Book Reviews

Summary: The second edition of an introduction to making reconciliation a real and tangible reality to Christian communities. 

Generally, my approach to reading is to find areas I can agree and learn from. It is not that I am not ever critical in my reading, but that I tend to work to be charitable. I say that because the reading of this book was much more critical than I tend to because it was read in a small group discussion. The group is all committed to racial reconciliation within my church, and they are not brand new to the conversation. So our critical reading was not based in opposition to the real need for racial reconciliation but in trying to test this roadmap to our experience and context. We were often challenged about being too critical, but the criticism was not about diminishing Dr. Salter McNeil’s work or thought but about challenging ourselves to think more deeply. I think that part of what I take out of this book is that there needs to be more theoretical work put into reconciliation.

Dr. Salter McNeil has a lifetime of work in racial reconciliation. And similar to my concerns of critiquing John Perkins, I am not at all critiquing the reality that they have given their lives to the service of Christ. But because they have served well does not mean that we can take their history as prescriptive to the future. In her book Becoming Brave, Dr. Salter McNeil notes that she has changed over time. Going forward, racial reconciliation within the evangelical protestant world must change to be more focused on reparations and repair and less focused on reparations and repair relational and visible diversity. That critique has become widespread and has been made for more than 20 years, from Emerson and Smith’s Divided by Faith to I Bring the Voice of My People to Elusive Dream and more. In her book Dear White Christians: For Those Still Longing for Racial Reconciliation, Jennifer Harvey specifically called out Brenda Salter McNeil for her coddling white Christians. And it is to Dr. Salter McNeil’s credit that she not only took that critique seriously but has noted it in both Becoming Brave and Road to Reconciliation.

In the context of my group discussion, there was quite a bit of discussion about basics, definitions, theoretical approaches, and the relationship between Christianity and reconciliation. Not every book can, or needs to, have a fully developed theoretical framework, but I think Road to Reconciliation needed more. For instance, the not so simple concept of race was not explored enough. Race is not a concept in scripture because it is a modern idea. But that does not stop many Christians from taking concepts that were in biblical ideas, like ethnicity and cultures, and transporting them to the modern idea of race. The modern idea of race is a socially constructed reality that inherently assumes a heirarchy and rankings. That does not mean that I don’t think that the modern idea of race cannot be redeemed, but I do think that if we are going to attempt that, we have to be aware of the pitfalls and point them out.

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Summary: A young adult novel in verse about an 8th grader grappling with his parent’s potential divorce, his own love interest, and is grappling with his father’s expectations. 

I have grown to enjoy novels in verse. Kwame Alexander has been the author of most of them, but also the memoir in verse Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson. I need to seek out some other authors. I mostly listen to these as audiobooks because hearing them read rightly feels like the most authentic choice. But I also try to read enough of them in print to get a sense of the poetic style. I likely should fully read them in print and fully listen to them because there are often hidden aspects of the verse in the print layout. And their audio often has a better orientation to the intention of the author’s writing than what I would do for myself.

My wife is teaching a unit on figurative language to 5th graders right now, and she is using the lyrics of songs from Encanto. The students know all the songs, and they can analyze the lyrics differently than they would if they were coming at poetry without any history. At the same time, our understanding of the lyrics is influenced by the movie’s visuals. She told me last night that there were multiple arguments about whether one line or another was figurative or literal or hyperbolic or some other characteristic. She would have to bracket the conversations by asking whether the line abstracted from the movie is an idiom or tends to be used in a hyperbolic way, and then ask, “Was there actually any clouds in the sky? Then he said there were no clouds in the sky?” The artists were often very literal in their representation of the lyrics, likely more literal than Lin Manuel Miranda may have intended.

I bring this up because one of the complaints I have heard is that either kids are not interested in poetry or cannot really understand the lyrical depth of poetry. Anyone that had been a teen pouring over lyrics trying to understand exactly what they were saying and what it means knows that this isn’t true. Kids do get poetry, or at least they can get poetry if taught well, and it is interesting for them.

