Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    White Awake: An Honest Look at What It Means to Be White
    White Awake: An Honest Look at What It Means to Be White
    White Awake: An Honest Look at What It Means to Be White
    Audiobook6 hours

    White Awake: An Honest Look at What It Means to Be White

    Written by Daniel Hill

    Narrated by Joe Hempel

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Daniel Hill will never forget the day he heard these words: "Daniel, you may be white, but don't let that lull you into thinking you have no culture. White culture is very real. In fact, when white culture comes in contact with other cultures, it almost always wins. So it would be a really good idea for you to learn about your culture."

    Confused and unsettled by this encounter, Hill began a journey of understanding his own white identity. Today he is an active participant in addressing and confronting racial and systemic injustices. And in this compelling and timely book, he shows you the seven stages to expect on your own path to cultural awakening.

    It's crucial to understand both personal and social realities in the areas of race, culture, and identity. This book will give you a new perspective on being white and also empower you to be an agent of reconciliation in our increasingly diverse and divided world.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateFeb 13, 2018
    ISBN9781977375452
    White Awake: An Honest Look at What It Means to Be White
    Author

    Daniel Hill

    Daniel Hill is the founding and senior pastor of River City Community Church, located in the West Humboldt Park neighborhood of Chicago. Formed in 2003, River City longs to see increased spiritual renewal as well as social and economic justice in the Humboldt Park neighborhood and entire city, demonstrating compassion and alleviating poverty as tangible expressions of the Kingdom of God. Prior to starting River City, Daniel served five years on the staff of Willow Creek Community Church in the suburbs of Chicago. Daniel has a BS in business from Purdue University, an MA in theology from Moody Bible Institute, a certificate in church-based community and economic development from Harvard Divinity School, and a DMin from Northern Baptist Theological Seminary. He is the author of White Awake: An Honest Look at What It Means to Be White (IVP, 2017) and 10:10: Life to the Fullest (Baker, 2014). Daniel is married to Elizabeth, who is a professor of psychology, and they are the proud parents of Xander and Gabriella Hill. www.pastordanielhill.com

    Related to White Awake

    Related audiobooks

    Religion & Spirituality For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    Related categories

    Reviews for White Awake

    4/5

    62 ratings8 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 1/5
      This guy values social justice more than the gospel... and to him, the gospel is social justice warrior-ism, nothing else!

      No wonder he has no clue on how to live out the gospel apart from critical race theory... Bill Hybels was his mentor!

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      A must read for the Christian challenging themselves on the infection of systemic racism and how the Gospel of Christ is the medication. Please Read.
    • 5/5
      For anyone seeking a way forward towards freedom for all people in Jesus Name- this book is for you! Thank you Daniel for having the hard conversations and giving white Christians the perspective that has been missing for far too long.
    • 5/5
      Great book written for Christian audience that looks at a Christian response of humility in healing the racial rift in America.
    • 5/5
      Very much appreciated this book. A very Godly approach to this issue.
    • 3/5
      Hill's self-discovery of whiteness and the anecdotes about the various people who have are also discovering their racial identity and its effect on their lives were the best part of the book. I skimmed over most of the religious bits, but I can see how this would be a good primer for Christians.
    • 1/5
      It's hard to know what to say about a book you'd been anticipating for months, started reading, experienced shock (over and over and over) about some of the badly tone-deaf things in the book, and kept slogging through in hopes that you'd find some coherent thread to take away.

      And here's my takeaway:

      White Evangelicalism is so invested in its success, nay, survival, that it is unwilling to dismantle its own system which has invested time and energy in keeping white supremacist politics and theology alive and well in contemporary American Christianity. In fact, it is blind to some of the whitewashing that occurs routinely in its own culture.

