America's Original Sin Quotes

“Let nobody give you the impression that the problem of racial injustice will work itself out. Let nobody give you the impression that only time will solve the problem. That is a myth, and it is a myth because time is neutral. It can be used either constructively or destructively. And I’m absolutely convinced that the people of ill will in our nation—the extreme rightists—the forces committed to negative ends—have used time much more effectively than the people of good will. It may well be that we will have to repent in this generation, not merely for the vitriolic works and violent actions of the bad people who bomb a church in Birmingham, Alabama, or shoot down a civil rights worker in Selma, but for the appalling silence and indifference of the good people who sit around and say, “Wait on time.” Somewhere we must come to see that human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and the persistent work of dedicated individuals. Without this hard work, time becomes an ally of the primitive forces of social stagnation. So we must help time and realize that the time is always right to do right.”
― Jim Wallis, America's Original Sin: Racism, White Privilege, and the Bridge to a New America

“As Martin Luther King Jr. said in his “I Have a Dream” speech, whose fiftieth anniversary has now passed, “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”1 King’s dream failed that night in Florida when Zimmerman decided to follow Martin because of the color of his skin.”
― Jim Wallis, America's Original Sin: Racism, White Privilege, and the Bridge to a New America

“The sociology of many white communities shapes the theology of their churches, making them “conformed to the world” and disobedient to the gospel.”
― Jim Wallis, America's Original Sin: Racism, White Privilege, and the Bridge to a New America

“Prejudice may indeed be a universal human sin that all races can exhibit, but racism is more than an inevitable consequence of human nature or social accident. Rather, racism is a system of oppression for social and economic purposes. As many analysts have suggested, racism is prejudice plus power.”
― Jim Wallis, America's Original Sin: Racism, White Privilege, and the Bridge to a New America

“As Nicholas Kristof wrote, “The greatest problem is not with flat-out white racists, but rather with the far larger number of Americans who believe intellectually in racial equality but are quietly oblivious to injustice around them. Too many whites unquestioningly accept a system that disproportionately punishes blacks. . . . We are not racists, but we accept a system that acts in racist ways.”
― Jim Wallis, America's Original Sin: Racism, White Privilege, and the Bridge to a New America

“Involuntary servitude was banned by the Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, but nothing was done to confront the ideology of white supremacy. Slavery didn’t end in 1865; it just evolved.”
― Jim Wallis, America's Original Sin: Racism, White Privilege, and the Bridge to a New America

“For a very long time, white evangelicalism has been simply wrong on the issue of race. Indeed, conservative white Christians have served as a bastion of racial segregation and a bulwark against racial justice efforts for decades, in the South and throughout the country. During the civil rights struggle, the vast majority of white evangelicals and their churches were on the wrong side—the wrong side of the truth, the Bible, and the gospel.”
― Jim Wallis, America's Original Sin: Racism, White Privilege, and the Bridge to a New America

“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.”
― Jim Wallis, America's Original Sin: Racism, White Privilege, and the Bridge to a New America

“Jesus proclaimed, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God” (Matt. 5:9). Martin Luther King Jr. reminded us, “True peace is not merely the absence of tension: it is the presence of justice.”46”
― Jim Wallis, America's Original Sin: Racism, White Privilege, and the Bridge to a New America

“No historic presidential election, no athlete or entertainer’s success, no silent tolerance of one another is enough to create the truth and reconciliation needed to eliminate racial inequality or the presumption of guilt. We’re going to have to collectively acknowledge our failures at dealing with racial bias. People of faith are going to have to raise their voices and take action. Reading this extraordinary new work by Jim Wallis is a very good place to start.”
― Jim Wallis, America's Original Sin: Racism, White Privilege, and the Bridge to a New America

“The white pastors who opposed the civil rights movement, and even those who ignored it, were indeed disobeying Paul’s theological proclamation that, in Christ, there is no Jew or Gentile, slave or free, male or female; but all are one in Christ Jesus.”
― Jim Wallis, America's Original Sin: Racism, White Privilege, and the Bridge to a New America

“In one of his most famous quotations, King sadly said, “I am [ashamed] and appalled that eleven o’clock on Sunday morning is the most segregated hour in Christian America.”
― Jim Wallis, America's Original Sin: Racism, White Privilege, and the Bridge to a New America

“For people of faith and conscience, these issues about implicit racial bias and the realities of white privilege in our society are not just political matters; they are moral and religious questions.”
― Jim Wallis, America's Original Sin: Racism, White Privilege, and the Bridge to a New America

“Whiteness is not just an ideology; it is also an idol. For people of faith, this is not just a political issue but a religious one as well. Idols separate us from God, and the idolatry of “whiteness” has separated white people from God. It gives us an identity that is false, one filled with wrongful pride, one that perpetuates both injustice and oppression. Whiteness is an idol of lies, arrogance, and violence. This idol blinds us to our true identity as the children of God, because, of course, God’s children are of every color that God has made them to be. To believe otherwise is to separate ourselves from God and the majority of God’s children on this planet who are people of color.”
― Jim Wallis, America's Original Sin: Racism, White Privilege, and the Bridge to a New America

