with the last name of Peters gets complicated. My great-grandfather was a French sailor who ended up in Mexico, and then it gets real complicated. My father was a blue-eyed, very fair skinned man, and my mother a beautiful, curvy Latina. I grew up in a predominately latino city in Los Angeles. I had my share of struggles-not fully accepted as ‘one of us.’ Though I made good friendships with several friends I always felt a bit of an outsider. When I attended U.C.L.A., the latino student population was almost nonexistent. I certainly felt culturally Latino, so again, I didn’t quite ‘fit in’ with the predominate Caucasian population. So I did what I ways did. I worked hard academically, and socially and tried to carve out a space for students like me who defied the the rusty buckets of categorization.

Then something happened a few years later that changed my sense of belonging or lack thereof. I entered a church for the first time. I experienced many life transforming events. One was a realization that I was God’s child, created by him, unique and loved as I was. My quest to belong to a particular group or tribe felt inconsequential. Not to say that one’s culture or ethnicity is irrelevant, that’s absurd as we are created with such differences in God’s mind. He obviously loves to create differences, but He does so not as a basis from which to derive our meaning or purpose, rather to simply exhibit the majesty and brilliance of the the most creative force that can exist. But of course, as with all that he creates, the created thing gets it twisted.

Ineptly, we find our meaning and significance in the creation. We fail to see that we are a reflection of his greatness and instead crunch ourselves into groups and collectives that demand that we emphasize what we look like, the language we speak, the music we create; this perspective is the root of the evil of ethnic slavery and the basis for pride in the self. I know this seems a bit simplistic, the latter is almost always a response to the evil of discrimination, but is it the best response?

I say we should celebrate our differences, but stop short of seeing them as ‘the answer.” The answer is in the eyes of God. He loves us, creates us for His glory and good pleasure, extensions of His love drawn in different colors, shapes, personalities, noses and ears as multitudinous as the there are stars.