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The Quest for Racial Solidarity in an American Church
by Hahrie Han
The inspiring story of evangelicals in Cincinnati struggling to bridge racial divides in their own church, their community, and across the nation.
In 2016, even as Ohio helped deliver victory to presidential candidate Donald Trump, Cincinnati voters also passed a ballot initiative for universal preschool. The margin was so large that many who elected Trump must have—paradoxically—also voted for the initiative: how could the same citizens support such philosophically disparate aims? What had convinced residents of this Midwestern, Rust Belt community to raise their own taxes to provide early childhood education focused on the poorest—and mostly Black—communities?
When political scientist Hahrie Han set out to answer that question, her investigations led straight to an unlikely origin: the white-dominant evangelical megachurch Crossroads, where Pastor Chuck Mingo had delivered a sermon the prior year that set in motion a chain of surprising events. Raised in the Black church, Mingo felt called by God, he told Crossroads parishioners, to combat racial injustice, and to do it through the very church in which they were gathered.
The result was Undivided, a faith-based program designed to foster antiracism and systemic change. The creators of Undivided recognized that any effort to combat racial injustice must move beyond recognizing and overcoming individual prejudices. Real change would have to be radical—from the very roots.
In Undivided, Han chronicles the story of four participants—two men, one Black and one white, and two women, one Black and one white—whose lives were fundamentally altered by the program. As each of their journeys unfolded, in unpredictable and sometimes painful ways, they came to better understand one another, and to believe in the transformative possibilities for racial solidarity in a moment of deep divisiveness in America. The lessons they learned have the power to teach us all what an undivided society might look like—and how we can help achieve it.
"Rigorously researched and richly nuanced, this deserves wide readership." —Publishers Weekly
"[Undivided] ably charts that course even as it illustrates the Christian concept of grace in action. Inspiring: a key text for any reader seeking strategies for racial reconciliation—or at least beginning to talk about it." —Kirkus Reviews
"In Undivided, Hahrie Han has given us a brilliant, intimate, and moving story of real people working for true actionable change and transformative justice within their communities. Deeply researched and immersive, Undivided offers a critical and ground-breaking intervention into a surprising tale that recenters our understanding of American social movements, religion, race, and democracy." —Leah Wright Rigueur, author of The Loneliness of the Black Republican
"Hahrie Han has put heart and soul into telling the inspiring story of a beacon of racial progress that may seem unlikely: a program for working-class people at a Midwestern evangelical megachurch. With wisdom, humanity, and great narrative skill, Han persuades us that there is a way forward in the struggle against racism, if we are willing to be patient, to trust one another, and to operate from shared faith." —Nicholas Lemann, author of Transaction Man
"Building a truly multiracial democracy is the great political challenge of our time. The last half century has taught us that changing national laws and policies is the easy part; multiracial democracy won't take root, however, until society itself transforms. In this beautifully-written book, Hahrie Han offers us a glimpse into how that might be done. Drawing on deep research into the experience of a single church community, Undivided offers a powerful lesson: building sustainable racial solidarity is slow, hard work, filled with uncertainty. There is no playbook or formula—only trial and error. And it is done from the bottom up, though relationships. Any American concerned with the future of our democracy should read this book." —Steven Levitsky, co-author of How Democracies Die
This information about Undivided was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Hahrie Han is a professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University, as well as the inaugural director of SNF Agora, an institute dedicated to strengthening global democracy. She writes for The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The New Republic and is the author of four scholarly books. The daughter of Korean immigrants, she lives in Baltimore.
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