Daniel Hill (1) (1973–)

It's hard to know what to say about a book you'd been anticipating for months, started reading, experienced shock (over and over and over) about some of the badly tone-deaf things in the book, and kept slogging through in hopes that you'd find some coherent thread to take away.

And here's my takeaway:

White Evangelicalism is so invested in its success, nay, survival, that it is unwilling to dismantle its own system which has invested time and energy in keeping white supremacist politics and theology alive and well in contemporary American Christianity. In fact, it is blind to some of the whitewashing that occurs routinely in its own culture.

I am willing to grant the point that Hill is writing for people open to changing but having absolutely no starting point and no idea about race relations, politics, or white supremacy. If this was the case, then he needed to provide a much stronger bibliography and more connections to the masses of people who have written about the subject before him. Further, his blend of memoir and how-to got muddy and should have been clearer in focus. I think of Robin DiAngelo's 2012 book, What Does It Mean To Be White? in which we talk about whiteness and break it down as a cultural and sociological phenomenon. DiAngelo provides bullet points and learning factotums to digest, as well as keywords. I'm not saying Hill needed to follow this exact model, but if he is indeed writing to an audience who needs to learn a LOT, he should have followed a more educational model.

There is also a total dearth of liberation and womanist theology in the book. The concept of race, social justice, and white supremacy within the church is something that liberation theologists have addressed, linking the suffering of Christ to the suffering experienced by people of color at the hands of an unjust system. Womanist theology is new to me, but my baseline understanding is that it connects the unique discrimination against women of suffering to Christ's own life on earth. Hill was not shy about including theology in his book, but it was more exegetical in focus. The lack of addressing race within theology itself was disappointing.

Hill also alludes to systems of power that oppress marginalized individuals, but he himself is often blind to how he portrays them. A case in point was the example of Germany recognizing and remembering the Holocaust as a system of injustice. That filled me with boiling rage: Germany experienced the Holocaust, because people were in denial about Hitler's naked racism and xenophobia and DID NOTHING. They turned a blind eye to the ghettos and death camps and smoke rising from chimneys in Dachau and Birkenau and Auschwitz and chose not to ask the hard questions. We cannot blithely refer to German contemporary remembrance without also noting that good people doing nothing was how 12 million people were systematically executed.

I haven't even gotten to the part that aggravated me the most: the incredible soft-pedaling when it came to explaining White Evangelicalism's engagement with race. Hill timidly alludes to the 2016 presidential election and that people "disagreed" on either side of the aisle. REALLY? We had people like Franklin Graham, Jerry Falwell Jr., and Dr. James Dobson who wholeheartedly endorsed Donald Trump and excused his racism, misogyny, xenophobia, and personal crudities as part of his journey as a "new Christian." Jen Hatmaker and Rachel Held Evans stood up to sexism, homophobia, and other attacks against marginalized communities and both received nasty personal attacks from the established Evangelical community as a result--Hatmaker's fallout was especially vicious. I get that Hill does not want to disenfranchise readers with the potential to change their hearts, but there is a fundamental truth we cannot ignore: people who voted for Donald Trump were by and large motivated by race anxiety, and the Evangelical Church fell *hard* for Trump, defending him and supporting him more strongly than any other demographic present in the election. Honestly, if you are not willing to disrupt white supremacy within your own faith demographic, you are not ready to lead other people into reconciliation, and people of color are not going to trust your efforts to reconcile with them.

I appreciated Hill's candor in his own theological journey and I would urge him, his readers, any readers of this review, and my own self to keep learning and reading. White supremacy is endemic to all major power systems in the United States, and we must become comfortable with being uncomfortable in order to grow and learn. I'll be reading womanist theology myself. I also encourage you to read Michael Eric Dyson's Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White People and Robin DiAngelo's White Fragility to really tackle issues of race within systems of power, especially a church.… (más)

An exploration of the author's journey toward greater recognition of white privilege, white culture, and how to most effectively seek to reconcile among various racial groups.

The beginning of the book is most consistent with the title, featuring a lot of the author's story as he came to a greater awareness of his whiteness in contrast to the experiences of others and his attempts to promote greater racial harmony and reconciliation.

Most of the book works through a personal process of coming to an understanding of the racial dynamics at play in America: encounter, denial, disorientation, shame, self-righteousness, awakening, and active participation. The author provides encouragement through the process, for the reader to grapple with the various phases him or herself as well as to serve as an encouragement for others.

In a time when many white people are coming to a greater awareness of their privilege and how people of color do not have the opportunity to have the same experience of American life as they do, this is a good resource to help white people come to grips with the situation and find a productive way forward.

**--galley received as part of early review program… (más)