Friendship in Black and White, episode 1
www.CrossCulturalVoices.org
Monique Duson: For you, what was it that kept you in it?
Krista Bontrager: What kept us in the friendship?
Monique Duson: In spite of all the conflicts. Yes. For you, anyway, what was it that kept you in it?
Krista Bontrager: I think I just made up my mind that you were my sister in the Lord. There were so many things about our friendship that I really loved and appreciated.
John Yoder: Hi everybody! My name is John Yoder. I'm your host for Cross-Cultural Voices. For the next few weeks, we have some exceptional content lined up for you. For the next three Tuesdays, we are going to hear the story of Monique Duson and Krista Bontrager, African American and White American friends, who at the beginning of their friendship were at opposite ends of the spectrum regarding social justice and other issues. But they regarded each other as sisters in the Lord.
Their conversations became very heated. But they built a robust friendship and as a result, they co-wrote the book Walking and Unity. They co-founded the organization Center for Biblical Unity. And you are going to love hearing their story.
Simultaneously, on the next seven Thursdays in our Cross-Cultural Voices Podcast, we have another series beginning that's called Christian Compassion Without Culture Wars. I have spoken with so many Christians and ministry leaders of various ethnic backgrounds who are building robust cross-cultural relationships, but they're sick and tired of the incessant arguing about justice and racism, DEI, CRT, and more.
You will hear from the same ladies that you are hearing on our Tuesday podcast, and you will also hear from other Christian leaders who are African American, Mexican American, Indian American, Chinese American, about how we can build healthy cross-cultural relationships without engaging in cultural wars.
You may have friends that don't listen to podcasts, but they enjoy reading blogs. Every Saturday we release a blog with excerpts from the previous week's podcast. All of our podcasts, our blog, are on our website www.CrossCulturalVoices.org. And now let's listen to Monique and Krista's story.
Krista Bontrager: Hey, everyone. Welcome to this conversation. My name is Krista Bontrager.
Monique Duson: And I'm Monique Duson.
Krista Bontrager: And we are the cofounders of a ministry called the Center for Biblical Unity. And we're excited to share with you a little bit about our ministry and our work and our book, Walking in Unity, a little bit about our friendship, how we met, and some of the dynamics of racial issues in America.
Monique Duson: Yes. So the Center for Biblical Unity was founded in February of 2020 before George Floyd, before Ahmaud Arbery or Breonna Taylor. We wanted to have biblically based Christ-centered conversations around topics of race, justice, and unity. Today that's extended to talk about many of the critical social theories, but our goal really is to point people back to Jesus when we are tackling difficult topics.
Krista Bontrager: So we talk a lot. at the Center for Biblical Unity about race, racism. What's the difference between race and ethnicity? What's a Christian view of these issues? We talk about justice, defining justice, social issues that you might see happening out in the culture. A lot of those topics and how does the Bible come to bear on these issues?
Monique Duson: Yes, if you would like to find out more information about us, you can do so by looking us up on the Web at www.centerforbiblicalunity.com. Or you can find us on social media at Center for Biblical Unity on Facebook and Instagram and YouTube. Yes. And Biblical_unity on Twitter.
Krista Bontrager: That's right. So maybe we'll start off by telling you a little bit about our story and how we met. This is a little bit of a story of an unlikely friendship. But…
Monique Duson: you loved me from the start!
Krista Bontrager: Ha! We met in the fall of 2017 and maybe even before that, maybe we should even back up about our childhoods and our upbringing and then get people to 2017.
Monique Duson: That's a good idea. Okay, I'll start. So I am from Los Angeles, in the area called South Central Los Angeles. I was born and raised there. I spent the first 15 years of my life there. And then I moved to a suburb of Los Angeles called North Hollywood. I lived there for a very long time. And then I went away to school at Biola University and then moved back to North Hollywood.
And I lived there until 2014, when I moved to South Africa. I was a missionary in South Africa for four and a half years. I worked with teachers and children who had been impacted by violence, trauma, drugs, who were participants in gangs. I really just wanted to, at that time, help people really understand that they had the potential to be more than what some people may have said that they could be.
