Books like Christianity and Critical Race Theory — picked by fans

When I finished this book, I felt I’d just finished a survey class on the history of the most important and consequential intersections between American racism and the American church.

I read it with a handful of other white folks who had no idea any of these specific historical moves had been made to keep white/black people separate in the founding of the major denominations, and it produced great conversation not only about the origins of our modern racial tensions within the church but also how we might move through them to a better place.

If your knowledge about specific events is thin, this book is a crash course in why most congregations became mono-cultural in the first place and—perhaps more importantly—remain so today.  

The idea of “cheap diversity” in the subtitle immediately caught my eye. Too often, churches and parachurch organizations think looking like a United Colors of Benetton commercial (way back reference!) is the end we’re seeking, where a Sunday morning appears mixed but isn’t truly integrated in any meaningful way.

Swanson helps me get beyond that superficial acceptance and suggests we need a complete rewiring of our thinking that only comes through changing our habits and liturgies, forcing myself beneath the surface and into broader communal discipleship among God’s people. 

Using the church's discipleship methods, Swanson gave me practical ways to think about challenging segregation, racial habits, and other cultural captivities that have become our norm and replacing them with more biblically aligned perspectives and behaviors.

Surrounded by so many generalities regarding the treacherous merging of white supremacy with Christianity, I needed this deep-dive sociological study into the reality of how “whiteness” has become a subconscious but tangibly verifiable idol within white Evangelicalism.

The assumption of white cultural superiority has become so hardwired into the church across centuries that, like a fish in water, as white folks, we can’t see how “normal” gets weighed down with racial consequences.

The wetness of water is felt by everyone but the fish, and in this case, what seems experientially obvious to most non-white people requires in-depth study and argumentation for white folks to see. I appreciated how this book named specifics and compared the answers to racialized questions between different people groups in their study.

I find it difficult to locate white pastors in the Evangelical tradition who are both aware of and candid about their own racial history. It’s even more difficult to get them to admit they’ve never thought about “White” as a race and why that might be significant in a world that prioritizes skin color.

He helped me understand both the personal and social realities of living at the intersection of race, culture, and identity and how they merge into one another in my life. I appreciated how Hill puts texture on the idea of racial privilege and the advantages inherent in not having to think about race at all. I found his seven stages to expect on the path to cross-cultural “awakening” disrupting, putting on a very different spin on what it means to be “woke” in our cultural moment. 

Muhammad’s study of ideas and discourse about real and imagined crime among African Americans is a touchstone for anyone seeking to understand this history.

He has painstakingly assembled the intellectual, pseudo-scientific, and popular conversations Americans had about the subject from the end of slavery until well into the 20th century.

This work has been particularly important for me because he brings our attention to the urban North and the use of census data, statistics, eugenics, etc., to condemn blackness as a dangerous threat to be contained.

There is no way to truthfully understand race and crime in America without consulting this essential text. 

Irshad Manji is one of the most courageous people I know. Her earlier book, The Trouble with Islam Today, sounded such a bold call to her fellow Muslims to modernize their faith that Irshad had to live behind bulletproof glass for years.

Her newest book challenges not only her fellow believers but people like me (and you!) to respectful, sensible, courteous, and productive conversations rather than furious confrontations. In the storm of overheated polemics about diversity, equity, and inclusion, this book offered the sound, practical advice I’ve been seeking.

I love this book because Bryan Stevenson combines moral clarity with genuine compassion, even for people who have done terrible things.

As someone who has spent decades working on wrongful convictions, I recognized so much of the emotional reality in these pages, the exhaustion, the small victories, the moments that restore your faith in humanity, and the crushing setbacks. What stayed with me most was Stevenson’s refusal to reduce anyone to the worst thing they had ever done. I think that perspective is desperately needed in modern discussions about crime and punishment.

This is one of the rare books that can genuinely change the way a reader sees both the legal system and the people trapped inside it.

Award-winning historian Kelly Lytle Hernandez tells the story of how Los Angeles became home to the nation's largest jail by taking us back to the founding of Los Angeles and the western settlement of California.

She explains that European and Anglo-American settlers looked to eliminate unwanted populations in the region by using war, raids, genocide, and incarceration to clear and restrict the presence of Native, Hispanic, and racial outsiders from western landscapes.

City of Inmates dispels any simple ideas about jails in America being rooted in reform—punishment and death have always been a part of law enforcement.

I love how this book portrays young people intelligently speaking truth to power…even when that power is the teacher grading you…even when that teacher is well-liked…even when some oppose your ideas.

This novel showed me what antisemitism (and bigotry in general) can look like in a contemporary high school, a place already brewing with emotions, factions, and hormones. The characters are so nuanced and realistic that I felt I was right there with them in the classroom and beyond.

This book inspired many productive conversations with my family and friends.

For months, Asian women in Oakland, CA, reported a nonstop stream of harassment and muggings by local youth. The problem: their harassers were Black. In a lineup, the women couldn't identify their attackers, and they walked free. To counter this, women in the community received cross-racial training...which failed. The robberies stopped when cameras were installed and the police didn't need a victim to ID anymore. Eberhardt’s book is full of gems like this, smart snippets of life, and the innate biases that run it. This smart examination of cognitive biases goes further than pointing out how racial biases influence criminal justice — it also offers some solutions, especially for unconscious prejudices. These take the form of unconscious bias training, and forcing people to deal with uncomfortable subjects.