Seldom do we think of the study of history as a journey of self-discovery. And if that claim has any truth, it's because we modern people tend to see ourselves as autonomous, independent, untethered, and unaffected by our biological and cultural genealogies. But there's a story in our DNA that didn't start with us. And Lisa Sharon Harper has been on a decades-long journey of self-discovery, piecing together her family's lineage from their arrival on America's shores—via slave boats, through the twists and turns of slavery and indentured servitude, through America's post-civil war attempt at Reconstruction, down into the shadowy valley of Jim Crow and twentieth-century Civil Rights struggle, all to her life in the present. Her book is Fortune: How Race Broke My Family and the World—and How to Repair It All. Evan Rosa recently spoke with Lisa at length about how race broke her world and how she traced her family line back beyond the founding of America. And in continued celebration of Juneteenth and the Black joy which has transcended centuries of oppression, the Black history that deserves to be named and known, and the Black freedom which is real and yet still not fully realized and repaired—thanks for listening today friends.
Seldom do we think of the study of history as a journey of self-discovery. And if that claim has any truth, it's because we modern people tend to see ourselves as autonomous, independent, untethered, and unaffected by our biological and cultural genealogies. But there's a story in our DNA that didn't start with us. And Lisa Sharon Harper has been on a decades-long journey of self-discovery, piecing together her family's lineage from their arrival on America's shores—via slave boats, through the twists and turns of slavery and indentured servitude, through America's post-civil war attempt at Reconstruction, down into the shadowy valley of Jim Crow and twentieth-century Civil Rights struggle, all to her life in the present. Her book is Fortune: How Race Broke My Family and the World—and How to Repair It All. Evan Rosa recently spoke with Lisa at length about how race broke her world and how she traced her family line back beyond the founding of America. And in continued celebration of Juneteenth and the Black joy which has transcended centuries of oppression, the Black history that deserves to be named and known, and the Black freedom which is real and yet still not fully realized and repaired—thanks for listening today friends.
How to Buy Fortune: How Race Broke My Family and the World—and How to Repair It All:
About Lisa Sharon Harper
From Ferguson to New York, and from Germany to South Africa to Australia, Lisa Sharon Harper leads trainings that increase clergy and community leaders’ capacity to organize people of faith toward a just world. A prolific speaker, writer and activist, Ms. Harper is the founder and president of FreedomRoad.us, a consulting group dedicated to shrinking the narrative gap in our nation by designing forums and experiences that bring common understanding, common commitment and common action.
Ms. Harper is the author of several books, including Evangelical Does Not Equal Republican…or Democrat (The New Press, 2008); Left Right and Christ: Evangelical Faith in Politics (Elevate, 2011); Forgive Us: Confessions of a Compromised Faith (Zondervan, 2014); and the critically acclaimed, The Very Good Gospel: How Everything Wrong can be Made Right (Waterbrook, a division of Penguin Random House, 2016). The Very Good Gospel, recognized as the “2016 Book of the Year” by Englewood Review of Books, explores God’s intent for the wholeness of all relationships in light of today’s headlines.
A columnist at Sojourners Magazine and an Auburn Theological Seminary Senior Fellow, Ms. Harper has appeared on TVOne, FoxNews Online, NPR, and Al Jazeera America. Her writing has been featured in CNN Belief Blog, The National Civic Review, Sojourners, The Huffington Post, Relevant Magazine, and Essence Magazine. She writes extensively on shalom and governance, immigration reform, health care reform, poverty, racial and gender justice, climate change, and transformational civic engagement.
Ms. Harper earned her Masters degree in Human Rights from Columbia University in New York City, and served as Sojourners Chief Church Engagement Officer. In this capacity, she fasted for 22 days as a core faster in 2013 with the immigration reform Fast for Families. She trained and catalyzed evangelicals in St. Louis and Baltimore to engage the 2014 push for justice in Ferguson and the 2015 healing process in Baltimore, and she educated faith leaders in South Africa to pull the levers of their new democracy toward racial equity and economic inclusion.
In 2015, The Huffington Post named Ms. Harper one of 50 powerful women religious leaders to celebrate on International Women’s Day. In 2019, The Religion Communicators Council named a two-part series within Ms. Harper’s monthly Freedom Road Podcast “Best Radio or Podcast Series of The Year”. The series focused on The Roots and Fruits of Immigrant Labor Exploitation in the US. And in 2020 Ms. Harper received The Bridge Award from The Selma Center for Nonviolence, Truth and Reconciliation in recognition of her dedication to bridging divides and building the beloved community.