Part of the reason why I went to South Africa was because of my stand for critical race theory, because South Africa had been so impacted by apartheid, and white people's oppression over blacks in South Africa. I wanted to go and help black and brown students and teachers in South Africa understand that there was more, that we could fight back against systems of whiteness, and all of that. And so I lived for four and a half years, really advocating for a lot of critical theory type ideas and working with young people to help them understand those ideas as well.
I came back home in 2017. That's when we met. No, I came back home in 2018.
Krista Bontrager: Yeah. And we should probably let people know that when you were growing up in South Central Los Angeles, that you lived through the Rodney King riots, if they've maybe heard about that, you were raised by a single mom, you're one of four children, you're the oldest of four children, and that you have had some experience of growing up in economic challenges.
Monique Duson: That's a kind way to say we were poor!
Krista Bontrager: And that you also worked in social service for quite a few years before going to Africa. So you've worked with homeless populations in group foster care.
Monique Duson: I think you know my bio better than I do! Yes, this is all part of the story. And part of the reason why I think we together really make a good pair to talk about things like racial injustice. We're talking about systems that may or may not be working against a group of people. How do we investigate to find out if a system is actually in play? Because I studied sociology at Biola. I was taught many of the ways to be able to acknowledge systems, or how do we think about systems.
Now, some of my education at Biola was also impacted by critical theory or critical race theory. And so I have relearned some things. I no longer hold to a critical theory framework or a critical race theory framework. But I do believe that as Christians, we have the responsibility and the opportunity to look out into society and say, “Hey, is there an injustice taking place? How do we know when an injustice is taking place”?
Because I have the scriptures lead us in all things. They give us all that we need for life and for godliness. And so I can look into the scriptures to see what are biblical injustices. So where should I spend or not spend my dollars? Where should I use my voice or my vote and impact society in a way that will help shift society to towards being a more righteous society?
Krista Bontrager: Yeah, and I think that is probably a good place for me to inject, a little bit about my upbringing and my experience, and then we bring those together. I also grew up in Southern California, the suburb of Los Angeles that’s called the San Gabriel Valley, and I'm a little older than Monique. And so we're almost two different generations. She's at the very beginning of the millennial generation, and I'm in the middle of the what are called Gen X. We were both raised by single mothers, and so we had an absence of fathers in the home and being brought up by our fathers.
I was raised with a very strong Christian mother and raised with a strong tethering to a local church. And that had a big impact in my life. I'm an only child. And I went to Christian schools for junior high school and college. I also went to Biola University. I was a film and television major at Biola University and met my husband there. And we've now been married for 32 years. We have two grown children.
In the 90s, I went to seminary. I went to Talbot School of Theology and did two Master of Arts degrees, one in theology and one in Bible exposition. I started a career to be what I thought I was going to be, a full-time theologian and work in academia professionally.
But the Lord had a different plan in that we ended up having our kids. I left academia worked part time for many years at an apologetics ministry, specifically focusing on articulating integration between the Bible and biblical ideas with science and the doctrine of creation. And I did that while my kids were growing up and started homeschooling them. So I was mostly a homeschool mom, stay at home mom. I worked about 15 hours a week for this apologetics ministry for most of their childhood. And then, was still involved in our local church and doing what we could to do to serve there.
I was just living my life, raising the kids, my husband and I were living in the suburbs and doing all that. And then when Monique and I met in the fall of 2017, we instantly had a lot of camaraderie together, in that we were both very opinionated. Ha ha!
Monique Duson: Before we talk about our opinions, let's talk about how did we meet? Because I lived over in South Africa, I would come home once a year and raise money for all of the work that I was doing in South Africa. And so I was speaking at a church here in California and one of our mutual friends, we didn't know each other, but we had a mutual friend in common. And that friend shared the talk that I was giving and Krista saw it.
And she then reached out and said, “Hey, like what you're doing”. And then we connected. It was really quite simple. But I think it's from there on that we initially had a conversation and then we just we started talking.
