Dear White Christians: For Those Still Longing for Racial Reconciliation

Dear White Christians: For Those Still Longing for Racial Reconciliation, by Jennifer Harvey. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2014. 262 pages.Adherents to the Baha'i Faith are familiar with this verse from Baha'u'llah's writings: this Day whatsoever serveth to reduce blindness and to increase is worthy of consideration. This acteth as the agent and guide for true knowledge. Indeed in the estimation of men of wisdom of understanding is due to of vision (Tablets 35).There is keenness of vision in Dear White Christians for those of any faith, or none, who long to heal the schism between the races and achieve true justice for our dark-skinned brothers and sisters. Author Jennifer Harvey, associate professor of religion at Drake University and ordained pastor in the American Baptist Churches, has produced a work that rigorously combines key notes from African American history with the responses from mainline Protestant and prophetic evangelical denominations to produce a detailed analysis of what has gone wrong. She answers with conviction, documentation, and insight the following question: Why, after so many decades of well-intentioned efforts, does eleven o'clock on Sunday morning remain the most segregated hour for Christian America? And further, she identifies alternate path toward achieving Dr. Martin Luther King's of the beloved community.Justice and racial identity are squarely at the center of Harvey's revealing conclusion that as long as the racial divide is addressed through the lens of (or the reconciliation paradigm as she names it), both healing and true unity will continue to elude not only Christians, but all of us who care. Healing can begin only after we light-skinned people look unflinchingly at our racial identity and own it. As we do so, we are compelled to recognize not only the brutal past, but also the continued systemic injustices that trap our dark-skinned siblings. And if we truly seek justice for them, Harvey explains, the path forward should be focused on repairing the damage done. This calls for a new paradigm-that of reparations.Harvey identifies the stunning omission in most efforts to achieve racial harmony as the failure to acknowledge the effects of racism on lightskinned people. Just as racism defines what it means to be dark skinned in America, it also reciprocally defines whiteness. In a racially divided society, whiteness, like blackness, is a racial identity. To demonstrate, Harvey poses a question to her college students: Is it OK to say that is beautiful? Of course it's not. White, in racial terms, denotes the dominant class that subjugates blacks and other racialized minorities through systems of violence and oppression. Unlike the sympathetic statement black is beautiful, calling white beautiful can imply an endorsement of white or a rallying cry for the Ku Klux Klan (45).According to Harvey, failure to embrace the history of white racial identity has allowed light-skinned people to ignore their complicity and violence (52). And because we have often not recognized our racial identity or attempted to deal with its implications, whiteness today describes a state of profound moral crisis and conceptual chaos (56, 45). She further explains that light-skinned Americans have consistently failed to resist and refuse white supremacy even though it permeates our history, our system of justice, our social institutions, and our habits (55).We can thus conclude that, until the twin evils of preference and prejudice are purged from the fabric of our society-which justice demands-lightskinned people will continue unjustly to benefit materially from the legacy of white supremacy. Our whiteness, its privilege and supremacy, remain at the heart of racial alienation, and the moral work that has been ignored for too long must entail, at a minimum, transforming our unjust laws and institutions (62). …

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