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America's Original Sin: Racism, White Privilege, and the Bridge to a New America, by Jim Wallis
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America's problem with race has deep roots, with the country's foundation tied to the near extermination of one race of people and the enslavement of another. Racism is truly our nation's original sin.
"It's time we right this unacceptable wrong," says bestselling author and leading Christian activist Jim Wallis. Fifty years ago, Wallis was driven away from his faith by a white church that considered dealing with racism to be taboo. His participation in the civil rights movement brought him back when he discovered a faith that commands racial justice. Yet as recent tragedies confirm, we continue to suffer from the legacy of racism. The old patterns of white privilege are colliding with the changing demographics of a diverse nation. The church has been slow to respond, and Sunday morning is still the most segregated hour of the week.
In America's Original Sin, Wallis offers a prophetic and deeply personal call to action in overcoming the racism so ingrained in American society. He speaks candidly to Christians--particularly white Christians--urging them to cross a new bridge toward racial justice and healing.
Whenever divided cultures and gridlocked power structures fail to end systemic sin, faith communities can help lead the way to grassroots change. Probing yet positive, biblically rooted yet highly practical, this book shows people of faith how they can work together to overcome the embedded racism in America, galvanizing a movement to cross the bridge to a multiracial church and a new America.
- Sales Rank: #71441 in Books
- Brand: Baker Pub Group/Baker Books
- Published on: 2017-02-14
- Released on: 2017-02-14
- Original language: English
- Dimensions: 8.90" h x .68" w x 5.91" l, .82 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 272 pages
Review
"A thought-provoking plea to white evangelicals and white Christians in general." ---Library Journal
From the Inside Flap
"Jim Wallis has grasped with amazing clarity and insight the persistent pain and sin of racism in America. In America's Original Sin we have not only a recounting of the pain of racism and xenophobia but also a hope-filled cartography for a new, reconciled reality. As a Latino evangelical, I have found in Jim Wallis a key ally and fellow visionary for a racially reconciled America."
--Rev. Dr. Gabriel Salguero, president, National Latino Evangelical Coalition; pastor, Lamb's Church
"Jim Wallis is a clarion voice our nation desperately needs right now, especially the parents and grandparents raising our next generation of children. Only the truth will set us free."
--Marian Wright Edelman, president, Children's Defense Fund
"Jim Wallis is a visionary veteran in the struggle against white supremacy. In this powerful book, he calls for a new conversation and action on the ground--in our homes, churches, sports arenas, and schools--in order to be true to the best of who we are!"
--Cornel West, Union Theological Seminary; author of Race Matters
"Every so often a leader addresses the pressing crisis of his or her day with the clarity, passion, and conviction that offers not only critique but hope that can only be forged in the trenches of faithful struggle and engagement. Jim Wallis has done just that by confronting the injustice of racism in our nation."
--Noel Castellanos, CEO & president, Christian Community Development Association (CCDA)
"We will not get better as a country until we face the sin we've inherited, the sin that continues to wound our brothers and sisters. This book can help us build a better nation by facing the terrible truth of our self-centeredness and the wonderful truth of God's ongoing, redeeming love."
--Joel C. Hunter, senior pastor, Northland--A Church Distributed
From the Back Cover
A book that every white person--especially every white Christian--must read.
"Jim Wallis marches among our hardiest and most steadfast pioneers on the path to a more perfect union and a more vibrant faith. America's Original Sin is a powerful act of Spirit-led truth telling and a loving disruption of the status quo. Wallis calls us to transcend racial categories and to see in one another the image of God. He points out the structural realities of sinful racism and makes clear that to be redeemed, we must do more than deny it. This is required reading for all who believe in the promises of God, hope for the American democracy, and long to see the power of a justice ethos grounded in love."
--Rev. Dr. William Barber II, president, North Carolina State Conference of the NAACP; author of The Third Reconstruction
"I have been waiting a long time for this book. I have been waiting for a white, male, evangelical Christian to say what Jim Wallis has the courage to say. Jim, in his own inimitable way, invites us into a conversation about America's original sin that is long overdue. America, the church, the criminal justice system, and, indeed, all of us, need to engage in the level of truth telling that he is calling for in this book."
--Cynthia L. Hale, senior pastor, Ray of Hope Christian Church, Decatur, Georgia
"Jim Wallis, the nation's preeminent evangelical prophetic teacher and preacher, sends a tough love letter to America, demanding and daring the church not only to repent of the 'original sin' of racism but also to join the fight against all forms of racial injustice. I encourage everyone who is concerned about our democracy and who desires to see the church live out its true mission of love and justice to read this prophetic epistle."
