All God’s Children: How Confronting Buried History Can Build Racial Solidarity, Terence Lester. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2023.

Summary: A plea that we need to confront the history we try to hide of racial injustice and that real reconciliation can only happen when we stand together in soliarity against racial injustices

Terence Lester leads the Atlanta-based Love Beyond Walls, a Christian community development organization addressing poverty, homelessness, and community development. He’s served as a pastor in both black and white churches and worked in the middle of efforts to address racial inequities and to foster racial reconciliation.

This book reflects the continued polarization in the United States around matters of race. The first part addresses our long-standing and currently increasing effort to suppress the history of racial inijustices and the contributions of Black Americans to our country’s history. Lester experienced this in his own education and it was only through reading and learning on his own that he understood more deeply the history of racial oppression beginning as early as 1619, running through the system of slavery in which both South and North were implicated, contributing to our young country’s economic prosperity, and continuing to control lives and livelihoods of Blacks through Jim Crow, lynchings, redlining, school-to-prison pipelines, voter suppression efforts, and continued concentration of economic resources within powerful interests.

It’s a history many do not want to acknowledge or understand. Against the arguments that teaching this history only perpetuates racial division, he contends that only understanding can lead to Whites and Blacks joining in solidarity to advocate for more just policies and practices. He argues that God is not colorblind but likes gathering those of every color around his throne. It is folly to pretend that we are. He contends that we cannot have racial reconciliation without racial justice.

Solidarity is a key idea for Lester. Solidarity is more than posting a black square or “Black Lives Matter” on social media. It means that we arrange our lives to be in proximity with people of color. It means supporting businesses of people of color. It means recognizing bias, including the skepticism of the competence of leaders who are people of color (he recounts having to provide far more evidence of credentials and competence than White peers, for example). Solidarity means doing, volunteering alongside others and accepting their leadership. Solidarity means speaking up on behalf of the other as Mr. Rogers did with Officer Clemmons, sharing his wading pool, both in 1969 and 1993 as a powerful statement of racial solidarity. Solidarity means not just making space at our tables, it means truly letting it become their table. Token presence is not inclusion.

Lester describes the pain of those who have walked away from him as he spoke about racial justice. Yet this is a book filled with gritty hope, encouraged by friends, both Black and White, who have stood and worked in solidarity, who have stopped theorizing and temporizing and waded in with him to tackle challenging problems. It is also a hope nurtured through the way of the cross, that realizes that only the seed that dies bears fruit, that we only save our lives by losing them. Terence Lester’s passion, pain, and persisting hope in gospel-nourished solidarity in pursuit of justice reverberates throughout the pages of this book. One senses his deep longing that we not miss this moment as the people of God to seek the shalom of all God’s children.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher.