Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 177:708 (Oct 2020)
Article: Book Reviews
Author: Matthew S. DeMoss

BSac 177:708 (October-December 2020) p. 494

Book Reviews

By The Faculty And Staff Of Dallas Theological Seminary

Matthew S. DeMoss

Editor

How to Fight Racism: Courageous Christianity and the Journey toward Racial Justice. By Jemar Tisby. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2021. 227 pp. $24.99.

Tisby is CEO of The Witness, Inc., and the author of The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2020). In many ways, this is a sequel to the earlier book. He structures a practical approach to fighting racism around the model of the “ARC of Racial Justice. ARC is an acronym that stands for awareness, relationships, and commitment” (5). Racial justice requires knowledge of racist strategies; awareness “is the knowledge, information, and data required to fight racism” (5). Relationships are required because “you cannot pursue true racial justice without authentic relationships with people who are different from you” (5). Finally, “what truly enables broadscale change on the racial justice front is a commitment to dismantle racist structures, laws, and policies” (5).

Tisby begins his book with several stories of racial injustice from 2020 and concludes: “Time will tell if the protests and uprisings of 2020 led to lasting transformations in the United States. What is clear is that racial progress does not occur apart from the sustained efforts of people who dedicate themselves to fighting racism in all its forms. History demonstrates and hope requires the fundamental belief that when people of goodwill get together, they can find creative solutions to society’s most pressing problems” (3). It is this hope that permeates this book, and it is a hope worth pursuing.

The book is divided into three parts, with three chapters in each part. In the first, “Awareness,” Tisby argues, “In order to fight racism, we must begin with the fact that race is a socially constructed category that offers certain privileges and advantages to one group, which in the US context is white people, to the detriment of all those who are excluded from that group—that is, ‘nonwhite’ people, or people of color. Race intertwines with sex and class in a sticky web of exploitation and oppression” (20). He continues, “The concept of race has changed over time as often as society’s norms have changed, and any progress in racial awareness largely has been due to the persistent protest of racially marginalized groups” (20). Tisby explains, “What we refer to as ‘race’ is a social construct. This should not be taken to mean that race does not have real-world consequences. It simply means that race is a socially determined category rather than a spi...