Like many of these novels in verse, there are a lot of pages, but the audio is pretty short. This one was 326 pages but only 2 hours and 36 minutes in audiobook. Which shows how much space is on the page. That sparseness is part of what I like. There is often a density to the lines that says more than one thing at a time. That being said, Kwame Alexander is writing this as a middle-grade book to get boys more interested in reading. So you must come into the book expecting a middle-grade novel.

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Takeaway: Part of the importance of Black History Month is focusing on the less well-known figures because so much has been repressed or forgotten. 

So many historical figures have made so many small contributions to our world that it is hard to believe anyone could have done so much. And at the same time, the fact that they are not more well-known is a testament to how our memories are fickle. I was unaware of Dovey Johnson Roundtree, and I honestly do not remember why or when the book ended up on my to-read list. But I picked it up this month because it is on sale.

Dovey Johnson Roundtree was born in 1914 and lived until 2018 at 104 years old. This autobiography was written with the help of Katie McCabe and published in 2009 under the title Justice Older than the Law. It was then reissued in 2019 with the new title Mighty Justice. Unfortunately, by the time she started working on her autobiography, she had lost her sight due to complications from diabetes. But ten videos of her were recorded by the VisionaryProject , giving a good sense of who she was and what she was like in her early 90s.

When she was four, her father died in the flu epidemic of 1918, and her mother and sisters moved in with her grandparents. Her grandfather was a pastor and well-educated. Her grandmother was a guiding force that is frequently mentioned in her autobiography but was disabled due to injuries from fighting off an attempted rape by a white field overseer when she was a young teen. Dovey Johnson Roundtree came of age during the Great Depression but attended Spellman College by working three jobs. Through the kindness of people around her, she graduated when even those three jobs were insufficient to keep her in school. She taught middle school for two years to earn enough money to support her family but then moved to Washington, DC, and began working as a researcher for Mary McCloud Bethune, whom she met because of her grandmother. Mary McCloud Bethune was one of the most influential women in Washington as the head of the National Council for Negro Women and one of FDR’s informal Black Cabinet. Bethune ensured that during WWII, the Woman’s Army Corp, Black women would be included in officer training. Dovey Johnson was included in the first class and was one of the first women to be made an Army officer. Due to her push against military segregation, she was blackballed but was not court marshaled, unlike several others. She spent all of WWII working to recruit Black women into the military and working on policy groups for desegregation and women’s rights issues in the military.

In 1947, after working in the military, she entered Howard Law School after catching a vision for using the law in civil rights in her brief work with A. Philip Randolph and labor organizing. Because of its location in DC, Howard Law School was the site of many preparations for the civil rights legal cases at the Supreme Court.

Roundtree and Julius Robertson, one of her law school classmates, started a small law firm in 1952 after they graduated. During that first year of their new law firm, they took on Sarah Keys, who sued the Carolina Coach bus company after being thrown off the bus for refusing to move to the back of the bus. Keys was in military uniform, and this was after the 1946 Morgan v. Commonwealth of Virginia, where the Supreme Court ruled that segregated bus travel was unconstitutional. But there was no enforcement of the 1946 ruling. Roundtree and Robertson sued the bus companies for violating the contract and for having Sarah Keys arrested for refusing to move seats. They lost the case in state court and appealed it to the Interstate Commerce Commission administrative judges. For Dovey Johnson Roundtree, this was not just an important case but mirrored her experience of being ejected from a bus in the same type of incident when she was a military recruiter in 1943. After three years of hearings, legal maneuvers, and appeals (in 1955), the full ICC ruled that

“We conclude that the assignment of seats on interstate buses, so designated as to imply the inherent inferiority of a traveler solely because of race or color, must be regarded as subjecting the traveler to unjust discrimination, and undue and unreasonable prejudice and disadvantage…We find that the practice of defendant requiring that Negro interstate passengers occupy space or seats in specified portions of its buses, subjects such passengers to unjust discrimination, and undue and unreasonable prejudice and disadvantage, in violation of Section 216 (d) of the Interstate Commerce Act and is therefore unlawful.”

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Summary: Dr. Thomas More has recently been released from two years of prison for selling prescription drugs and returns to his Louisiana community to discover that all is not right. 

