“We have the same arguments again and again. We make no real progress. As we try to find ways to enforce our particular viewpoint, we dehumanize those who disagree with us.”

George Yancey is talking about—you guessed it—race in America. The sociologist and author of Beyond Racial Gridlock: Embracing Mutual Responsibility (InterVarsity, 2006) wants to cut through our deafening deadlock with a solution that brings together rather than tears apart. Or at least makes that possible.

In a new article for TGC titled “Let’s Stop the Racial Insanity,” Yancey spotlights four popular solutions to racial disagreement—humanism, education, intelligence, and power—and reveals how each is finally inadequate. Gratefully, though, there is another option.

“If we stop talking past each other and instead start talking to each other, we might be able to devise solutions that are accepted across the racial and political spectrum,” Yancey writes. Such “collaborative conversation” sounds nice, but it requires us to face an uncomfortable question: What, really, is our goal? Is it to shame those who disagree, or is it to actually persuade them? The former path is easy. And addictive. And lucrative. It’s just not Christian.

Speaking of Christians, we possess incomparable resources (the omnipotent third person of the Godhead, for instance) to be leading the way. But many of us are too busy conforming ourselves to the pattern of this world.

“Considering the needs of others is an awful lot like dying to self—a key Christian value often missing in our racial discussions,” Yancey observes. “Can Christians find ways to sit down with each other and discuss the racial challenges before us? In a post-Christian age, we must find real answers for a hurting world.”

The solution to the impasse is not to ignore real issues or overlook disagreements to the tune of Kumbaya. The solution is to work through them, together, with countercultural honesty—countercultural because it’s framed by charity and focused on making Jesus look better than ourselves.