Spencer Perkins - More Than Equals: Racial Healing for the Sake of the Gospel

More Than Equals is about the hard, hopeful and holy work of seeking to realize the prayer of Jesus and become one new people across racial divides. Yet in order to see why and how this books message still matters, we must first see how the context has changed.

When Spencer and I wrote More Than Equals in the early 1990s, race wasnt in the headlines and few Christian publishers were putting out books on the topic. But as we wrote, a racial wake-up call struck the nation. In 1991 white police officers in Los Angeles were filmed violently beating an unarmed black man named Rodney King. When a trial found the officers not guilty, the city erupted with protests and violence. Suddenly race became front and center in political and church debate. More Than Equals hit a wave of new interest, and Spencer and I were thrust into speaking and preaching across the nation in schools, churches and communities.

In the new introduction to the revised edition of 2000, I described Americas swings between racial progress and regress. From Spencers father facing the racism of the 1950s to Spencers adulthood in the 1990s, there were areas of undeniable progress in the changing attitudes of white Americans.

But twenty years later came the pandemic of 2020, and with it the disproportionate deaths of black Americans (as well as Hispanics and Native Americans) due to Covid-19. The pandemic became an x-ray revealing deep fractures of racial inequalities in the body politic of America. If that was not enough to expose how race continues to matter, then came the horrific videotaped murder of George Floyd by a white police officer as Floyd cried out, I cant breathe. A new time of racial reckoning erupted across the nation. And then came the terrifying January 2021 mob assault on the U.S. Capitol, including many overt and organized white supremacists, provoked by the president.

These realities revealed the continuing consequences of the United States being the only modern nation that had slavery in its midst from the very beginning. Thirty years after More Than Equals, here are the disturbing facts about the ongoing power of those racist roots: American schools and communities continue to be highly racially segregated, the black poverty rate is 2.5 times the white rate, the wealth gap is worsening, and more black children (two-thirds) grow up in high-poverty segregated areas than they did in 1970. Adding to the pain is how these realities are often interpreted very differently by different groups including in a divided church, in those who find charges of racism to be overblown, in generational conflicts over race emerging in white churches, and in a time of dangerous national impulses from both left and right to move from disagreement to demonization.

Furthermore, while in More Than Equals Spencer talked about pervasive race fatigue in the nation, now a new dynamic has emerged: reconciliation fatigue in the church. The notion of racial reconciliation has come under deserved criticism. Some protest what has often become reconciliation withoutwithout lament, without repentance, without mutuality, without confronting injustices in society and interrupting institutional streams of historical racial disparity. Intensifying this reconciliation fatigue is the sense that this is the version of race relations preferred by many white evangelical Christians. Along with this has been a cultural shift in many quarters away from racial reconciliation to racial justice.