--Otis Moss III, senior pastor, Trinity United Church of Christ, Chicago, Illinois
"In the face of the implicit and often unconscious structures of racism, 'it's time for white Christians to be more Christian than white,' says Jim Wallis. If you don't understand this quote--or if you do--read America's Original Sin. Wallis unpacks for white Americans how we lost our souls, and he maps out the road of repentance to systemic and personal racial healing."
--Sharon E. Watkins, general minister and president, Christian Church (Disciples of Christ)
"For decades, Jim Wallis has steadfastly spoken, written, and lived as one committed to racial justice and reconciliation. This book is a consummate distillation of those themes that leans back to remember 'America's original sin,' principally to rivet our attention and commitment to a different future. This is a sobering and motivating act of hope."
--Mark Labberton, president, Fuller Theological Seminary
Most helpful customer reviews
70 of 75 people found the following review helpful.
Personal and Powerful
By Rev. Scott Garber, author of the upcoming White as Sin
One Sunday I stood in the church vestibule greeting congregants as they exited. One man complimented me on the sermon and then asked this somewhat unusual question: “How long do you think it took to prepare that?”
“Fifty years,” I told him. That was my age at the time.
The best messages have to steep for a while, and clearly the message of America’s Original Sin has been steeping for quite some time. In fact, a few months ago, Jim Wallis told me that this was the book he’s always wanted to write. I believe he’s been writing it all his life. It’s only now, in the fullness of time, that we’re getting to read it.
This book lays bare the facts about white America’s moral responsibility for this country’s racial dysfunction. These facts are not really in dispute but are nevertheless largely ignored by white Christians. Not any more. Jim Wallis doesn’t just present the facts; he confronts us with them.
America’s Original Sin is not just a reminder of our jaded history or our hypocritical present. It is more than the sum of its sobering statistics. It calls into question the very benignity of whiteness. It reminds us of our biblical commitments. It calls us to repentance.
The repentance to which Jim Wallis points, however, is not simply a cathartic spiritual experience. He’s not just talking about committing to change but about making changes—changes in our relationships, changes in our churches, changes in our politics. And the book is chock full of practical prescriptions as to what that change should look like.
Perhaps the best thing about this book, however, is just how very personal it is. Reading this book feels a lot like having a conversation with Jim Wallis, right down to the de rigueur references to Little League. After a lifetime of listening to and living with minority concerns, Jim offers us the benefit of an experience that few of us will ever have. If we take it to heart, we can change the racial landscape of America.
87 of 97 people found the following review helpful.
TWO STARS. AMERICA'S ORIGINAL SIN: RACISM, WHITE PRIVILEGE, AND THE BRIDGE TO A NEW AMERICA (2016), BY JIM WALLIS
By Midwest Reader
I ordered this title pre-publication.
I wanted to like the book; but the truth is that I did not. It was a frustrating read for me. Nevertheless, it gave me a lot to think about.
Through the course of attempting to articulate what it was that troubled me in these pages, I re-read early chapters of Lillian Smith's 1949 classic, KILLERS OF THE DREAM (which was revised and republished in 1961). Hers is the clear-eyed view of the complicated dilemma of segregation in which white Southerners found themselves caught up, written from the empathetic perspective of an articulate writer who was herself a white Southerner. Smith was not a defender of segregation, however. She saw the world as a place where all its children should be able to play together, and grow together, as equals. But she understood intimately the dilemma with which white Southerners lived.
It is this rare but necessary perspective that Wallis' writing seems to lack.
In his engaging "My Story" in the opening pages of chapter 1, Wallis reveals how it was that he gained a sympathetic perspective of African Americans; but evidently he never was able to get beyond his anger to the place of developing a similarly sympathetic or empathetic perspective of the white, racially- and socially-unengaged Christianity that he rejected. Consequently-—or so it seems to me-—that same anger, unresolved, pervades and weakens his ability to communicate effectively with the audience he most hopes to reach with this book: That would be white America, and particularly the white Evangelical Christian America in which he grew up (xxiii; 3-4, 62).
Following are some of the specific problems I had with this book.
