We had a good first week with America’s Original Sin. I wanted to share with you and many other friends along the way of our ongoing tour my favorite interview of the week. It was on Morning Joe. I was delighted to see that some genius producer there had invited Eddie Glaude, the Chair of the Center for African American studies with an endowed chair at Princeton to join the discussion. Eddie had been on Morning Joe the week before to promote his new book, Democracy in Black, which I am reading right now. The dialogue we had on the show was both exciting and encouraging, at least from both of our perspectives!
The discussion got Joe Scarborough to say that he would have to read the book to figure out the meaning of “the idolatry of White Christianity,” in a great ending to the segment. We are already seeking this kind of dialogue with Eddie Glaude, Bryan Stevenson, Rev. William Barber, and other black authors, to the media outlets we are talking with. Already, Amazon has put three books in their “Frequently Bought Together” category: America’s Original Sin, Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me, and Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy — just $40 together. Looks like they have just added Democracy in Black. I couldn’t be in better company and really hope many people buy these books together.
We also had extraordinary dialogues at both the first two book “town meetings;” with Robert Franklin and Heather McGhee from Demos responding in NYC, and Revs Herbert Brown and Brad Braxton in Baltimore. The conversations went so much deeper than just an author talk with Q and A—and we have planned such community events around the country with local leaders to ask what does this mean “here.” I so appreciated the dialogues we have already had in these first two cities and on the Morning Joe interview; it further points to the power of broad and deep dialogues, leading to action, at this moment in time.
We got some good news at the end of the week that Amazon had run out of stock on the first day and had to re-order, that we made top ten on Barnes and Noble online, and are apparently at number 8 on the Washington Post bestseller list this week. Our hope and prayer is that this book will help a little to push the public conversation to go beyond the political media obsession with “the state of the race” to the conversation we need to have together about the state of race in America in 2016. We can use everyone’s help for that; so please join in.
I hope you will get the book this week if you haven’t yet—and perhaps the others with it.
Take a listen to Morning Joe.
Jim Wallis is the founder and former president of Sojourners. He is the inaugural holder of the Archbishop Desmond Tutu Chair in Faith and Justice at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy and director of its new Center on Faith and Justice. His latest book is The False White Gospel: Rejecting Christian Nationalism, Reclaiming True Faith, and Refounding Democracy.
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