The Thanatos Syndrome is sort of a sequel to Love in the Ruins, but apart from the characters, much has changed. Thomas More is still a somewhat neurotic psychiatrist. He has ‘found himself’ after two years in jail and is no longer drinking to the extent that he was. He is now married to his former nurse/secretary/love interest from Love in the Ruins. But the world is very different. Love in the Ruins was in a sort of post-apocalyptic world where there was no real national government and many extremist groups that had created their own little fiefdoms. But Thanatos Syndrome is set in a late 1980s Louisiana (it was written about 15 years after Love in the Ruins) that is not too different from the real 1980s Louisiana.

Thomas More had one real significant research achievement the Lapseometer. In Love in the Ruins, it was designed to read the state of the soul with the ability to fix mental imbalances. In Thanatos Syndrome, it is a brain scanner that detects heavy salts in the brain that impact brain function. Soon after being released from prison, he is asked to consult with several patients. Most of these are people he has previously worked with and knows in this small community. They are changed. Over time Thomas More realizes that something is impacting a large area making people more docile, more computer-like in their ability to access information, and the women are more sexually aggressive. There is a crazy old catholic priest who was a boy during the early days of Nazi Germany that speaks up if the social commentary was not clear enough.

Walker Percy is writing a social commentary novel. The main theme of the book is social engineering. A group of rogue scientists and doctors are using the water system to nearly eliminate crime, teenage pregnancy, and other social ills, but also removing part of what it means to be human. Thomas More thinks that the human part is really important. Percy (and More) are Catholic and there is an underlying catholic social teaching that opposes abortion and euthanasia and eugenics as well as an obligation to care for AIDS patients and other ‘undesirables’. He critiques racism and sexism while illustrating it, so there are problems with me recommending it.

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Summary: A history of Baptists and Methodists in South Carolina arguing for the continuation of segregation for theological reasons. 

I have read a lot of Civil Rights and Civil War/Reconstruction/Jim Crow history. And some of that history, like Mark Noll’s The Civil War as a Theological Crisis, is trying to be comprehensive, but much of it is telling the history from the side of the abolitionists or the opponents to segregation. The Bible Told Them So is telling an essential part of this history from the side of the segregationists and why they were arguing for the continuation of segregation and how they made that argument. The arguments are so explicit and clear here that it becomes hard to avoid the reality of how in the 1950-70s there was a real fight to “preserve white supremacy.”

The book is structured in five chapters. The first focuses on congregational response to Brown v Board and how many pastors were fired for supporting the ruling. The second chapter looks in more detail at the theological reasoning for the defense of segregation. The third chapter looks at how Baptists and Methodists responded to proposals to integrate their denominational colleges (and pairs nicely with the chapter on college from The Myth of Colorblind Christianity). The fourth chapter is about the rise of colorblind language and justifications for segregation in the face of the larger culture’s rejection of segregationist rhetoric. And the final chapter is about the rise of private schools and how those schools were framed, primarily using colorblind rhetoric but for segregationists reasons.

I think the arc of this history is essential. There is a movement from overt segregationist language, theologically informed and undergirded, to alternate public rhetoric while maintaining the private communication, to a colorblind public and private rhetoric without a change in practice, to a denial that the earlier segregationist language was ever used. In many ways, I think this builds on the work on the history of memory from David Blight and others about how there is an intentional misremembering. One of the parts of this story that was new to me was how early colorblind language was drawn directly from the Plessy v Ferguson decision.

“The phrases “natural affinities,” “mutual appreciation of merits,” and “voluntary association of individuals” were not Workman’s. They were the words of Henry Brown Billings, words the Supreme Court in 1896 used to deny Homer Plessy–and all who shared his skin color–ful equity as American citizens…At first blush, Workman’s letter seemed to gesture at a new era of white Christians’ acceptance of racial integration. But by appropriating word for word a line from the Supreme Court case that gave Jim Crow legal sanction in the South for nearly seven decades, Workman’s letter also reveals ways in which the new language of colorblindness had its roots in the desire of segregation. Understanding the historical links between colorblindness and segregationist theology reveals a continuity of segregationist Christianity from the 1950s to the 1970s and a perpetuation of racial separatism by white Christians–even unwittingly so–into the decades beyond.”

