I MET KATHY KHANG last summer. She joked about turning to Korean face masks and wine in her times of need; I immediately thought to myself that we’d really get along. Fortunately, her expertise in crafting both engaging conversation and knockout tweets (@mskathykhang) translates well into her latest book, Raise Your Voice: Why We Stay Silent and How to Speak Up.
Khang, who emigrated from Korea to the U.S. as a child, has worked in various settings, including newsrooms and university campus ministries. She brings her journalism and ministry experience to activism, recognizing that social justice always involves multiple intersections of race, gender, orientation, faith, politics, and more.
Raise Your Voice is an authentic diagnosis of, and antidote to, the deafening silence from many women and minorities in the workplace, politics, the world, and, most potently, in our spiritual and worship spaces. Khang crosses social, cultural, professional, and generational boundaries to create a tool useful to anyone who has ever felt either like they didn’t have a voice, or that their voice was taken from them.
The author walks us through many facets of power and speech: why we don’t speak up, how to find our voice, how to prepare to speak up, how to speak up, and how to care for ourselves after we have spoken up. Khang helpfully organizes her advice into bulleted lists that guide us through each step of the journey. (A cheer goes up from the generation addicted to the “10 ways to ...” article format.) The work of raising your voice begins within yourself, but it includes many levels of culpability within our spiritual, political, and professional spheres. Khang’s advice centers around the individual, but communities can learn from it as well.
Khang effortlessly makes each chapter personal in nature, but universal in applicability. She sprinkles deeply personal examples of feeling voiceless between biblical revelations. (For example, Moses was as insecure as the rest of us and tried multiple times to refuse a very specific call from God. In Khang’s words, “Who does he think he is?”) From being physically silenced in her workplace to overcompensating with excuses for choosing not to speak up during her time in ministry, Khang exposes her deepest insecurities and hopes to the reader.
Khang reminds us of Esther, the near perfect biblical example of a minority woman forced to assimilate and pass in a majority space. Esther’s original name is Hadassah; Kathy Khang was Khang KyoungAh before she was Kathy. By pushing aside the parts of themselves that were no longer advantageous in the majority space, Kathy and Esther learned to survive. But Khang reminds us that “the parts of our story that get lost or buried can only stay hidden for so long if we want to truly be whole and become who God created us to be.”
One of the most important points of the book is the need for intense self-care before, during, and after raising our voice. After all, “God did not spend a metaphorical six days on creating to spend the seventh day fretting.” Her three tenets are rest, restore, and be ready to go. Woven throughout this advice is the constant reminder that while an intentional practice of self-care is important, the form for each person will be unique.
Khang is a talented writer, but beyond that she is a woman of God and an expert at diagnosing room for growth. Do yourself a favor: Pick up this book and allow her to remind you to strive to know more deeply how God sees you, and to rest in the comfort that we are on this journey together.
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