Read an Excerpt of White Picket Fences Here.

Praise for White Picket Fences:

I want to read every word Amy Julia Becker writes. No one I know captures so completely the ache and the joy of being human. White Picket Fences is her most compelling book yet, tackling one of the thorniest topics of our time and illuminating it with honesty, humility, and hope. Privilege so often involves a conspiracy to forget, and this book gently, unflinchingly insists that we remember. But it also helps us believe that in a world so often torn by violence and indifference, love can still have the last and best word. – Andy Crouch, Author

Beautifully and elegantly written in a prose that does not allow us to shrink from a painful reality, Becker challenges us to move out of the stagnant state of “benign” racism. Without “white-explaining,” Becker presents a convincing story of everyday privilege, a disruption of that privilege, and a necessary transformation. – Soong-Chan Rah, Milton B. Engebretson Professor, North Park Theological Seminary, Author of The Next Evangelicalism and Prophetic Lament

Discussing the reality of privilege is both uncomfortable and essential. In White Picket Fences, Amy Julia Becker explores this critically important topic without being heavy handed or didactic…White Picket Fences is compelling, wise, and vital. – Tish Harrison Warren, Priest in the Anglican Church of North America and author of Liturgy of the Ordinary

A Gentle Invitation into the Challenging Topic of Privilege

The notion that some might have it better than others, for no good reason, offends our sensibilities. Yet, until we talk about privilege, we’ll never fully understand it or find our way forward.

Amy Julia Becker welcomes us into her life, from the charm of her privileged southern childhood to her adult experience in the northeast, and the denials she has faced as the mother of a child with special needs. She shows how a life behind a white picket fence can restrict even as it protects, and how it can prevent us from loving our neighbors well.

White Picket Fences invites us to respond to privilege with generosity, humility, and hope. It opens us to questions we are afraid to ask, so that we can walk further from fear and closer to love, in all its fragile and mysterious possibilities.

Amy Julia Becker is the author of White Picket Fences: Turning toward Love in a World Divided by Privilege (NavPress, 2018). She is also the author of Small Talk: Learning From My Children About What Matters Most (Zondervan, 2014), A Good and Perfect Gift: Faith, Expectations and a Little Girl Named Penny (Bethany House), named one of the Top Books of 2011 by Publisher’s Weekly, and Penelope Ayers: A Memoir. A graduate of Princeton University and Princeton Theological Seminary, her essays about faith, family, and disability have appeared in the Washington Post, USA Today, Christianity Today, the Christian Century, and online for The New York Times, ABCNews, the Atlantic, Vox, and The Huffington Post. Amy Julia is a member of INK: A Creative Collective. She lives with her husband Peter and three children, Penny, William, and Marilee in western CT.