      I am willing to grant the point that Hill is writing for people open to changing but having absolutely no starting point and no idea about race relations, politics, or white supremacy. If this was the case, then he needed to provide a much stronger bibliography and more connections to the masses of people who have written about the subject before him. Further, his blend of memoir and how-to got muddy and should have been clearer in focus. I think of Robin DiAngelo's 2012 book, What Does It Mean To Be White? in which we talk about whiteness and break it down as a cultural and sociological phenomenon. DiAngelo provides bullet points and learning factotums to digest, as well as keywords. I'm not saying Hill needed to follow this exact model, but if he is indeed writing to an audience who needs to learn a LOT, he should have followed a more educational model.

      There is also a total dearth of liberation and womanist theology in the book. The concept of race, social justice, and white supremacy within the church is something that liberation theologists have addressed, linking the suffering of Christ to the suffering experienced by people of color at the hands of an unjust system. Womanist theology is new to me, but my baseline understanding is that it connects the unique discrimination against women of suffering to Christ's own life on earth. Hill was not shy about including theology in his book, but it was more exegetical in focus. The lack of addressing race within theology itself was disappointing.

      Hill also alludes to systems of power that oppress marginalized individuals, but he himself is often blind to how he portrays them. A case in point was the example of Germany recognizing and remembering the Holocaust as a system of injustice. That filled me with boiling rage: Germany experienced the Holocaust, because people were in denial about Hitler's naked racism and xenophobia and DID NOTHING. They turned a blind eye to the ghettos and death camps and smoke rising from chimneys in Dachau and Birkenau and Auschwitz and chose not to ask the hard questions. We cannot blithely refer to German contemporary remembrance without also noting that good people doing nothing was how 12 million people were systematically executed.

      I haven't even gotten to the part that aggravated me the most: the incredible soft-pedaling when it came to explaining White Evangelicalism's engagement with race. Hill timidly alludes to the 2016 presidential election and that people "disagreed" on either side of the aisle. REALLY? We had people like Franklin Graham, Jerry Falwell Jr., and Dr. James Dobson who wholeheartedly endorsed Donald Trump and excused his racism, misogyny, xenophobia, and personal crudities as part of his journey as a "new Christian." Jen Hatmaker and Rachel Held Evans stood up to sexism, homophobia, and other attacks against marginalized communities and both received nasty personal attacks from the established Evangelical community as a result--Hatmaker's fallout was especially vicious. I get that Hill does not want to disenfranchise readers with the potential to change their hearts, but there is a fundamental truth we cannot ignore: people who voted for Donald Trump were by and large motivated by race anxiety, and the Evangelical Church fell *hard* for Trump, defending him and supporting him more strongly than any other demographic present in the election. Honestly, if you are not willing to disrupt white supremacy within your own faith demographic, you are not ready to lead other people into reconciliation, and people of color are not going to trust your efforts to reconcile with them.

      I appreciated Hill's candor in his own theological journey and I would urge him, his readers, any readers of this review, and my own self to keep learning and reading. White supremacy is endemic to all major power systems in the United States, and we must become comfortable with being uncomfortable in order to grow and learn. I'll be reading womanist theology myself. I also encourage you to read Michael Eric Dyson's Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White People and Robin DiAngelo's White Fragility to really tackle issues of race within systems of power, especially a church.
    • 4/5
      An exploration of the author's journey toward greater recognition of white privilege, white culture, and how to most effectively seek to reconcile among various racial groups.The beginning of the book is most consistent with the title, featuring a lot of the author's story as he came to a greater awareness of his whiteness in contrast to the experiences of others and his attempts to promote greater racial harmony and reconciliation. Most of the book works through a personal process of coming to an understanding of the racial dynamics at play in America: encounter, denial, disorientation, shame, self-righteousness, awakening, and active participation. The author provides encouragement through the process, for the reader to grapple with the various phases him or herself as well as to serve as an encouragement for others.In a time when many white people are coming to a greater awareness of their privilege and how people of color do not have the opportunity to have the same experience of American life as they do, this is a good resource to help white people come to grips with the situation and find a productive way forward.**--galley received as part of early review program