Show Notes
Production Notes
Evan Rosa: For the Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center For Faith and Culture. Visit us online at faith.yale.edu.
Lisa Sharon Harper: You are a person who comes from people from land, with names, who had particular struggles because of the policies passed on that land by people who were creating public flows of life to benefit them. If you were to root yourselves in who you really are, then you would rediscover your humanity, your frailness, your fleshliness, the reality that God does not ask you to be perfect.
Never in the scripture are you asked to be perfect. God is perfect. Only God is perfect. God asks you to love. God calls us to be reconnected: deeply and radically reconnected. The call of life is to be reconnected, and whiteness as a construct inherently, by design, disconnects.
Evan Rosa: This is For the Life of the World, a podcast about seeking and living a life worthy of our humanity.
I'm Evan Rosa, with the Yale Center For Faith and Culture. Seldom do we think of the study of history as a journey of self discovery. And if that claim has any truth, I wonder if it's because we modern people tend to see ourselves as autonomous, independent, untethered, unaffected by our biological and cultural genealogies, but there's a story in our DNA and it didn't start with us.
And Lisa Sharon Harper has been on a decades-long journey of self discovery, piecing together her family's lineage from their arrival on America's shores, via slave boats, through the twists and turns of slavery and indentured servitude, through America's post-Civil War attempt at Reconstruction down into the shadowy valley of Jim Crow and 20th-century civil rights struggle, all to her life in the present.
Her book is Fortune: How Race Broke My Family and the World and How to Repair It All. I recently spoke with Lisa at length about how race broke her world, and how she traced her family line back beyond the founding of America. For more information about her book, check the show notes and visit lisasharonharper.com for more resources on reconnecting to our history and seeking restorative racial justice.
In celebration of Juneteenth and the black joy which has transcended centuries of oppression, the black history that deserves to be named and known and the black freedom, which is real, and yet still not fully realized and repaired. Thanks for listening today, friends.
Lisa. Thanks so much for joining me on For the Life of the World.
Lisa Sharon Harper: It is so good to be here with you, Evan. Thank you so much for having me. It's a privilege to be talking with you and your audience.
Evan Rosa: Thanks so much. You've really done, I think a remarkable thing with your new book, Fortune. Not many people have I think so intimately reconstructed their genealogy and family tree to the detail and familiarity that you have.
Lisa Sharon Harper: Mm-hmm
Evan Rosa: Tell me a little bit about what that feels like.
Lisa Sharon Harper: Well, I'll tell you it literally feels like a monument that's been built for the next generations. I was most invested in passing this on to my nieces and nephews, to the next generations of our family so that they would know who they are.
But also I was invested because I wanted to know who I am like, who are these people who made me, who I am, who came before me. But what I found in the midst of that research is that their lives were so amazingly connected with policies that were passed in their time that I began to understand America better as I understood myself better, as I understood my ancestors and their lives better.
So I said, this is not just for my own descendants and family. It feels like a story that needs to be told for everyone, because I think that as we begin to understand how policies and structures and laws have shaped the course of our family's lives, we can reconcile the narratives that are warring with each other in America and come to a, a closer understanding of what is true about who we are and how we got here. And as a result, get a common vision for what it will take to make us, um, flourish as a nation and as a people.
Evan Rosa: I think that it's tempting to call this a project, but really it's more like a calling the way that I understand it. And the way that you've told the story in the book, having spent just decades, 30 plus years of your life, that's a calling. That's not just a little tiny project. So I do wanna press in a little bit more about the ways in which, and maybe the theological or spiritual ways that you understand family history as connecting to both political social realities in America, as well as a theological understanding of how Christians can understand the way that a family history bears on them and bears on the world.
Lisa Sharon Harper: Well, I think it's funny. I never really understood the power of family history in scripture until I had done my own family history and understood the power of the context within which people live. So I used to look at the list of names that Jesus came from--Jesus is, you know, son of Mary, son of doo, son of Joseph, depending on who you're reading, and, and this is, and this is his lineage.
Or when you start the book of Luke, right? In the days of King Herod. Or you start the book of Nehemiah, in the days of King Uzziah. The time, the context matters because there's a political context, a social context, a cultural context, and a spiritual context.
