Divvying People Up

A few days ago I argued that the need for church planting is greater than we usually think. A sub-section of that argument, was a claim that our common ways of grouping people "White folks," "Black folks," etc., are not very useful in our quest to understand people. Tell me someone's race - or ethnicity, and you don't tell me a whole lot.

But we still think this way - locally and globally.

The Lebanese Political Journal has a useful post on how we Americans think of the Middle East, particularly on our simplistic equation between "Middle Eastern" = "Muslim" = "Arab", and even more, how we seem to assume all Arabs are the same. Read the post at the Lebanese Political Journal for a full discussion. The short summary? They're not all alike - not even close. If we're ever going to understand the Middle East and its peoples and act wisely toward them, we'll need to learn about the differences.