Witnessing Whiteness is a book with ambitious academic and ecclesial aims. Norris pursues two broad accounts of white US Christians’ relationships with white supremacy, past, present, and future. In its attention to academic theology, the book offers an intellectual historical account of the entanglement of white supremacy with Christian theology and argues that the proper work of white academic theologians is to unmask white supremacy in churches. Moving out beyond the realm of academic theology and engaging white US Christians more broadly, Witnessing Whiteness examines and indicts the failure of white US Christians to be witnesses to their whiteness and lays out an “ethic of responsibility” in hopes that white Christians might work to free their churches from white supremacy and join wholeheartedly in God's work of liberation.

The chapters of Witnessing Whiteness are arranged to tell a series of tales. In chapter 1, Norris draws on a broad range of scholars to give a political, sociological, and social psychological account of white supremacy in the United States and the mechanisms by which it camouflages itself. In chapter 2, Norris offers a historical-theological account that explains the ways in which white supremacy was woven into the fabric of the church itself and has distorted even the work of theologians who are lifted up as progressive. Chapters 3 and 4 tell the stories of two of the most significant US American theologians of the past fifty years: Stanley Hauerwas and James Cone. Norris finds in Cone a corrective for some of Hauerwas’ shortcomings in dealing with white supremacy and draws forth from their work a set of ecclesiological and ethical resources: memory, particularity, and concreteness. In chapters 5 and 6, Norris provides guidance for a radical reorientation of white US Christians through an ethic of responsibility. This ethic builds on his reading of Hauerwas and Cone and comprises three stages: remembrance, repentance, and reparation.

Witnessing Whiteness is an excellent work of scholarship, excelling in its academic aims. It stands alongside Jennifer Harvey's Dear White Christians as a resource for understanding how whiteness works in US churches and US Christian theology, and draws together excellent work on the shared history of white supremacy and Christianity. Further, its powerful reading of Hauerwas and Cone finds a productive tension between their work. Norris’ skillful storytelling in discussing these two theologians reveals the book's second major strength. Witnessing Whiteness is at its most powerful when it witnesses. Norris skillfully weaves stories of major theologians, tragic contemporary events, and his own struggles to uncover the workings of white supremacy within his own life. Through this storytelling, Witnessing Whiteness invites the reader to engage not only on the level of academic argumentation, but also on the level of faith and identity.

Through their brilliance, these moments of witnessing reveal the way in which this book falters, specifically in its efforts to respond to Cone's challenge to white theologians. I offer this substantial critique in the spirit of the request with which Norris ends the introduction (that is, as a minor student of Cone, in eager anticipation of Norris’ future work). Witnessing Whiteness suffers from a privileging of the visual, leaning heavily into metaphors of blindness (a regrettable vestige of theology's ableist language), uncovering, and revealing. In focusing so fully on the need to perceive white supremacy and its mechanisms, Norris bypasses careful attention to the affective or emotional. This shortcoming is perhaps most evident when Norris turns to repentance, the second stage of the ethic of responsibility, and struggles to offer an account of repentance that is substantially different from his account of the first stage, remembrance.

Repentance is a deeply affective reality. It demands, in Cone's terms, that white people “become black” and, as Norris notes, “empty themselves in order to receive the gift of blackness” (102). It demands the full power of witness that goes beyond pointing out or revealing to create the possibility of intimate, emotional, transformative encounter. Repentance, which is so deeply necessary for reparation to become a viable possibility, demands that white supremacy not only be revealed, but that those who benefit from it develop the emotional resources to survive without its demonic blessings.