When we're reading the scripture, we tend to focus on, and I'm, I'm saying, especially in the evangelical world, we tend to focus on the spiritual context, like what are the spiritual lessons that somebody else taught before? Okay. They apply now. Okay. How do we, how do we read them into the text right now? But we totally miss the political, the cultural, the social context. And as a result, I think we actually miss the meaning because this whole book, the entire book is written in the context of oppression. The entire book is written by people who were colonized. In the midst of them being colonized or fearing colonization.
And it's those people who then made a point of writing down the generations. So that, that has to mean something. And it means something to our faith. What I've come to understand is that, in the context of our faith, when we look at Jesus' lineage, for example, when Matthew gives us his lineage or others give us his lineage what we're looking at is we're looking at the context within which he was born and each generation actually had its own struggles. It had its own triumphs.
Yeah.
Evan Rosa: So, I mean, you, you say in the book, that context is text.
Lisa Sharon Harper: Yes.
Evan Rosa: That's really what I'm hearing in what you're saying right now. And that, that leads also into the sort of complexity. So you also say "we don't like shades of gray, nuance, complexity. In submission to our culture's dualistic narratives we have cast our nation's foundational stories as if they were sketched by Disney or John Wayne."
Lisa Sharon Harper: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. And that is real.
Evan Rosa: It is real. And I want to dive into a little bit more about how context is text and how that, how history inflects our own individual experience and our own individual existence and our search for personal meaning, flourishing community life.
Lisa Sharon Harper: When we look at the context of American life, you cannot divorce it from the laws that were crafted to shape the flow of American life. And I mean, American, as in, even going back to the colonial period before we were America, because those laws actually mostly stayed in place actually, when we became a nation. Yeah, we got a constitution eventually we had the bill of rights and all of that, but the basic laws were all still there. And we know that because slavery still existed.
Evan Rosa: Yeah.
Lisa Sharon Harper: They transferred from domains. So from colonial times to post-revolution times. But those laws shaped the course of life and those laws are our context and those laws were created in order to deal with a perceived problem in the context of the ground. This became clear to me when I was researching. Fortune was the very first American born, in other words, person born on this land within my family, that we have been able to trace. Her name is Fortune Game MaGee. And so Fortune was born in 1687 to Maudlin McGee and Sambo Game.
Sambo was from Senegal we believe, the southeastern corner where Mali and Guinea and Senegal meet. He, we know the ship that he came over on. He came over on a ship, he was brought over in chains in 1686. And we know he was from Senegal because that's a Senegalese name, it's a Wolof name. And it means second son. Isn't that deep, that's so deep.
Evan Rosa: That you know that about these individual human beings that are tied to you by blood. I mean, this is what I was talking about. Most people do not have that kind of level of depth of connection to their ancestry.
Lisa Sharon Harper: Well, I know it from a series of revelations in the midst of the research. The first one was realizing that there's this brilliant man who has researched all of, um, the free black, um, men and women and families in Virginia, Maryland, South Carolina, North Carolina and Delaware. And so he's made it, his life's work actually to, to trace them, to research them. He's done most of the work.
So when we realized that my family was connected to this Fortune family through DNA research with the ancestry.com that there were too many connections, still the connection needs to be narrowed in, but we know there's a family cluster there. We're not exactly sure exactly which ancestor. But we know there's a family cluster and they're connected.
So here's the thing: when I realized that Fortune, born of Sambo and Maudlin, and the reason we know that is because of court records, because she was a mixed-race girl. Because Maudlin was from Ireland. She was actually Ulster Scot. And that means that she was Scottish helping to plant plantations on Irish land in Ireland for the English, she was there as an indentured servant. She fell in love with Sambo, had an affair and they had Fortune.
When I realized that she lived in that time and it was the laws that were passed just 20, something years before she was born, that shaped the course of her life. I went, whoa.
The law is personal. It's not just this philosophical thing that's out there. It impacts the course of not only Fortune, but also Sarah and Humphrey and every generation that came after that. Thomas going down to Robert, going down to Phillip, going down into Ella and, and so on through my family line to me.
So, the fact that in 1664, Maryland, the planter class, who was also the legislators, generally speaking, got freaked out by the fact that they now had these mixed race children coming from the unions of white women and enslaved black men. These white women were marrying enslaved black men. And they were like, we can't have that.
And so they instituted a law and that law said, any white woman who marries and has children by an enslaved black man shall herself become enslaved, to her husband's master and her children will be enslaved in perpetuity. And then through a bunch of finagling over the next 20 some years, that changed because they realized people were starting to actually force their indentured Irish servants to marry and have children by enslaved black men so that they would gain free labor.
