Under Our Skin - Tapa dura

Can it ever get better? This is the question Benjamin Watson is asking. In a country aflame with the fallout from the racial divide—in which Ferguson, Charleston, and the Confederate flag dominate the national news, daily seeming to rip the wounds open ever wider—is there hope for honest and healing conversation? For finally coming to understand each other on issues that are ultimately about so much more than black and white?

An NFL tight end for the New Orleans Saints and a widely read and followed commentator on social media, Watson has taken the Internet by storm with his remarkable insights about some of the most sensitive and charged topics of our day. Now, in Under Our Skin, Watson draws from his own life, his family legacy, and his role as a husband and father to sensitively and honestly examine both sides of the race debate and appeal to the power and possibility of faith as a step toward healing.

For so many people, the racial divide is an argument, a political position, a debate on TV.

But keeping our distance isn’t working.

It’s not an option anymore. This is about you and me. It’s about our neighbors, our children, and our world.

In this challenging look at race, bias, and justice, Benjamin Watson, tight end for the New Orleans Saints and social-media commentator, speaks from his deepest heart to articulate what many of us think and feel. Part memoir and part social commentary, Under Our Skin offers a look at both sides of the race debate and appeals to the power and possibility of faith as a step toward healing. It’s a bold new path for us to follow as we come together to talk about the truths, myths, and realities of racial conflict.

Change starts here.

From the flap:
Let’s admit it. We all feel angry, offended, sad, hopeless, confused. But this is also true: We can be encouraged.

Benjamin Watson is a tight end for the New Orleans Saints, a writer and speaker, and a widely read and followed commentator on social media.

He attended Duke University as a freshman and transferred to the University of Georgia, where he majored in finance. After an all-SEC senior campaign, he was drafted in the first round of the 2004 NFL draft by the New England Patriots. He won a Super Bowl ring in his rookie season and appeared in another Super Bowl following the 2007 season. After a three-year stint with the Cleveland Browns—including the 2010 season in which he led the Browns in receptions, receiving yards, and receiving touchdowns—Watson signed with the Saints in 2013.

Watson serves on the executive committee of the NFL Players Association and is the founder of the nonprofit One More foundation along with his wife, Kirsten. They live in New Orleans with their five children.

Ken Petersen is a veteran of book publishing, having worked for Tyndale House Publishers and Random House/Crown (WaterBrook Multnomah). He has written numerous books and lives with his wife, Rita, in Colorado Springs.