AUSTIN CHANNING BROWN, author of I’m Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness, posted once that she didn’t need “more friends” but rather wanted “partners in the struggle for justice.”
As a white Midwesterner, I’d thought of racial injustice as an individual problem—individuals not liking other individuals who didn’t look like them. Therefore, the answer to racism was friendship. I worked at churches that celebrated calls to the common table in worship, absent confession or repentance, to sanctify my individualistic take on race. Brown’s words shook me—this activist wants co-laborers, not friends? What even is the work if it’s not friendship?
While Andre Henry is Black and grew up in the South, he and I were raised on the same milk of individualistic race relations. In his debut book, All the White Friends I Couldn’t Keep, Henry narrates his journey out of the “colorblind” evangelicalism of his childhood to being an artist, activist, and community organizer for systemic racial justice.
Henry’s guide to systemic justice is deeply personal. He illustrates how his growing awareness of his own captivity in white supremacist systems alienated him from many white persons he had called friend, family, even pastor. A white family with whom he grew up and often shared holiday meals passively stood by as an in-law spouted racist rhetoric about a police shooting of a Black man. A white friend in seminary confessed to Henry that he could not “categorically condemn slavery, because some slaves might have had a positive experience.”
I resonated with how much of myself I saw in these white friends. But Henry also weaves insights from activists, theologians, and sociologists to expose the racist logic operating behind the curtain. Those familiar with Henry’s newsletter or podcast will recognize his pithy, provocative ability to make abstract theories accessible.
Reactions to incidents of racial injustice often begin and end with fleeting outrage. In the wake of George Floyd’s murder in 2020, anti-racism books soared to the top of the bestseller lists. Most of that anger evaporated in the following months (or, as Henry charts in one chapter, was tamped down by authoritarian responses). Henry imagines a different path, one where we refuse to let our anger distract from seeing how white supremacy operates at a systemic level. One where our outrage mobilizes us to put our bodies into the ongoing fight for freedom.
As an aspiring ally, I am not Henry’s primary audience. While I learned much from the book, Henry writes first for people of color, those who most directly experience the pain of white supremacy. In that, I hope readers find themselves inspired by Henry’s vision for Black liberation.
Friendship couldn’t have saved George Floyd. Or Michael Brown. Or Sandra Bland. Or Philando Castille—the man whose murder proved to be Henry’s own apocalyptic catalyst. And anger can’t sustain a movement. In the end, Henry delivers what he calls an apocalypse—a revelation of not just freedom from oppression but freedom for dancing. Creating. Loving. A freedom to flourish. Delivered by another, this vision might feel foolish. But he teaches readers language, strategies, and habits of nonviolent resistance, charting a course to become different people. Liberated. Free. And one might even say, saved.
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JR. Forasteros pastors the Haven Collective in Dallas, co-hosts the Fascinating Podcast, and wrote Empathy for the Devil: Finding Ourselves in the Villains of the Bible.
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