Alencia Johnson takes the reader on a journey of self discovery in the most delicate and insightful way. As a disruptor who always placed the blame on others, Johnson applies facts and biblical principles that taught me the importance of doing the internal work while also improving the community around you. How I deliver information to others and how I speak to myself will be forever positively changed because of this book. Alencia, thank you for the words you have shared and for the insight!

First, let me just get out there that I was very disappointed to find out this was not actually a Christian book. Using Jesus a couple of times throughout the book to prooftext your point and justify your personal choices does not make a book Christian, especially when the biggest chunk of anything that you dedicate to Jesus is to highlight what a great human He was and how much we can learn from the way He asserted Himself. That wasn't the point of Jesus's life, and it's not a Christian teaching. This is a political book. Its main purpose is to promote liberal heroes and ideology and to declare them as objective truth. It does not stand on God's word and doesn't even pretend to.

To the book itself, though, which I did read in its entirety - I can't think of a person on this earth who I would have more fundamental disagreements with than this author. I had never heard of her before (which sounds like it might offend her, since she's very proud of her life in the public spotlight), but I wonder if she realizes that if I were to invest myself wholeheartedly in creating a more just society as it is on my heart to do (and I DO do this), she and I would be working in diametrically opposed directions. All the things she thinks are important to justice, are not on my radar for what true justice looks like. Her heroes are not my heroes. Her conclusions are not my conclusions. It would be simple for her to then just write me off as someone who doesn't understand, which is something else she likes to do throughout the book, but that's because she seems to have tunnel vision for what is worthwhile when, in fact, what we both understand is that humanity is messy. At least, she says she understands that.

This is the tension that we live in. I often see folks on one side of the aisle or the other say that democracy is in great danger when their side loses, but friends, this is how democracy works - the people show up, vote, and one side wins and the other side(s) lose. Just because you're on the losing side doesn't mean democracy itself is in danger. And yet, I imagine that I would be easily cast aside by her worldview for simply disagreeing with her, for working "the other direction" on the issues she feels are most important.

Here's the thing - those aren't the issues. They really aren't. That's not where justice is going to be found or won or carried out. None of it. And it saddens me to read that as much as she talks about having a bigger table, building a bigger welcome, making room for more chairs to be pulled up, she also makes it clear that white men (and many white women) would not be welcome at her table...unless they are committed to her causes. She even says it about one of her idols, someone she continually promotes throughout the book - Senator Elizabeth Warren. She wasn't interested in working for this white woman until this white woman showed that she was committed to the author's causes. So...sorry, white folks; Alencia is busy building a world that you're not welcome in. Unless you're willing to give up your own perspective and adopt hers because yours has been historically wrong and damaging forever and hers is...enlightened or something. I don't really know. What I do know is that she's not really looking for a more just world; she's looking for HER vision of a more just world and anybody that's not on board with that is unenlightened, unwelcome, and working "against their own best interests."

That said, she'll probably just write this review off because I am, after all, a white woman. But to do so would be to ignore the work that I have done and do in my community for real justice and my inclusion in a number of "marginalized groups" that she claims to be fighting for.

This book could have been good. I had really high hopes for it. I think these are conversations that we need to have. But I felt like I was being talked at by a naive young woman with a very narrow worldview, and it just didn't work for me.