1. Although this has been described elsewhere as a concise and focused work, my read of it is the opposite. Beginning with the Preface and Introduction, but not ending there, I had difficulty understanding where Wallis was going with the book, and how he intended to get there; he has a tendency to shift unexpectedly from one thought to another, and to meander around in his thoughts. It might be deduced from the Introduction that the author's multiple purposes in writing the book can be summed up as an exploration of (1) America's racial past, (2) its present, and (3) its future (xxv). It was shortly after this point that he lost me, however; because he surely didn't follow that outline. The first two chapters of the book should perhaps be viewed as belonging to his Preface and Introduction.
There is a lot in this book that is a repetition of what we've already read in newspapers and heard in detail in endless television reporting. Added to that is much that is tangential, lacking in subtlety and delicacy and heavy on harangue. In addition, nearly everything here is borrowed from somewhere else, and not always artfully so. I wondered whether all those rave reviews at the front of the book-—20 of them, not counting more on the dust cover-—were wishful thinking. Reading the book took my determined effort.
2. With a title of "America's Original Sin," I expected this book to present a solid and convincing defense of why racism should deserve to be called my country's Original Sin. I was disappointed by Wallis' fragmented attempt at doing that here. Although page 9 contains a beginning definition of America's "original sin," as Wallis conceptualizes it, any argument to connect it to current racial problems quickly devolves within a few paragraphs. For him the sequence of cause and effect is already obvious, and that's what he communicates (xxii, e.g.; first complete sentence on the page). But stories of encounters with "good cops" and "bad apples" does not connect the racial problems of today to a "system" with roots in a 400-year-old original sin by simply saying it's connected (9). Citing evidence of current racial sin without a more thorough defense of one's basic premise about causation does not make an argument that skeptics are inclined to buy. Convincing Christians today that they/we have a part in a systemic racial sin which goes back four centuries is not a fait accompli (see xv, ¶ 3) when many of the same Christians believe that the shootings at Mother Emanuel were due to mental illness-—nothing more or less.
To be fair, Wallis does pick up his page-9 argument again in multiple partial attempts (37, ¶ 4; 39-40; 45, ¶ 5, through 46, ¶¶ 1-2) and, finally, in a more comprehensive form (~ pp 76-82 of chapter 5), some-65 additional pages after first attempting an explanation of the term. This is a pretty long trek over which to expect to hold his readers' attention, especially if they are reluctant readers to begin with.
3. I hoped that chapter 3 ("The Original Sin and Its Legacy") might lead to the heart of what I expected to find in the book. Instead, chapter 3, like so much of the book, seems excessive in drawing attention to the author. Wallis seems to take personal pride in portraying himself as controversial (33; 34; 37,n.2; 39; 52-3), bringing up that aspect of himself repeatedly [yet taking apparent offense when "charged with being polemical" (39)]. With all due respect to the man and his work, I confess to being put off-—throughout the book-—by the author introducing the ideas of others in terms of where Wallis met those others, how Wallis responded, etc. (See, e.g., 53, 64, 128-9, 190-4.) I wish he or his editors had had the ability to get to the point without doing that. There is no question that writing creatively and writing about oneself with humility is hard to do; but I sincerely wish that Wallis and his editors had tried harder.
4. With all he has to say about repentance-—and with all that America could rightfully be called upon to repent for-—I have difficulty understanding why Wallis should want to spend time asking white Americans to feel his complicated need to repent for being white. By doing this, he may be making the issue of repentance more profound for some of his readers; but I would suggest that he also is making it unnecessarily confusing. Yes, I understand that "whiteness" bestows automatic privilege in this country; and yes, I understand why that privilege is automatic. Wallis goes to some length to explain that whiteness is a “false” identity. But here's the problem: The black theologian James Cone appears to understand Wallis' white audience better than Wallis does. If I understand James Cone correctly, whom Wallis quotes [GOD OF THE OPPRESSED (1975)] in "borrowing" the phrase "die to whiteness" (65, 73), he (Cone) says something quite different in his much more recent book, THE CROSS AND THE LYNCHING TREE (2011). Cone says there that the sin Americans need to deal with is "the great sin and ongoing legacy of white supremacy" (C & LT, 165-6), NOT whiteness. If repentance means turning in an opposite direction, what can we who are of northern European extraction do about the genetics of our skin color? But white supremacy is something which is based in attitude and behavior; that is a sin and legacy we can hope to do something about. Wallis even acknowledges as much when he says, "...(T)he real issue…is the persistence of white privilege, which is…rooted in…white supremacy" (73). A similar problem involves Wallis' activities in Ferguson, Missouri, and his thoughts on a "weekend of repentance" (69-72), all of which seems less than clear to me. Why should he want to include all of this in talking about repentance? Was he arrested, for example, for "an act of repentance" (72) or for trying to shame a police force into changing the way they operated? I can understand the concept of standing in solidarity with the oppressed, and perhaps that's essentially what Wallis was trying to illustrate.
