Dismantling Racism: The Continuing Challenge to White America

Racism has reemerged, dramatically and forcefully. All of us -- people of color and white people alike -- are damaged by its debilitating effects. In this book, the author addresses the "majority," the white race in the United States. Racism permeates the individual attitudes and behavior of white people, but even more seriously, it permeates public systems, institutions, and culture. This book does not intend to attack or to produce guilt, but its message is tough and demanding. It begins by analyzing racism as it is today and the ways it has changed or not changed over the past few decades. Most important, the book focuses on the task of dismantling racism, how we can work to bring it to an end and build a racially just, multiracial, and multicultural society. Churches are not strangers to the task of combating racism, but so much of what we have done is too little, too late. We have yet to make a serious impact in the racism that surrounds us and is within us. This book calls us to begin our next assault on the demonic evil of racism. The result that it seeks is freedom for all races, all people.

Joseph Barndt is a pastor in the Bronx in New York City and co-director of Crossroads, a ministry working to dismantle racism and build a multicultural church and society. Pastor Barndt previously served congregations in California and Arizona. He is the author of Why Black Power?, Liberating Our White Ghetto, and Beyond Brokenness.