As expected, I have a lot of highlights, primarily of quotes that need to be read to be believed. You can see my 12 notes and 76 highlights on my Goodreads page.

One of the interesting realities is that arguments, primarily those in the 1950s and early 1960s, included the positive use of the phrase “white supremacy.”

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Summary: A memoir of the ways that beliefs about God impact our social reality and the ways that we can heal. 

There are books that I know will be misread or not picked up because they are judged without being read. I am never sure if the misreading or the prejudicial lack of reading is the bigger problem. I recieved an advance copy of God is a Black Woman from Netgalley. I glanced at reviews on Netgalley when I downloaded it, and sure enough, the standard (my paraphrase), “well, God may not be a white man, but he sure isn’t a Black woman,” was in one of the early reviews. And in response to a tweet, I posted a quote from God is a Black woman, and a person I do not follow argued with me over several tweets, assuring me that Christena Cleveland was publicly no longer a Christian and now advocated Goddess worship. That person had not read God is a Black woman but assured me that their view was accurate based on their reading of social media. I countered that I had read the book written to address these issues and that Cleveland had neither publicly repudiated Christianity nor advocated Goddess worship. But those two interactions, I think, will characterize a lot of potential readers, vague impressions that inaccurately keep them from picking the book up, and a misunderstanding of the book based on a lack of familiarity with the realities of race, gender, and history. As part of the Twitter conversation, the person suggested that no one believes that God is a white male. However, Color of Christ and many other studies show many people believe that God is a white male either explicitly or implicitly. (Four studies on perceptions of God and Race, older study on the importance of images of Black Christ to counter white supremacy)

I am not a close follower of Christena Cleveland, but I have been aware of her work for a while. I read Disunity in Christ, Cleveland’s first book. I was aware that she was a professor at Duke and led the reconciliation study center started initially by Chris Rice. And that she left the school because of her frustrations with racism around the school. I read her essay about leaving, White Devil in Blue, although the article is now behind a paywall.  And I knew that she had gone to France on pilgrimage to visit a number of the Black Madonnas common in France. Knowing those parts of the story meant that I was not walking into the book blind, but I was not familiar with her broader story.

God is a Black Woman is framed as a memoir of that pilgrimage. Like many memoirs, that framing is an organizing structure more than a foundation. The book primarily looks at what she calls ‘whitemalegod’ and ‘fatherskygod’ and how she personally, and our society more generally, has been shaped by the cultural understanding of God as a white male. There are many ways to misunderstand this book if you have not previously grappled with Black or Womanist theology. Angela Parker’s book If God Still Breathes, Why Can’t I, which I have read, but I am going to reread before I post on, has an excellent explanation of what Womanist Theology or biblical studies are and why all Christians, not just Black women must grapple with the questions that are raised by Womanist readings of the Bible or Womanist theological reflections.

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Summary: A brief biography of one of the civil rights era’s most important voting rights figures. 

I have known about Fannie Lou Hamer for a while. She was a figure in many histories of the civil rights era and a character in several biographies I have read, but this is the first book I have read primarily about her. I decided to pick it up after listening to an interview with the author on the Pass the Mic podcast and because I needed to use some credits on Audible. It is a brief biography, and the context is very helpful. But I also wanted a bit more. In print, it is just under 140 pages of text. Given that brief length, I wish there were an appendix with the text of several of her speeches. On the other hand, the book is well documented, with more than 30 pages of endnotes and a ten-page index. That high level of documentation is great, but it reads as a very accessible biography.

After the first, each of the chapters opens with a short passage detailing violence against black women. That framing of the book by connecting Hamer with the current civil rights struggle gives context for why we need to pay attention to Fannie Lou Hamer and other relatively unknown figures today.

Traditionally I have used Julia Child as an example of someone that did not start what they are known for until later in life. Julia Child did not take her first cooking class until she was 36. She didn’t start writing her first cookbook until her early 40s and didn’t start her TV show until she was 50. By comparison, when she was six, Fannie Lou Hamer started working cotton fields when she was trapped into a work contract as a sharecropper. She was sterilized without her consent during surgery to remove a tumor as a young woman. Because of this, she was unable to have biological children but did adopt two daughters and raised two additional girls. It was not until her mid-40s that Fannie Lou Hamer started working in civil rights.

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Summary: A theological exploration of the culture led to Stand Your Ground laws. 

Stand Your Ground by Kelly Brown Douglas is on several lists for best book of theology for the 2010s. In addition, it is regularly cited in books I have read that were published since Stand Your Ground came out in 2015. As many contemporary theology books do, part one is a historical and cultural framing of the issue, with part two concentrating on the constructive theological response.

Part one is much more straightforward to discuss. Kelly Brown Douglas charts the development of the Anglo-Saxon myth of exceptionalism from the 1st century Roman Historian Tacitus’s book Germania. The book was not cited much until the Renaissance, when it was common to root ideology in older Roman or Greek ideas. Germany did not solidify into a single ideological, cultural or political identity until fairly late, but Germania was used in the myth-making (as well as with Nazi ideals.) But Germania was also important to the development of Anglo-Saxon identity because early Anglo-Saxons pointed to Germania as the ideal of what Anglo-Saxons came from and could become. The narrative of Anglo-Saxon identity was important to the American founders. This extended quote of Benjamin Franklin that Kelly Brown Douglas quotes is representative of other over Anglo-Saxon exceptionalism.

Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them, and will never adopt our Language or Customs, any more than they can acquire our Complexion.

Which leads me to add one Remark: That the Number of purely white People in the World is proportionably very small. All Africa is black or tawny. Asia chiefly tawny. America (exclusive of the new Comers) wholly so. And in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians,   French, Russians and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion; as are the Germans also, the Saxons only excepted, who with the English, make the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth. I could wish their Numbers were increased. And while we are, as I may call it, Scouring our Planet, by clearing America of Woods, and so making this Side of our Globe reflect a brighter Light to the Eyes of Inhabitants in Mars or Venus, why should we in the Sight of Superior Beings, darken its People? why increase the Sons of Africa, by Planting them in America, where we have so fair an Opportunity, by excluding all Blacks and Tawneys, of increasing the lovely White and Red? But perhaps I am partial to the Complexion of my Country, for such Kind of Partiality is natural to Mankind.

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Summary: A legal and historical look at the development of slavery in the US written and oriented toward theonomist leaning Christians. 

I honestly am not sure how to talk about The Problem of Slavery in Christian America.  The history is very good and helpful. But the political and theological bias of the author, primarily coming out in later sections makes it hard to completely recommend the book.

Part One is focused on the judicial and legal history of the development of slavery in the US, and it is excellent. I learned a ton, and I have over a hundred highlights to show how helpful I found this part. The most helpful is the close reading of the legal development of slavery and how that development undercuts some of the Lost Cause historical revisionism about the reality of slavery.

There has been a very long history of Christians opposing slavery, from very early, out of broad concerns about the love of neighbor and the golden rule reasoning and opposition to the cruelty of slave systems. Even though the British Common Law system did allow for slavery, there was a reasonably strict understanding that other Christians could not be enslaved and that limitations to slavery. The American (and Caribbean) development of slavery rejected British laws to be freer to enslave people.

In part, this desire to enslave was a counter to the system of indentured servitude (which was time-limited but still a form of slavery). Indentured servitude was, in many cases (but not all) a voluntary system where a person agreed to enter service for an agreed period in exchange for payment of the passage to America and room and board during the time of service. But indentured service was not producing enough workers at the rates that tobacco planters were willing to pay. Also, once free, indentured servants could become planters and compete with other planters. Indentured service was a type of apprenticeship at its best where a person would learn a trade and be set up for a future career. (Many indentured servants were very much abused, but there was legal recourse in the system even if it was still often a brutal system.)

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Summary: A retelling of civil rights era history noting ways in which traditional framing distorts the history. 

