White Picket Fences: Turning toward Love in a World Divided by Privilege

A Gentle Invitation into the Challenging Topic of PrivilegeGently addressing the challenging topics of privilege and race, power and inequality, White Picket Fences is a memoir of Amy Julia Beckers growing awareness of the unequal benefits (and secret harm) she received by virtue of her white skin, Protestant heritage, education and able body.Through telling her own story, Amy Julia Becker shares her process to acknowledge and examine the injustice, oppression and silence that has characterized American history and her own life. These forces of division, social power and unequal opportunities are still active and relevant to the church, education system, and even the books we give our children to read today. She reflects on her upper-middle-class childhood both in the American South and later New England, her own struggles with perfectionism, and raising a child with a disability, in light of privilege. Amy Julia Becker guides readers through her growing realization of how inequality has negatively impacted herself and others. "Privilege harms everyone," she writes, "those who are excluded from it and those who benefit from it." Black and white, rich and poor, strong and weak.Through reflections on parenting, family, and faith, Amy Julia Becker traces her process to discover how she can participate in actions and conversations of truth and love in order to bring wholeness and healing.  "Identifying the wounds of privilege is one thing," she writes, "participating in their healing is even harder." She offers a challenge to readers: "This book is an invitation, especially for people from a similar cultural background to mine, to consider the reality of privilege, the benefits and wounds that come from privilege, and whether we can respond to the fact of our privilege with generosity, humility, and hope."Winner of Christianity Todays 2018 Book Awards Award of Merit: "Told with grace and humility, this memoir will be a helpful companion to those who are wrestling with similar questions about privilege." -- Ruth Everhart, Christianity Today Review Sometimes realizing your privilege starts with looking at your bookshelf.Amy Julia Becker, author of White Picket Fences, began to consider the whiteness of her bookshelf, a bookshelf found acting ?not as a door but as a mirror, a mirror that shows me my white skin, my stable and traditional family, my remote and safe neighborhood, and little of the expansive world outside [her] door? (19). As Becker quickly discovered in an attempt to read quality children?s literature with her three children, privilege often starts with noticing who?s not on your bookshelf - which for her meant realizing that there weren?t any books that featured children of different ethnic or racial backgrounds.Nearly every character in the books she loved and filled her shelves with was white.Connecting the dots from her bookshelf to her identity as a white, straight, middle-to-upper class, educated woman meant coming to grips with the reality of a privilege that had always been hers. But if waking up to the reality of privilege ultimately means learning to use and lay down this same privilege for good, a journey of noticing and deconstructing first must take place.Like her previous books, A Good and Perfect Gift and Small Talk, Becker?s writing centers in story and in the art of telling good stories about herself and the people in her life. Perhaps most profoundly, the author is most able to identify privilege through her relationship with her oldest daughter, Penny, who was born with Down syndrome. Had it not been for Penny?s presence in her life, she might still feel dismissive or even bewildered by controversy (136), but being in intimate relationship with her daughter helped her make connections to other injustices bought by the price of privilege.?As I have learned more about the history of people with intellectual disabilities,? she writes, ?I have seen the parallels in the