So then they changed that law, but eventually it basically shook out to what impacted Fortune, which was a law that said, if, if you are the product, the child of a white woman, or trace your lineage back to a white woman, you cannot be enslaved, but you can be indentured. And if your father is, is of African descent, black, then you will be indentured for 31 years.
And if your father is white, you'll be indentured for 21 years. And so there, you see it in the first set of race laws, you see the privilege of whiteness. You also see gender-- these are the first laws that actually impacted gender. And you see the creation of a racial caste system that Isabella Wilkerson talks about in her book, in America.
And that was 1662 and 1664, '62 in Virginia, '64 in Maryland. So that's the context and that is text that context, that legal context shapes the flow of life. For Fortune and three generations of her progeny who go on and are indentured not enslaved because her mother was white. But on Leah's line, who is, I think chapter three in the book, Leah is enslaved in South Carolina and her mother, as I know, from African ancestry.com DNA, her mother traces back to Nigeria.
So her mother was black. And by that point she was born in the early 1800s. By that point, it was very solidly the status of the mother is what gives you the status of the child in terms of slavery, free citizen or not citizen. And so her mother was black, so therefore she was enslaved. And by that point, that was the clear law and certainly in South Carolina.
So her context shaped her reality in the end, all her descendants, which were enslaved until the end of the Civil War.
Evan Rosa: What's amazing about this is, um, when you compare it to the modern sensibility of autonomy and the individual that is sort of freestanding and disconnected. And I, and I believe this is a lie that we are freestanding.
Lisa Sharon Harper: That's a lie.
Evan Rosa: That we are autonomous or pure individual: gotta be a lie. I mean, it's a sort of biological lie of course at some deep level. But it's also this spiritual and moral lie. In the sense that there's this and, and I think it's probably idolatry at the, at the bottom of it.
It's something like the pride of life that emerges to try to convince us that we are our own and that we have made this world for ourselves. But the story that you have written down here and passed on is proof to the contrary and it's proof that we are intimately connected with our past intimately connected with each other.
And that laws really do have an impact on individual human lives and can constrain or free.
Lisa Sharon Harper: Yes. Yes. I mean, one great example of that are the laws that were passed after the Civil War that you had a good seven, well, nine years of real freedom, of Reconstruction where people were reconstructing the south, that's where that word Reconstruction comes from and where you had the Civil Rights Act of 1866 passed, and you had voting rights protected and all of this.
And that's why within nine years you had more than a thousand, I think some people say 2000 people of African descent were elected into positions in American governance as far top as senators and house representatives and even lieutenant governors, mayors.
I mean, you just had black elected officials all over the country, not even only in the south, but all over the country. And here you have in nine years, you have the policy deal of 1877, the Harding compromise and that compromise then lifted federal protection from the south and then threw the south into Jim Crow law.
So into the, the hands of basically, um, post civil war slaveocracy. Where they then leveraged the loophole and the 13th amendment in order to people their plantations that had gone for nine years being unpeopled, cause people left, but they said, okay, we're gonna people them again. We're gonna force workers onto them through the loophole, imprisoning them.
They lowered the bar of criminality. All of these things happened. And in my family, what we see is the laws that are passed in that time, immediately, as soon as Reconstruction is over, laws are passed in South Carolina that ban people of African descent from working in any position that is not domestic or farm.
So basically in the only way that you can work in South Carolina is to do what you did during slave times. Is to work in the house and then also to work in the fields. So it's those things that actually then pushed black people to say, we outta here. And my family was among them. We said, we're out.
You know, that's what made the great migration. So these decisions that were made in terms of policy really did shape the flow of life. And as a result, the, the futures and fortunes of my family and millions of, of families across America. And not only black folk, also white folk course. So for example, the institution of the homestead act.
So when there is in the mid-1800s, there's a recession going on in Washington DC and on the east coast. So what they do, they open up the west and they say, come, and all you need to do is do a big run and plant your flag and you get to have that land. Well, who got to benefit from that? White men got to benefit from that.
Very, very few people of African descent got to benefit from it. And even if they did most of the time, their land was taken from them within a few generations. And so you have a situation where the laws, the policies are not only shaping life for the oppressed, but also, and most especially, particularly for white men.
Evan Rosa: Absolutely.
Lisa Sharon Harper: For the benefit of white men.