I have other problems with this work, but I will stop with the above.
It remains to be seen whether white Christians will receive what Wallis has to say here. There is a lot, in my opinion, about the roots of white economic power and white privilege and white entitlement that white America, and contemporary white Evangelical Christian America in particular, probably have never had occasion to learn or to be aware of. I am no longer young, and that has been true of me until in very recent years. They might get some of that if they persevere with the book.
I learned some things while reading this, and other books along with it, that I didn't know or appreciate before. I had not known, for example, that the GI Bill of Rights was inequitably administered to black and white veterans after WW II. This was obviously a critical obstacle to black upward mobility. It may be historically at-least-as-important a factor in maintaining white privilege as has been the historical pitting of lower-class whites against impoverished blacks by white elites in order to prevent the poor of both races from joining forces in attempting to improve their socioeconomic situation. Additionally, I had not realized that "states' rights" advocacy-—something heard expressed so frequently these days-—was a euphemism for "stop getting in the way of white privilege and white supremacy," which it evidently was and is. Lastly, for including the quote, "Talking is not the same thing as being heard" (124), I thank Wallis. It has profound implications.
To readers who are able to see beyond the faults over which I have taken issue with Wallis' book and are able to view it in a more favorable light, I say, "Good for you."
Interestingly, another book with the same main title—AMERICA'S ORIGINAL SIN: ABSOLUTION & PENANCE, by Arthur I. Montoya—was published in 2011. Although not entirely without faults, it is well-organized, informative, and relatively concise and thorough in demonstrating how slavery in America led to America's current racial problems. Montoya's answer to those problems may be too simplistic, but he states it clearly in four brief concluding pages.
For readers who have not yet bought Wallis' book-—and anyone interested-—I recommend several other books that deal with how we got to where we are. I recommend reading Isabel Wilkerson's carefully researched and wonderfully written THE WARMTH OF OTHER SUNS (2010), and Bryan Stevenson's invigorating JUST MERCY (2011); then Michele Alexander's THE NEW JIM CROW (2010)-—not an easy read but an especially valuable one at this present juncture in American life. I recommend Danielle McGuire's AT THE DARK END OF THE STREET: BLACK WOMEN, RAPE AND RESISTANCE-—A NEW HISTORY OF THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT FROM ROSA PARKS TO THE RISE OF BLACK POWER (2010), and Congressman John Lewis' WALKING WITH THE WIND (1998). If given a choice between reading the book TWELVE YEARS A SLAVE, written about Solomon Northrup, and seeing the motion picture film by the same name [critiqued by Wallis (37-8)], I recommend the former. (The latter is, in my opinion, a depiction of violence for the sake of violence and-—for reasons that only the film makers know-—does not come close to representing the book fairly. There is sufficient violence portrayed in the book.) Finally, for those who cannot afford to buy or borrow any of these books, and for those who can, I recommend from the Equal Justice Initiative (www.eji.org) a free copy of 58-page SLAVERY IN AMERICA (2013) and 88-page LYNCHING IN AMERICA: CONFRONTING THE LEGACY OF RACIAL TERROR (2015). Both help to draw the line of causality from white supremacy of America's slave-holding era down to America's present legacy of racial inequality; the latter includes mention of the psychological harm that extends to the white American community (67-73), which is our own legacy.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
Don't just read: follow
By Philotheopoiea
Jim Wallis is good at pulling together detail and insight to help people understand the theological roots and wings of public issues. He's done that in several books now and this book is extremely timely given the recent unveiling of the depths of both personal and structural racism in the United States. There are a lot of books out there more informative about the politics of race and there are a lot of theological constructions around racial justice that have been written by superb theologians; Wallace draws on both kinds of books to fulfill a relatively rare role as a white man speaking primarily to white people about a spiritual approach to dismantling our racist social structure. Theologically, I have a couple of minor bones to pick. (For example, I wonder if the role played by shame in sustaining racism needs a fuller theological response.) But this book is an informative and useful blend of public theology and spiritual discipline and worth reading and using as a guide.
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