Krista Bontrager: Yeah. On Zoom and Facebook Messenger, because she was still living in South Africa. I was living I live in Southern California, and we just the camaraderie that we had of both kind of found the same things, humorous and, just connected about ministry issues and, values that we share in common, just really not liking hypocrisy and both being very direct in our communication and we just instantly had this friendship bond and camaraderie.
We're getting to know each other in the early part of 2018. And then she came home for a brief trip in early June of 2018 and I said, “Hey, why don't you come stay with my family for a couple of nights? I want to take you to church with me, meet my friends at work, and they've heard me talk about you and so it'd be fun to have you meet them.” And in that 10-day period of when she was here, she ended up having to make an emergency transition off the mission field, and she never went back to South Africa.
Monique Duson: Yes. Now for many people, if I didn't say what the emergency transition was, they would be like, “Why didn't you tell us? What was the reason you came home”?
I was diagnosed with mission field induced post-traumatic stress disorder. There had been a death threat made against me for some of the work that I was doing. And because of that, and some other things that had happened, when I got back here to the States to safety, I was diagnosed with mission field induced PTSD. In addition to the death threat, it was deemed that it was unsafe for me to return.
And so I left my whole life that I had built for four years in South Africa. All my clothes, all my shoes, car, everything. I left everything. I was only supposed to be home for six days. And so it was a very quick trip. I was doing some other quick trips in different places, different countries. And so I really only had a carry on that I came home with. I travel light, people. Not anymore though. Now I'm like, give me my whole big suitcase just in case I get stuck.
Krista Bontrager: But that kind of brings us to the part of the story where Monique came to live with our family. She needed a place to kind of transition off the mission field. So my husband and I offered her a guest room and bathroom in our house. We had already been renting out this room to international students from China and Japan that were coming to the local high school. And so we already had a setup.
And so we just said, “Hey, we're, we haven't gotten a new student yet. So why don't you stay with us for three months, three months, few months, give you a place to transition?”, not realizing at that time how significant the PTSD was, and that she would need a lot more time to recover. And so she just ended up staying with our family for almost five years.
Monique Duson: Four years and eleven months.
Krista Bontrager: So in that season, then we started some conversations together about the differences in how we were raised, differences in how we saw the world, particularly as it pertained to matters of race and justice.
Monique Duson: See, it's one thing to live on separate continents and talk because at that point, you can still hide any disagreements. You don't have to let all of your information out. But when you're in the same house, it's a lot harder. And I'm black. And so I really didn't think that living with white people was going to be for me. Because I'm black. That's just it. My mama raised me to be all the way black. I was not white.
There's difference in our culture. There's different differences in our hair. The hair was a big thing. There was just a lot of differences. And as we are now living together, these differences, especially in our ideology, our ways of thinking, what does it mean to be a human person? How do you treat people? How do you help people? What does righteousness and justice look like?
Those are some of the broader concepts that we tackled really early on. Now, it looked like, Oh, you're a Republican. I'm a Democrat. And we don't get along. Just right out the gate. We don't. I wanted to know immediately, you're white, you voted for Trump, right? Why would you do that? He doesn't like my people. Remember that?
Krista Bontrager: Yeah, I remember that. And we both, I think that's your way of saying we both had a lot of assumptions about each other. That because I'm white, I must think a certain way. Or I had assumptions about Monique, that because she was black or from that culture that I didn't really know anything about at the time.
Monique Duson: For black culture? You didn't know nothing about black culture?
Krista Bontrager: Not so much.
Monique Duson: You're right. There were a lot of assumptions. I assumed a lot, but I also had spent a lot of time working with white people.
Krista Bontrager: So you thought you knew about white people.
Monique Duson: Oh, there were some things I knew. There were some things I knew, but then there were a lot of things that I didn't know. Absolutely had no clue. I had just made these things up as I went along, as I watched things on TV, as I overheard certain comments around the office. That was how I acquired, I would say 95 percent of my knowledge.
John Yoder: So friends, that brings us to the end of part one of this conversation. You'll want to be back for part two next week, as Monique and Krista share some very different perspectives about parenting, racism, and politics.
Remember that you can grab a transcript of this podcast. you can catch every episode, and you can subscribe to our blog on our website www.CrossCulturalVoices.org.
