Annotated Bibliography on White Church

Hunn 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 Baldwin
spoke 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.