Christine Jeske Archives

Racial Justice for the Long Haul

Racial Justice for the Long Haul, Christine Jeske. IVP Academic (ISBN: 9781514011034) 2026.

Summary: Qualitative ethnographic research analyzing why some white advocates for racial justice persevere.

Pursuing racial justice is hard and long work. While many White Christians are convicted of the important work they can exercise as allies and advocates, enduring in that work for the long haul is another matter. Anthropologist Christine Jeske undertook to study why some have persevered in the work when many fell by the wayside. She began by working with racial justice advocates of color, asking them to recommend Whites who were examples of enduring advocacy. One of the first findings of her research was how many could not think of a single White person they could recommend. However, she eventually identified seventy people across four sites to interview. This book translates her findings into an engaging summary for a wider audience than her research colleagues. Across the stories of the seventy, she found three elements that sustained an engagement in justice advocacy.

The first of these elements is collision. This is the experience of confronting racial realities that strips away the “white imagination.” It might be an immersion in a Black neighborhood. Or it could be an honest conversation about what it is like for persons of color to deal with White people. For others, it could be a collision with either the ranking or invisibility of persons of color. Perhaps it is an experience where the tables are turned and they are the invisible ones. Others confront their own complicity with racial injustice. All of these engage the heart and are the moments where people began to care.

But this is only a beginning. Those who persevere also ask a lot of why. This is a process that engages the mind in understanding the history and structures of racism. One learns about the interlocking influences of education, incarceration, housing, hiring, and law perpetuate inequalities across racial groups. This leads to coming to terms with the scope of the challenge and a more realistic understanding of possible solutions. It is here, though, that challenges to perseverance rise. How do we embody what we know? Then how do we deal with the complexity of problems that defy simple solutions? Also, there are the real fears and guilt over the mistakes we inevitably will make, no matter how well intentioned.

And this leads to the third element that distinguished Jeske’s findings from most anti-racist training. It is the experience of responding to grace. It is the experience that turns despair into hope, when one experiences what one doesn’t deserve, not only from God, but from people of color. Yet this can be controversial. White’s transgress, often grievously. And people of color forgive. it becomes a stereotypic expectation. Jeske distinguishes the characteristics of true from false grace. Real prior indebtedness exists. Then grace is given freely rather than demanded. True grace is not mere psychology but traces back to God. Finally, it anticipates a response beginning with sincere apology, thanksgiving, reparation and restoration.

Jeske concludes with discussing the fruit of grace, hope. Again she distinguishes true from illusory hopes. True hope laments, mends, and risks–all hard work. But true hope also leans into joy, the celebrating of reconciled life together.

What marks this book is the combination of academic rigor and honest realism about long haul justice advocacy for whites. There is real struggle and failure and despair. Often change happens slowly and mostly in local, communal settings. The grace and hope she writes of come on the other side of these hard realities and are not cheaply won. This is supported by the stories of those who have persevered and by Jeske’s own story, included as an appendix. Jeske leaves readers under no illusion that it will be easy. But she also offers the hope of grace, that we neither achieve nor deserve but can only receive and respond to.

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

This Ordinary Adventure, Christine Jeske and Adam Jeske. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2012.

Summary: The Jeskes describe what happens when their quest to live a life of “amazing days” meets up with the realities of returning to suburban America, parenting, regular work–and routine.

Take a young man and woman dedicated to living out their faith in a way that leaves its mark in the world for good, who train to do development work in Majority World countries, and then do it. They live with the poor, contract malaria and dysentary, and fear for their daughter’s life when she runs a 105 degree fever. And they meet extraordinary people from the African host who ferries Christine to catch a crucial flight on his beat up old motorcycle, to the health care worker who diagnosed their daughter with tonsillitis and got her on the necessary antibiotics. They help a village close a coffee deal that was still paying dividends ten years later. They had resolved to live a life of faith that chose risk and living “amazing days” over safety.

And then they came home to pursue graduate studies and work with a national organization as a writer. They lived in several locations in Wisconsin, finally settling in midwestern Madison. They find themselves settling into the routines and realities of work, raising Phoebe and Zeke, and engaging and resisting suburban realities and trying to figure out what “amazing days” look like in this different setting.

The book is co-authored by Christine and Adam and they contribute alternate chapters, that describe both their adventures abroad, and the ordinary adventure of early twenty-first century life as people of faith with high ideals who don’t want to settle for ordinary and predictable lives. The book alternates between painful struggle, funny stories, and revelatory moments like watching a spider weave a web in a kitchen window. “Amazing” can be a day at the parks with the kids, or a community gathering, or Adam’s crazy jello creation. it doesn’t have to be a harrowing adventure in a country most people haven’t heard of. The big issue seems willing to be attentive to the form “amazing” comes in and how the amazing God wants to encounter us in different seasons.

I have to admit that there was part of me that wrestled with the “amazing days” thing. The people I knew in the blue collar neighborhood I grew up in would never have dreamed of “amazing days” and would probably have thought this couple a bit strange, running around the world, and then struggling with life here at home. Those I knew who lived lives of faith said their prayers before they went to work while their wives prayed they would return safely. You sought to raise your kids right, helped your neighbors when they were in need, remembered the bonds of extended family. You didn’t think about “amazing days”–just what doing right by God, family, work, and neighbor required. Running around the world, or traveling farther than Niagara Falls, or indulging in all the suburban conveniences (attached garages and whole house air conditioning or introspecting about living simply) were luxuries that seemed beyond us.

Yet I remember when my wife and I bought a home in suburban Columbus years later. We were walking around our neighborhood and asked ourselves if we had “sold out”. We were also committed to a vision of living out our faith that was different than the American dream, which confronted us in the form of the array of leagues and lessons our peers thought was the norm for any child. We somehow never made the obligatory pilgrimage to Disney World but discovered the “amazing” in wandering dusty bookstores and exploring small towns in out of the way places within an hour of our home.

And I think this is the point Adam and Christine make in this memoir of their first eleven years of life together. The temptation to settle down and sell out is real–to abandon the ideals of our faith and become more “realistic” about life. But to settle, to put roots down in a place, to love God, people, and that place doesn’t require a sellout. At the same time, I think we (at least I) continue to need voices like Christine and Adam who keep us attentive to God’s invitation to the adventure in the ordinary. I need the suggestions, both zany and practical, at the end of each chapter. I might just take them up on taking a photograph every day for the next month!