I am very interested in how framing and bias can distort history. Some books I have read that have informed my perspective on this are Battle for Bonhoeffer (about how this works with an individual, not just more extensive history), and Was America Founded as a Christian Nation?: A Historical Introduction by John Fea (which looks at a historical topic and the ways that Christian nationalism, in particular, distorts historical analysis) and Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory by David Blight (which looks at how there was an intentional misremembering at the end of the Civil War to reunify the United States by orienting the US toward a vision of white racial superiority instead of orienting the country toward the rights of newly freed Black citizens.) I have heard about A More Beautiful and Terrible several times, but some quotes from Jamar Tisby in one of his newsletters caused me to pick it up finally.

Once I read for a little while, I looked up some background on the author. Jeanne Theoharis is a political science professor at Brooklyn College. She is the daughter of Athan Theoharis, a historian who specialized in the history of the FBI, J Edgar Hoover, and other US intelligence agencies, which is a fascinating background for a father when Jeanne specializes in civil rights history. Liz Theoharis is Jeanne’s sister, a professor at Union Seminary, an ordained minister in the PCUSA, and co-chair of the modern Poor People’s Campaign, along with William Barber. Again, it is essential background to know that Jeanne Theoharis is writing about the use and misuse of civil rights history while her sister is helping to lead one of the most important civil rights organizations that is actively organizing for civil and economic rights. (I also know locally active people in the Poor People’s Campaign.)

Each chapter is about one aspect of the civil rights story and how the traditional framing can distort the way we remember and think about civil rights history. I think this is a reasonable organizational method, but it also leads to some repetition because the chapters have overlapping content.

Chapter one is about desegregation, but instead of telling the story of a Southern Brown v Board, it tells of a failed story of integration in Boston. The Massachusetts legislature passed the Racial Integration Act in 1965, eleven years after Brown. But school boards refused to acknowledge school segregation. Nearly 25 years after the NAACP chapter in Boston created an Education committee and organized around desegregation, there was a federal lawsuit and an order to use bussing to integrate Boston schools and federal supervision of the plan until the late 1980s. Resistance to busing was strong, and White flight reduced the city’s White population. The 1974 Supreme Court case limited the desegregation busing to municipalities, effectively limiting busing and allowing residential segregation and white flight to continue school segregation. Primarily, we think of school desegregation as a success story in the US.

The year 1989 was the high point of school integration, and like in Boston, federal oversight largely had stopped by the late 1980s. Schools have been segregating again so that the likelihood of a Black or Hispanic student going to an 80% or more Black or Hispanic school was roughly the same as in the late 1960s to early 1970s when many districts were only starting their desegregation efforts. As I have said before, the Louisville school district, where my mother spent part of her elementary years (she is a couple of weeks younger than Ruby Bridges), did not desegregate until the school year I was born. School segregation today is different from school segregation in the past. It is not overtly legal for one reason. It is also not complete in the same way. Historically, school segregation was universal; no Black students were in a White segregated school. Today’s schools are technically integrated, but most white students attend majority-white schools, and most minority students attend majority-minority schools. Part of this is that schools are economically isolated and that class and economics have a racial dimension. It is also that neighborhoods are still largely racially segregated because of historic housing patterns. But all of that is background, which gives context to how we tell the story of school desegregation efforts as a hero story.

The second chapter is about how the view of race riots of the 1960s tends to ignore resistance to community organizing that had often gone on for decades before riots. Primarily focusing on LA and Detroit, I learned about the Detroit Great March in 1963, several months before the March on Washington, which had at least 125,000 in attendance (using Wikipedia’s numbers) and maybe as many as 200,000 (using the book’s estimate). When riots are framed as starting out of the blue, instead of contextualizing them within a larger civil rights movement, often a failed one, it further diminishes how civil rights history is a history of many local movements, not just a few big players. The other part of this is that most racial riots in the civil rights and post-civil rights era are in northern or western cities, where civil rights gains were much less tangible. One of the book’s central themes is that while southern racism was more overt, the more subtle racism of the North and West was more likely to be sustained and unchanged.

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