America's Original Sin: Racism, White Privilege, and the Bridge to a New America

by Jim Wallis

love is stronger than hate, and that only love can defeat hate.

It’s time for white Christians to be more Christian than white—which is necessary to make racial reconciliation and healing possible. That’s what the country and, more important, what God is now waiting for.

God is always personal, but never private. Trying to understand the public meaning of faith has been my vocation ever since. How that personal and public gospel can overcome the remaining agendas of racism in America is the subject of this book.

Believing that black experience is different from white experience is the beginning of changing white attitudes and perspectives.

Racial profiling is a sin in the eyes of God, as we will later explore theologically. It should also be a crime in the eyes of our society and reflected in the laws we enact to protect one another and our common good.

the heart of the difference is that many white Americans tend to see unfortunate incidents based on individual circumstances, while most black Americans see systems in which their black lives matter less than white lives.

“The United States of America was established as a white society, founded upon the near genocide of another race and then the enslavement of yet another.”

We can no longer “indulge in the luxury of obliviousness”45 to implicit bias and the embedded history of white privilege. And we cannot take “the path of least resistance”46 to racialized systems or act as if the behavior they sanction is normal. We can no longer plead that we are unaware of the systems around us and what their consequences are for our fellow citizens and brothers and sisters of color.

I have been a supporter of the “Black Lives Matter” movement since its beginning after the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson. But along with many other supporters of “Black Lives Matter,” I also believe that “blue” lives matter.

Perhaps nothing has worked against the old idea of community policing—which we are hopefully getting back to—more than the police being militarized, which removes them from the community both physically and emotionally.

It’s very difficult to make a faith-based argument against immigration reform, at least if you’re reading the Bible closely. God’s passionate, abiding concern for immigrants and foreigners, strangers and travelers—for our neighbors—is obvious to anyone reading through Scripture.

the next bridge to cross is America’s transition from a majority white nation to a majority of racial minorities.