100 Books Like White Awake

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.

This book came out a few months before mine, and I thought it landed as the first book written by theologically conservative people taking Critical Race Theory seriously as a lens and analytical tool without getting hung up on it as a worldview.

They look through an intensely biblical lens themselves and see CRT for what it is: a way of interpreting racial power dynamics in a broken world. I don’t think it a stretch to suggest they get us to look at CRT through Jesus’ eyes, placing it in a biblical context large enough to grasp not only what theorists want us to see but also helping us transcend their usually limited secular answers and solutions.

I thought it successfully combined both the academic and the pastoral—rare in books like this—and helped me think about the implications of looking at the world through a lens I don’t normally have… show more.

In 1939 it was well-accepted that Europe was home to many different races. Jacobson tells the story of how, after the Holocaust, different ethnic and national groups slowly because members of the “Caucasian” or White race. Jacobson uses a variety of sources, including those from popular culture to tell the story of how these marginal groups, such as the Irish, Poles, Italians, and of course Ashkenazi Jews, became honorary white. This is a highly readable book about the history of racism against some ethnic Europeans. More so, it is an important book for showing how racial categories change through time and how being white is neither stable nor a given. Rather, it is a club that policies entry.  

Across the South, major statues of Confederate leaders are being removed from prominent pedestals, while schools, military bases, streets, and other memorials named for Confederates are being renamed. No effort is more astonishing than ending the hero worship of Robert E. Lee, the West Point graduate who chose to fight for his home state of Virginia in the Civil War, and led the South to defeat.

In this deeply researched and personal history of Lee and his own reckoning of Lee’s betrayal of the United States, West Point historian and retired Army general Ty Seidule reveals how he, a son of the South, came to revile Lee’s status as a southern God. As a PhD historian, Seidule dismantles many myths about Lee, and proves that Lee was, in fact, fighting to create a new nation based on slavery.

Battalora’s teaching that whiteness was created in colonial America to divide the masses and ensure that white elites dominate is central to my Rigged Advantage Theory.

I love how rich this short book is for informing where “white” came from. Imagine if white people understood that King James (of Bible fame) was NOT white but that “white” was made up to prevent my 1st ancestor in the new world (an indentured servant) from ever aligning his potential for political power with enslaved people to VOTE in a multi-racial democracy. This drama persists!

The History of White People tracks the creation of race as a fact, rather than an idea or social construct, and of Anglo-Saxon whiteness, for the free male, as a promise of power and supremacy.

Nell Irvin Painter, a Princeton professor of American history, emerita, begins with Greek historians and Roman conquerors BCE, who thought not of race but of place, the highlands and lowlands shaping appearance and temperament.

Along the way, Rome’s scrubbed-up copies of Greek statuary become the ideal for beauty, and skin colors and skull measurements become a way to rank superiority. Painter traces the United States’ enslavement of Africans, slaughter of Native Americans, eugenics, endorsement of male brutality (Ralph Waldo Emerson! Teddy Roosevelt!), and race-oriented immigration control: all play a role in whiteness.

I want to know how things really work; don’t you?

Resmaa’s book is one of the more influential books for me.

Though his focus is on racialized and generational trauma, he begins by helping the reader understand where biases, fears, and oppression become lodged in the nervous system–generations before us–and how this shapes the way we interact with anyone who is different than us.

Mixed in with excellent content are effective practices for the reader to find a sense of grounding and safety in their current surroundings which is key in being able to resolve the trauma that is living in our bodies. 

I love this book not only because of the hard truths it tells in relation to racial whiteness and racism but also because of how Rankine’s writerly voice reverberates through one’s mind long after finishing the book.

As someone who sometimes finds it hard to sit still to finish a book, I did not have that issue with Just Us partly because of how diverse and stimulating the content is. In addition to including poetry and prose within the text, there are many images to see and study as one internalizes the urgent points made by a witty, seasoned author whose overall tone demands that readers be part of and sit with this “American conversation” that asks us to think deeply about power, privilege, inequality, whiteness and more.