Hahrie Han

.Any American concerned with the future of our democracy should read this book.

A compellingly written, meticulously researched, on the ground examination of the relationship between the Evangelicalism and racism. Driven by stories of ordinary people struggling for racial justice, this book opens up a landscape beyond the headlines and social media feeds, offering hope and insight about how to address America’s original sin. In doing so, it offers pastoral wisdom for church and social movement leaders to understand better the dynamics of organizing for real change.

Hahrie Han has put heart and soul into telling the inspiring story of a beacon of racial progress that may seem unlikely: a program for working-class people at a Midwestern evangelical megachurch. With wisdom, humanity, and great narrative skill, Han persuades us that there is a way forward in the struggle against racism, if we are willing to be patient, to trust one another, and to operate from shared faith.”

In Undivided, Hahrie Han has given us a brilliant, intimate, and moving story of real people working for true actionable change and transformative justice within their communities. Deeply researched and immersive, Undivided offers a critical and ground-breaking intervention into a surprising tale that recenters our understanding of American social movements, religion, race, and democracy.

Undivided is a remarkable book that takes readers on a poignant journey through the messy complexities of faith, racism, and personal transformation in a painfully fraught political world. It is a meaningful, person-centered, richly informed reflection on the problems and possibilities of faith-based, community-rooted solidarity. Undivided inspires, challenges, and opens its readers eyes to the difficult realities of how personal and political change happen in people’s lives. Eschewing easy answers or simple solutions, Hahrie Han brilliantly illuminates an uncertain yet hope-filled path towards collective enactment of racial justice in the United States.

Undivided feels like it is written by someone who understands and, dare I say, loves the church. And because of that, the book catches the church doing right, and praises it, but also challenges it to do better.

Prisms of the People provides more than a hint about how to build and sustain powerful community organizations, an approach firmly rooted in principles of inclusion and engagement rather than boilerplate routines or recipes. The difficult approach makes all kinds of sense: saving democracy takes democratic organizing.

Prisms of the People provides answers to a fundamental question of our time: how can we rewire American democracy from the bottom up so that it includes all voices equally? Forging impulses of Tocqueville and Alinsky into a twenty-first-century recipe for participatory activism, the authors show how disenfranchised people across America built organizations that were vital democratic spaces in which they transformed each other into more capable members and leaders.

For all the scholarship on social movements and civic associations, surprisingly little research has focused on the issue of organizational effectiveness. Han's book should go a long way toward filling this gap. Using a mix of comparative case analysis and field experiments, the author offers an empirically rich, analytically compelling account of why some associations succeed in mobilizing effective collective action, while so many others fail—often spectacularly—to do so. This book deserves the widest possible audience in political science, sociology and, most importantly, among those who aspire to successful grass roots activism.

Amid all the hype about 'big data' and analytics in Obama's presidential campaigns, one key story hasn't been told in full: how the Obama team built a sprawling and vibrant field organization almost entirely out of volunteer labor. Han and McKenna recount the successes and struggles of this effort, drawing on extensive and illuminating interviews with everyone from senior staff to many of those volunteers. Their account shows how a winning campaign depends as much on old-fashioned shoe leather as on statistical models and multi-million dollar advertising sprees. This is a book that both scholars and practitioners of campaigns should read.

Groundbreakers is thus an excellent introduction to the practice of organizing, which is an extremely underappreciated facet of American politics...If we are ever going to have a more active and representative political culture, political actors and ordinary citizens alike will have to start taking some cues from Groundbreakers.