I loved this book! It's well-written, enjoyable, and a great read. The author did a great job of writing in a way that captures the readers attention, and makes you not want to put it down until you're finished! I would highly recommend it!

The Race-Wise Family is great introduction for families to engage with issues of racial identity and justice. What I love most about this volume are the practical ways in which the authors engage directly with parents, coaching us through tough topics, offering up starter questions and activities for kids at various ages, and ending with prayer, grounding our circumstances and experiences in relation to God.
Another thing I love about this book is how it offers a different facet of how to approach conversations around race and culture. This book has helped me to put on more compassionate and empathetic lenses for those that may not be acquainted with this vocabulary and bringing newcomers into the conversation!
I believe this book has something to offer to anyone willing to set aside preconceived judgment and biases, take up a posture of engagement and active listening, and lean into a conversation that might at times feel uncomfortable, but knowing ultimately how loving such postures and actions will be to those watching and listening.

This book is essential reading for every Christian parent! We need sisters like Michelle Ami Reyes and Helen Lee who are kind enough to share the lessons they've learned along the way and wise enough to do it in a manner that is rooted in scripture and lovingly filled with challenges.

The book lays out 10 postures that are necessary for us to grow as "race-wise families." Each posture has a chapter dedicated to enumerating helpful definitions, sharing illustrative stories from each author's life and family, and concludes with practical steps for readers to take including prayers to pray. For many of us, the "what do I do?" question surfaces again and again in the face of what can sometimes feel like a hopeless mess of racial questions. Reyes and Lee outline simple, but not easy, steps to take at the individual and family level.

As a majority culture reader, the chapters on assessing bias and talking to children about privilege were so helpful. And the chapter about racial healing felt like a gift to be admitted as a listener into a conversation mostly intended for BIPOC readers.

The beautiful kingdom focus of this book allows it to be hopeful even in the midst of all too frequent atrocities. Even today, I will review the chapter on "Opening Our Hearts to Lament" as I discuss with my own children the recent mass shootings in Buffalo, California, Dallas, and more locally.

I am hopeful that more of my friends will read this book with me so we can journey together as a "Rase-Wise Family" in the body of Christ!

The nine postures outlined in "Race Wise Family" by authors @Michelle Reyes and @Helen Lee are concise and biblically centered as they guide us on how to overcome the racial divide through conversations, prayer, and practical applications for any and all of us to be advocates, for healing and hope.“Race Wise Family” is a tool that every parent and Christian educator should have in teaching children to be Kingdom-minded from their early years in dealing with people ~ all made in the image of God. –caring especially for marginalized people, as Jesus demonstrated. It would be a great read for parent groups in churches as well as for group Bible study. The nine postures outlined by authors @Michelle Reyes and @Helen Lee are concise and biblically centered as they guide us on how to overcome the racial divide through conversations, prayer, and practical applications for any and all of us to be advocates, for healing and hope. #RaceWiseFamily , #NetGalley

Race and racism have been scorchingly hot topics the past couple years since the 2020 George Floyd protests. (In saying that, I don't mean to imply that they're new topics, just that there's an increased scrutiny about them lately.) The overall feeling about race right now, though, is that it's something we must fight viciously about in classrooms and courtrooms and behind news desks, but it is not something we can safely talk about among friends and family for risk of inciting a flamewar. For parents, this presents a conundrum: how do you help your children understand a conversation that cannot be talked about? How do you help them develop a posture of leaning toward doing justice, loving mercy, and walking in humility with regard to their racialized society?

This is exactly the task that authors Helen Lee and Michelle Ami Reyes take up in their new book, The Race-Wise Family: Ten Postures to Becoming Households of Healing and Hope. Some folks will of course be suspicious of a book aiming to teach children about race, but they'd miss out on the gentle, humble, and helpful little guidebook that this is. It's not that Lee and Reyes present much that will be groundbreaking for those who have some degree of racial IQ, but that they summarize the issues in a way that is accessible and appropriate for kids of varying ages.

The book is divided up into ten chapters, each a "posture" that a family can develop together such as "valuing multiethnicity" or "opening our hearts to lament." One chapter, "Journeying toward racial healing," is written specifically to parents of color. Each chapter is quite short, composed of a story from Lee's or Reyes's lives about how they've experienced the given problem firsthand followed by working definitions of key terms, a biblical case for the posture, and concrete practices that a family can engage in to develop that posture. Not all practices will apply to every single family, and Lee and Reyes specify when a practice might be helpful for young children, older children, teenagers, or even young adult children. Finally, each chapter ends with a simple prayer expressing that posture.

The chapter I found most helpful for my own family was their final posture, "Raising Kingdom-Minded Children." It's become a somewhat common notion that people who care about racial justice do so only to garner the approval of progressive cultural elites. Of course, caring about racial justice just to garner approval is not a great motivation. As Lee puts it, though, "Standing against racial injustice is part of our Christian witness." In other words, racial justice matters because justice matters, regardless of who approves of you. Lee and Reyes show that to pray "Thy kingdom come, thy will be done" while maintaining an uncaring posture about justice is to fundamentally misunderstand who human beings are to be in this world. It does not make one a Marxist to wish to see a more just society; such a desire is instead firmly rooted in the "kingdom come" vision.

Though appendices typically do not get much attention in a book review, I want to call them out here because these ones are uncommonly good. There are five of them:

The Multiethnicity Quotient Assessment
Kid-Friendly Definitions
Media Suggestions for a Race-Wise Family
Prayers for a Race-Wise Family
Recommendations for Future Learning for Parents

The lists of media suggestions as well as the recommendations for parents are both quite useful, and their kid-friendly definitions are a very helpful reference when you're struggling to figure out how to help a child understand challenging concepts.

If you're convinced that racial justice is a great threat to society and all that is good, this book is most likely not going to change your mind (maybe it will; give it a shot!). If, however, you've found yourself as a parent struggling with how to talk with your children about race-related subjects and current events in age-appropriate ways, The Race-Wise Family could be an excellent resource for you. Get it, keep it handy, highlight it, and use it to spur family discussions. Try practicing some of their suggestions about how to become more race-wise.

DISCLAIMER: I received a copy of this book from the publisher for the purpose of a fair, unbiased review.