Evan Rosa: Hmm. Deeply connected to this issue is, is a quote again from the book. "Law is rarely if ever crafted in response to philosophical belief," that's in the idealized kind of thing. And you go on, "law is crafted to deal with real time issues, rising from common life in a society."
And the important to the context there is that it's not just real time issues in common life. The real time issue is the maintenance of power. It's the maintenance of these laws that are oppressive to one community, but deeply benefit the other. And yet, and this is part of the lie as part of the, the social lie, the lie we tell ourselves, maybe it's whether it's mass delusion, whether it actually occurs to the individuals and who it benefits.
That's a question, however, speak to what you've learned about how these laws impacted the white communities that benefited from this kind of oppressive legal force.
Lisa Sharon Harper: Yeah. Well, I think that we have to really stop and ask a pretty profound question.
When was the last time in the history of the world?
When people of European descent as a people did not go somewhere in the world, anywhere in the world, and imagine they should be the rulers there.
Evan Rosa: That is the question.
Lisa Sharon Harper: Isn't that the question? That question came to me about a year and a half ago, and I was blown away by the reality that I couldn't trace a time.
And then I had to, when I did, I had this like, aha moment it's before the Greek empire. You have to go back before the Greek empire, so that's like 3000 years. You have to go back before the Greek empire, in order to find the moment when people of European descent did not assume that they should be the ones to rule the world.
And that assumption has been passed down to us through Greek philosophers like Aristotle.
Evan Rosa: And Plato.
Lisa Sharon Harper: Yeah. And others, but especially I, I name Aristotle because he explicitly said it in his book Politics-- On Politics. He actually said if a people group has been conquered, it has demonstrated that it was created to be enslaved.
And so, and it's that logic that then led Pope Nicholas V to declare--not the Bible--it was Aristotle who was undergirding Pope Nicholas V's doctrine of discovery, um, Romanus pontifex, when he said, wherever you go in the land, oh, explorers, and you find uncivilized un-Christian people, you get to claim the land for the throne and enslave its people.
He was looking at it and saying, if you go somewhere, we are the civilized ones. We are the ones, because that was the way that the Greeks understood, if you're gonna be fully human, you gotta be European. You gotta be white, you gotta be male and you have to be able bodied. So if you see people who are not white male or able bodied, they are not civilized. And they're certainly not Christian. So you get to enslave them. That was the logic and it came from Aristotle, not the Bible.
Because on the first page of the Bible, we actually see very clearly: all humanity is created in the image of God and called, and created with the capacity to exercise dominion in the world, to exercise stewardship of the world, agency to shape the world.
So it is that lie that has been passed down from generation to generation for 3000 years. You know, and maybe a really great illustration of this for people my age, who are Gen Xers might be Pleasantville, it's like, you know, or the Truman Show, like you're in this alternative universe or maybe it's the Matrix, it's this alternative universe where you see the world set up in a way that you flow, like you just flow and you think everybody else flows because the oppression that is required for you to flow is hidden from you. And the reality of this constructs of the laws, the, the process of making those laws, that decision making within the halls of government has been hidden.
So it's just assumed this is the way should life should be. For 200 years, we assumed slavery should just be, yeah, of course. It took people of faith actually, who had a vision given to them by brown people who were colonized in the scripture of this beloved community of the kingdom of God who said, it's not supposed to be this way.
And then went against the flow, the inertia of our world that is set up by the laws and structures and the flow that we determine as a political society, to say no. So it's when those first people have always said no, whether it was the abolitionists who said no to slavery or the women, black women especially, beginning with black women and then moving to white women who said no to lack of suffrage, and then to black men, women and children who said no to Jim Crow and then to LGBTQ community who said no to being treated as second class citizens and the same with the disabled community and the same with Native Americans and the immigrant community now. Whenever anybody stands up and says, no, they are saying no, not just to the law, but to the lie that undergirds the law, they're saying lie no to that. And so what's the impact that it has had on the white soul? It reinforces the lie. The laws reinforce the lie of the supremacy of whiteness.
But if you get outside of that matrix, if you get outside of the Truman Show, if you get outside of Pleasantville, you begin to understand people of European descent are simply human beings. Just simply human beings. Who themselves have been oppressed quite honestly, had a huge ravenous history of oppression on European soil and have taken that way of being wherever they have gone in the world.
And it doesn't have to be this way. It doesn't have to be this way as my friend, Andre Henry says famously. That's what gives me hope, is that as people of faith, I understand repentance is possible. Like turning and walking another direction.
