Annotated Bibliography on White ChurchHunn Choi

1. Helsel, Carolyn Browning. A Word to the Whites: Whites Preaching about Racism in White Congregations. Word & World 31:2 (Spr 2011): 196-203.

Helsel believes that White preachers can help white congregants (and themselves) overcome racism by facing the problem directly and by communicating the great love of God for both the oppressor and the oppressed. At stake is nothing less than Christ's own ministry of reconciliation. One way is that preachers can confront racism by understanding racial identity development and working towards their own antiracist white identity.

2. Briggs, David. Black-White Racial Divide Is Worse, Researchers Say. Christian Century 131:2 (Jan 2014): 15-16.

The US is not a postracial nation. The 2012 Portraits of American Life Study suggests that a land of two Americas divided by trace and less willing than ever to find a common ground of understanding. A few facts to support this assertion are:1) In 2012, when nearly half of blacks, including 52 percent of black Protestants, said they thought about their race daily, just 10 percent of whites in both studies report- ed the same degree of racial awareness. In 2006, it was about four in ten blacks who said they were aware of what race they were every day.2) In 2006, slightly more than a third of white respondents, including 42 percent of white mainline Protestants, said the government should do more to help minorities increase their standard of living, in 2012, just a quarter of white respondents, and only 21 percent of white mainline Protestants, favored such government action, fo the same period, the percent- age of black respondents favoring a greater role for government rose from 71 percent in 2006 to 79 percent in 2012. 3) Forty-five percent of white respondents in 2006 said one of foe most effective ways to improve race relations was to stop talking about race. In 2012, 59 percent wanted to stop talking about race, including 69 percent of white evangelical Protestants and 65 percent of white Catholics. The percentage of black respondents favoring less talk about race rose from 31 percent in 2006 to 39 percent in 2012, including 44 percent of black Protestants. 3. Wallis, Jim. Americas Original Sin: The Legacy of White Racism. Cross Currents 57:2 (Sum 2007): 197-202.

Wallis views racism as Americas original sin, and slavary and the subsequent discrimination against African Americans is a magnitude of injustice that requires national repentance. For him, the brutal founding facts of our nations cannot be erased. He notes, In spiritual and biblical terms, racism is a perverse sin that cuts to the core of the gospel message. Put simply, racism negates the reason for which Christ diedthe reconciling work of the cross. It denies the purpose of the church: to bring together, in Christ, those who have been divided from one another, particularly in the early church's case, Jew and Gentilea division based on race. There is only one remedy for such a sin and that is repentance. For him, White racism in white institutions must be eradicated by white people and not just African Americans. In fact, white racism is primarily a white responsibility. The church must be the prophetic interrogator of a system that is racially oppressive, but it must also get its own house in order.

4. Perkinson, James W. Theology After Obama-What Does Race Have to Do with It? A Racial Prolegomenon to American Production in the Twenty-first Century. Cross Currents 62:1 (Mar 2012): 80-109.

Perkinson makes interesting comments: In keeping with the post-civil rights anxiety about blatant racial predication, color-blind racism today operates largely in terms of euphemism and code the landscape of significant racial reference today is organized under a triune bogey, simultaneously invoked and masked as criminal, illegal, and terroristic. That these terms today are explicit legal code for, respectively, black, Latino, and Muslim antagonists in the national morality play is patent, policingfiguratively and literallythe other within, at the border, and across the water. The slippage between each code and its reference is two-way and elusive, mobilizing racial stereotypes at unspoken or even unconscious levels of association criminalized blackness, Latin illegality,/ and a terroristically imagined Islam are not merely ad hoc racializations generated at the intersection of contemporary bureaucratic needs and popularized misinformation. For Perkinson, Obama as icon of the new could never step free from the deep shadow of our continuing struggle with race in this country. After all, Obama fits all three categories: black, outside the law in his claim to citizenship or eligibility for the Office, and a Muslim. We need mainstream theology with prophetic clarity and long-term resolve, allowing it to be initiated into an alternative current of pain and beauty, and speak a new word.

5. Baldwin, James. White Racism or World Community. Ecumenical Review 20:4 (Oct 1968): 371-75.At the July 1968 Assembly of the World Council of Churches, the U.S. writer James Baldwinspoke to the assembly, as one of Gods creatures whom the Christian church has most betrayed, For him, the Christian Church is the primary power structure in the West: The Christian Church still rules this world, it has the power, to change the structure of South Africa. It has the power if it will, to prevent the death of Martin Luther King, Jr. It has the power, if it will, to force my government to cease dropping bombs in Southeast Asia But the church, or, rather, some within it, manipulated scripture and theology and, thereby, creating a philosophical and theological framework that other institutions have used in initiating and endorsing oppressive practices. Furthermore, the church has often abandoned the genuine basis of its powerthe teachings of Christand instead, to grab for political and social power, and it has endorsee the rejection of certain groups from political and social systems, making of them a marginalized and oppressed class.

6. Moore, Joy J. Race in Evangelical America. In http://www.baylor.edu/content/services/document.php/110982.pdf.

Joy Moore reviews in this article four books that deal with the complex issues of social injustice, racialized churches, and evangelical Christian practices of racial reconciliation. 1) In Reconciliation Blues: A Black Evangelicals Inside View of White Christianity, Edward Gilbreath provocatively exposes the inherent racism that lingers within the American evangelical church. 2) In Living in Color: Embracing Gods Passion for Ethnic Diversity, Randy Woodley, a Keetoowah Cherokee, chronicles from a Native American perspective the effects of the quest for identity in a racialized culture. 3) Seeking solutions to social injustices in general, Crazy Enough to Care: Changing Your World through Compassion, Justice and Racial Reconciliation by Alvin C. Bibbs, Sr., with Marie Guthrie and Kathy Buscaglis, offers a twelve-session study guide for small groups to convert passive Christians into radically compassionate people. 4) Brenda Salter McNeil and Rick Richardsons approach in The Heart of Racial Justice: How Soul Change Leads to Social Change is to place problems in a larger theological frame and construe the work of racial reconciliation as the ecclesial demonstration of spiritual transformation.