“Racism is rooted in sin—or evil, as nonreligious people might prefer—which goes deeper than politics, pointing fingers, partisan maneuvers, blaming, or name calling. We can get to a better place only if we go to that morally deeper place. There will be no superficial or merely political overcoming of our racial sins—that will take a spiritual and moral transformation as well. Sin must be named, exposed, and understood before it can be repented of.”
― Jim Wallis, America's Original Sin: Racism, White Privilege, and the Bridge to a New America

“The most controversial sentence I ever wrote was not about abortion, gay marriage, the wars in Vietnam or Iraq, elections, or anything to do with national or church politics. It was a statement about the founding of the United States. Here’s the sentence: “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.”
― Jim Wallis, America's Original Sin: Racism, White Privilege, and the Bridge to a New America

“The story about race that was embedded into America at the founding of our nation was a lie; it is time to change that story and discover a new one.”
― Jim Wallis, America's Original Sin: Racism, White Privilege, and the Bridge to a New America

“As I have talked with black friends about this book, especially with black parents, the line that has elicited the most response is this one: “If white Christians acted more Christian than white, black parents would have less to fear for their children.”
― Jim Wallis, America's Original Sin: Racism, White Privilege, and the Bridge to a New America

“But no matter where you go as a white person in American society, no matter where you live, no matter who your friends and allies are, and no matter what you do to help overcome racism, you can never escape white privilege in America if you are white.”
― Jim Wallis, America's Original Sin: Racism, White Privilege, and the Bridge to a New America

“We focus television cameras on the drama of a burning CVS store but ignore the systemic catastrophe of broken schools, joblessness, heroin, oppressive policing—and maybe the worst kind of poverty of all, hopelessness. . . . If wealthy white parents found their children damaged by lead poisoning, consigned to dismal schools, denied any opportunity to get ahead, more likely to end up in prison than college, harassed and occasionally killed by police—why, then we’d hear roars of grievance. And they’d be right to roar: Parents of any color should protest, peacefully but loudly, about such injustices.43”
― Jim Wallis, America's Original Sin: Racism, White Privilege, and the Bridge to a New America

“Martin Luther King Jr., the nation’s apostle of nonviolence, once said, “A riot is the language of the unheard.”32 But King also showed us that, ultimately, only disciplined, sacrificial, and nonviolent social movements can change things.”
― Jim Wallis, America's Original Sin: Racism, White Privilege, and the Bridge to a New America

“We focus television cameras on the drama of a burning CVS store but ignore the systemic catastrophe of broken schools, joblessness, heroin, oppressive policing—and maybe the worst kind of poverty of all, hopelessness. . . . If wealthy white parents found their children damaged by lead poisoning, consigned to dismal schools, denied any opportunity to get ahead, more likely to end up in prison than college, harassed and occasionally killed by police—why, then we’d hear roars of grievance. And they’d be right to roar: Parents of any color should protest, peacefully but loudly, about such injustices.”
― Jim Wallis, America's Original Sin: Racism, White Privilege, and the Bridge to a New America

“If white Christians acted more Christian than white, black parents would have less to fear for their children.”
― Jim Wallis, America's Original Sin: Racism, White Privilege, and the Bridge to a New America

“White privilege is a sin of which we must repent, and the best way to show that is by changing practices and policies—and by helping to create new communities that provide for another way.”
― Jim Wallis, America's Original Sin: Racism, White Privilege, and the Bridge to a New America

“The heart of racism was and is economic, though its roots and results are also deeply cultural, psychological, sexual, religious, and, of course, political. Due to 246 years of brutal slavery and an additional 100 years of legal segregation and discrimination, no area of the relationship between black and white people in the United States is free from the legacy of racism.”
― Jim Wallis, America's Original Sin: Racism, White Privilege, and the Bridge to a New America

“I have always learned the most about the world by going to places I was never supposed to be and being with people I was never supposed to meet.”
― Jim Wallis, America's Original Sin: Racism, White Privilege, and the Bridge to a New America

“The Confederate flag had been raised above the South Carolina statehouse in 1962—in direct defiance of racial integration and the civil rights movement3—and has been used as an emblem of white hate and violence against black people ever since. It is therefore an anti-Christian flag that helped inspire the murder of black Christians on June 17, 2015.”
― Jim Wallis, America's Original Sin: Racism, White Privilege, and the Bridge to a New America

“Living in faith is knowing that even though our little work, our little seed, our little brick, our little block may not make the whole thing, the whole thing exists in the mind of God, and that whether or not we are there to see the whole thing is not the most important matter. The most important thing is whether we have entered into the process.”
― Jim Wallis, America's Original Sin: Racism, White Privilege, and the Bridge to a New America

“In recent years, when conservative white Christians began to construct their political agendas, a recognition of racism’s reality was absent from the issues list of abortion, homosexuality, tax cuts for the middle class, and, yes, opposition to affirmative action.”
― Jim Wallis, America's Original Sin: Racism, White Privilege, and the Bridge to a New America

“But the judgment of God is upon the church as never before. If today’s church does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authenticity, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century. Every day I meet young people whose disappointment with the church has turned into outright disgust.28”
― Jim Wallis, America's Original Sin: Racism, White Privilege, and the Bridge to a New America