But normally we think of repentance in the personal like, oh, I did somebody wrong so now I need to repent of that. But what would it look like for a society to repent? What would it look like for the church to repent of the assumptions we've had about who we are and how we should operate as the church?
Evan Rosa: I really feel like I just need to ask how does that repair occur? How does that kind of reconciliation at a societal level begin to take shape in, in real life?
And, and I think it is tied to very much the methodology of your book here, which is sharing in personal history and using that history to personalize the other and start telling the truth.
Lisa Sharon Harper: Yeah. Start telling the truth. Quite honestly, for people of European descent, start telling the truth about how you got here.
Start telling the truth about who you are. So many of my white friends have responded to, you know, the question of DNA or whether they should do family research with the thing that I don't know, maybe it's something that's passed down to y'all or taught to you, but to say I'm just a European mutt, there's nothing there.
I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna do that research, but that is not true. Um, you are a person who comes from people, who came from land with names, who had particular struggles because of the policies passed on that land by people who were creating public flows of life to benefit them. And that's by and large, that's the reason why almost every person of European descent came to America is to escape that.
So, but what happened is once y'all got here, you created a new way of crafting a class of nobility, a noble class, and you made it white. White meant noble, white meant homeowner, white meant landowner. Whereas in, in Europe it was the serfs and the nobles. You had different names for it in different domains, but that's basically what it was.
Well, the serfs and the nobles became the landowner class and the slave and the white folk who were in between were told you're closer to the noble than you are to the slave because you're white. So just stick with us and we'll, we got you. And that's the benefit of whiteness. But what would happen? What would happen if people of European descent in America were actually to see themselves, not to renounce whiteness, to reject that moniker that actually erases their history, erases their family, demands that they renounce their origin story, and simply root their origin in the reality that they have some level of power, cause that's all whiteness is really for it is to determine who has power. So what would it look like for people who have been deemed white to say no, who I actually am is I am one who has benefited from this cover called whiteness, but my ancestors were Lithuanian. My ancestors were German. And this is their story. This is how they came to an American soil, who my ancestors were, was Swedish, who my ancestors were British. And they came here in this way--were Quaker, were--there's all kinds of stories, usually involving famine or oppression that got people here.
And I think my gut tells me if people of European descent were able to root themselves in that as opposed to whiteness, which is just ghost, it doesn't really exist.
Evan Rosa: It's just a construct.
Lisa Sharon Harper: It, if it's a construct, if you were to root yourselves in who you really are, then you would rediscover your humanity, your frailness, your fleshliness, the reality that God does not ask you to be perfect.
Never in the scripture are you asked to be perfect. God is perfect. Only God is perfect. God asks you to love. God calls us to be reconnected, deeply and radically reconnected. The call of life is to be reconnected and whiteness as a construct inherently by design disconnects.
Evan Rosa: I think you're, I think it's spot on. It really connects with my own experience of really not receiving a lot of my own family history. And I think I can't speak for everyone. I can speak for my own context. And I suppose I would go out a little bit on a limb to say that I think this is probably common. And I think it's part of that white construct, which is creating a safe harbor for white children to grow up disconnected, as you say, disconnected from the fact that others suffering is what makes their safety.
Lisa Sharon Harper: Which is exactly why they're attacking critical race theory right now and the 1619 project, because it's all it's uncovering the reality that this is all constructed and they have to, they have to keep that hidden in order to continue in a world where whiteness is assumed to be supreme.
You've gotta keep the lie going.
Evan Rosa: Yeah. And I think it's always justified by this desire to protect. That the, the prior generation wants to protect the younger generation from that psychic pain. That honestly, that melancholy, I use the term melancholy along the lines of J. Cameron Carter in describing that's the kind of feeling of a white individual who has been harbored from the pain of her black sister and has been sheltered and yet, and I should say his black sister really, because it's so deeply connected to the white male. Coming to terms with that psychic pain that whether it's anxiety or depression, or just the slight suggestion that something's off at an existential level. It's that constant assumption that we will be protected, that we, we will be harbored from any of the bad feelings or bad thoughts that might from bad repercussions or the repercussions that would come. Of course. And so there's really an important connection to the ways in which we understand the way we encounter, like the kinds of truth that hurts when the truth really hurts. But must still be said, must be admitted. And then you need to bear those repercussions, bear the consequences of the truth and not just continue to live in the falsehoods.
