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Traci Schlesinger, Fire in the Heart: How White Activists Embrace Racial Justice By Mark R. Warren Oxford University Press. 2011. 297 pages. $99 cloth, $25 paper, Social Forces, Volume 93, Issue 1, September 2014, Page e5, https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/sor037
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The United States remains a country characterized by deep and enduring racial inequality. Across economic, social and political metrics, blacks remain substantially disadvantaged relative to whites. Mark Warren is not only troubled by the grave injustice of continuing white supremacy, but also committed to discovering what it will take to transform the social structures that produce these outcomes. In Fire in the Heart: How White Activists Embrace Racial Justice, Warren asks, “How can white Americans come to care enough about racism to take action against it?”(7) In order to answer this question, Warren interviews 50 white racial justice activists. In these interviews, Warren asks both about the factors that led people to become engaged in anti-racist political action and about the experiences and relationships people have had as activists. Warren finds three important things. First, nearly all the activists in his study had direct experiences with racial injustice. Based on his analysis of the interviews, Warren argues that these experiences violate whites' deeply held values of equality and, thus, lead (at least some) whites to develop a moral impulse to act. Second, virtually every white activist in the study mentioned learning about racism through relationships with people of color. Through these relationships, activists develop an ethic of care and redefine who counts as “us” and who counts as “them.” Third, through doing social justice work, activists begin to create their “moral visions” of the kind of society in which they would like to live. Putting these three findings together, Warren argues that “head, heart, and hand” all need to be engaged if white people are to work toward racial justice.
