Posts By This Author

Can We Talk? White Privilege Today

Suddenly, it seems, white people are seeing the racial divide as looming larger than before. Race, so often dismissed by white people as an insignificant factor in contemporary U.S. society, has acquired meaning—meaning that they were working hard to ignore.

The Only Sermon

by Andrea Ayvazian 11-01-2003

If we dug a huge grave miles wide, miles deep

Can We Talk?

It's time for a new conversation on race in America.

Radical Aging

by Andrea Ayvazian 07-01-1994

"Welcome to the 40s," a friend said to me on my birthday, "the old age of youth and the youth of old age."

A Community Tackles Racism

by Andrea Ayvazian 04-01-1994
The committee for Northampton

Stone by Stone

by Andrea Ayvazian 06-01-1992
A manual for tearing down racism

Our individual and collective inability (or at least reluctance) to discuss the issue of racism openly and frankly—and to struggle actively with it with colleagues, family members, parishioners, and friends—keeps the cycle of oppression repeated and reinforced. Joseph Barndt's Dismantling Racism: The Continuing Challenge to White America will be greeted with gratitude and relief by anyone who has tried to wrestle with the issue of racism in a personal relationship or a professional setting.

Barndt—a pastor in New York City and co-director of Crossroads, a ministry working to dismantle racism and build a multicultural church and society—has been working on issues of racial justice for decades. In Dismantling Racism, he has boiled down years of experience, insight, and wisdom into a clear, readable, no-nonsense, and honest volume.

Barndt's overall analysis is superb. He addresses the social, political, and economic realities in this country with such simplicity and clarity that reading this book is like looking through a camera lens at a vista that at first appears blurry but is suddenly, dramatically, brought into focus.

In the first chapter, Barndt discusses what he calls the "continuing evil of racism"—how the roots of racism are "embedded and intertwined in the life and history of the United States." A dynamic tension is created between the despair and disappointment of the past and a sense of hope for the future.

Crossing Boundaries

by Andrea Ayvazian 05-01-1985

A journey to the Soviet Union.