Lisa Sharon Harper: That's exactly right. In fact, the first two chapters first, not chapters, first two parts of the book, trace that family story in order to uncover the choices that were made politically and socially that shaped their lives.
And then the last part of the book, um, goes into three essays on what repair will require. And the first chapter of that repair section is on truth telling. And how we have to do three things. We have to truth-seek. We have to truth-listen, and we have to truth-tell. And that truth-seeking and truth-listening time, that is the painful time for people of European descent. And it's the first step. The very first step is to seek the truth or at least to allow the truth when it comes to you.
Evan Rosa: You can't listen if you're not open to it.
Lisa Sharon Harper: Right. Right. Yeah. But, oh, on the other side, on the other side of that, you get to exhale.
Yeah. You get to be simply human. Yeah. And not try to strive to be God, which I think is actually the principle sin of people of European descent, I think.
Evan Rosa: It's an idolatry, absolutely.
Lisa Sharon Harper: Is to try and be God. It's to try to shape the world, to try to actually define the world, to be the determiner of what the world is and who everybody is in it in order to control the world.
That is somebody who's trying to be God, not somebody who's trying to be even, even a supreme human. No, you're trying to be the supreme God. And that is when you are at war with God. The real question is it's not, it's not like can white people get to that place. The, the real question is what benefit will people of European descent get when they lay down their arms against God.
They will get to be simply human and they will get to be cared for by God, not striving and cared for by themselves, which only brings domination. You can only get that through domination. And when you dominate then you have to continue to dominate in order to maintain that power.
So the only way for people of European descent to find true peace is to lay down your arms and trust God to be God.
Evan Rosa: It's beautiful; needed. It's so, we need to hear that so much.
Lisa Sharon Harper: I wanna say one last thing, that what repair will require is reparation and it will be costly. But again, that's where actual faith kicks in. Like that's what faith, that's where we were required to actually have and exercise faith. You know, David had this moment, I believe it's Samuel II. I always get that wrong. Um, it's it's in the book. It's it's this moment where the Gibeonites come to David and say, you know, King David, you know, Saul tried to kill all of us, tried to commit a genocide against us.
And it's funny cause David had been just wrestling with God saying, why do we have this famine in the land, famine--and then there's a knock on the door and they tell him, and he is like, oh, that's why we have a famine on the land. And he could have done a few different things there. He could have said, oh wow, I'm so sorry that he did that. But you know, that really wasn't my reign. So, you know, deal with it. You know, he could have done that, which is exactly what we've done as Americans to people of African descent. He could have been better and he could have said, oh, we're gonna, you know, we're gonna fix this. I'm gonna get my council together. We'll figure it out. And we'll fix it. He didn't even do that. What he did was he fixed the actual break. He went back to core. The actual break was the moment that Saul looked at the Gibeonites and did not see the image of God in them: did not see the inherent divine dignity and call that God had placed on their lives to exercise dominion on their land.
That God, God, had said the Gibeonites are my people. The Gibeonites are people I created to rule here on this land at this time in this place, they should be able to determine how they live and when they die, as opposed to being killed by war, but no Saul said, no, I am gonna be God in this moment.
I'm I say they don't deserve to live and I'm gonna commit genocide. So what did David do? David? His process of repair started with the acknowledgement of them as full human beings created in God's image, created and called to exercise dominion. He gave them dominion over the remedy. He said, what do you say we should do for you so that things may be well with you?
And they told him, and it was costly. They had already had their council meeting. They were ready. And he did it without asking a question. He just did it. And how did God respond? God lifted the famine. That's how we know God was good with that. God lifted the famine. So what would it look like? What would it look like for people of European descent to listen and pay attention to the, the recommendations for the healing of people who've been oppressed impacted people's, and especially for me, the people of African descent for whom there has never been reparations. And it's the only people group who has been oppressed on American soil that has never received federal reparations.
So, what does it look like then for what does repentance look like? It looks like turning and listening to the black manifesto written in the 1970s. It looks like turning and reading and taking in and listening to, and following the vision of the movement for black lives. It looks like passage of HR 40, the house resolution 40, that is calling for a commission to study, not even the actual check, but a commission to study what reparations what repair would require? And it looks like passing the TRHT, the truth, racial healing and transformation commission act that was put forward by Barbara Lee last year. That is simply asking for a truth commission. To see what happened. And then to see how do we fix it? So that is what repair will require for people of African descent. And that's what repair will require for people of European descent, because that is, if we do that, it will start the process of people of European descent claiming their mere humanity.
Evan Rosa: That's beautiful. I just have one more question for you. So as, as you've done this work looked at your family, connected it to your life today. And as you think about the kind of theological and moral frame for the kind of flourishing that is implied by the kind of repair that you're talking about, what's the difference between mere survival or going with that, that unjust flow and true flourishing.
What's the difference there?
Lisa Sharon Harper: Oh, that's a good question. Wow. And it's a stark difference, especially given our actual context right now. Because I think you can't have this conversation in a bottle cause we don't exist in a bottle, in a Petri dish. We exist in a context and in our actual context right now, if America, if our nation, our context, if we follow in the footsteps of the ones who've come before and we simply do, as they've done, and we do not course correct immediately. Then what we will do is we will literally give up our democracy. Not only will it be black people or brown people, gay people, immigrants that, that lose the ability to vote. It'll be white women it'll be poor or even middle class white men.
Because the inertia of the laws and the structures since the very beginning to right now, to the last presidency, the last administration, has been to protect through law, the planter class. The ruling class, the noble class that, that comes over from Europe. That, that idea, the concept of nobility, but the ones who have always gotten short shrift is everybody else.
But right now we are at an existential moment in our nation where it's not even just that, you know, the middle class is shrinking and we have more people on the bottom. More people are gonna be poor. Yes, that'll be true. But we are about to lose our civic rights, our civil rights, white people are gonna lose their civil rights.
White women are losing their civil rights, their right to protect their own bodies. White men who are poor, elderly white people, and everybody else are losing the right to vote as gerrymandering happens, as ID laws are instituted, as they shut down polling stations. And so white elderly people who need special help to get there, won't be able to travel 30 miles, 40 miles to go vote on a particular day.
So when we lose democracy, we actually quite honestly, we lose the great experiment. We lose the capacity for all people on this land to exercise agency, dominion, stewardship, to be fully human. And that is when we have actually ceded the ground. We've actually said, if we continue on this road, we are continuing in the direction that has been placed for us from the very beginning, we would then solidify for generations that the only people who really can flourish on this land are white, rich men who claim to be Christian. But if we choose the way of God, If we choose the way of the kingdom of God. In other words, that we are all brothers and sisters, because God is our father. God is our mother. God is our parent. If we choose the way of the beloved community, where love flows in all directions and all people are prepared to exercise stewardship of the world through their education and their housing and their job capacity. And also the way we pay each other, the way that we say thank you for the work that has been done.
If we go the road of the beloved community, then what we do is we set up, we first of all have to go back and we're gonna have to transform this society. We're gonna have to go under the hood of the car in other words. And re-tinker rework this car and how the engine runs, and who are the assumed beneficiaries. No longer will it be the few it'll be the all the many. And all should have, and will have a say in that, but the only way to get there, the only way to get there is through repentance, is to repent for the ways that the church has engaged with the vote; that the church has engaged, the people of the church have engaged with the civic duty within a democracy to vote, because it is that civic duty that vote that shapes our world. That vote gets people into office who will then create laws that either benefit those few or benefit the many. And we, the church, people who claim Christian faith who say that they walk with brown Jesus, we make up the majority of voters in America. So if we just us were to actually repent of our politics of the way that we have through our conversations and votes shaped the way that the people live together.
If we were to repent of that and to begin to re, or not rebuild to build the beloved community, we could get there. Yeah, we could get there. We really could. We could get there within one generation. We could get there within the next 23 years, because that's the point 23 years from now when we will have a majority people of color in the nation.
And if we do not have the white church fighting to maintain that bit of power that they had under false pretense, but rather if we have the church, people of European descent who call themselves Christians fighting rather for the beloved community, we could get there.
Evan Rosa: Lisa, thank you so much for joining me. Thank you for writing this text, that shows how context is text in your real life and giving that not just to your descendants, but to the world. I think it's this beautiful example of the ways in which as Martin Luther King Jr said, we're made by history. And what you've given all of us is a gift.
And thank you for your leadership in this area.
Lisa Sharon Harper: Thank you, Evan. Appreciate you and appreciate your audience. Thank you.
Evan Rosa: For the Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture at Yale Divinity School. This episode featured Lisa Sharon Harper. Production assistance by Annie Trowbridge and Luke Stringer. I'm Evan Rosa, and I edit and produce the show. Special thanks to Lisa Sharon Harper and Katie Zimmerman at freedomroad.us. For more information, visit us online at faith.yale.edu.
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