Ep. 43: Inventing Whiteness: How Race Broke My Family & The World w/ Lisa Sharon Harper
Show Notes
Episode Summary
Throughout this country’s history, the hallmarks of American democracy – opportunity, freedom, and prosperity – have been largely reserved for white people through the intentional exclusion and oppression of people of color. America’s original sin is white supremacy, born and bred into the first laws of our land and fully endorsed by the church. Am I right Southern Baptist Convention? Yesterday’s segregationists are today’s Christian Nationalists. But what is “whiteness?”
If you are deconstructing your faith, odds are you are going to have to untangle yourself from white privilege and white supremacy, two hallmarks of American evangelicalism. In this intensely personal episode, Lisa Sharon Harper shares the story of her family and their battle to escape chattel slavery and what it means to her to be a descendant of slaves. She also offers practical ways you can join the work for restoration and racial equality.
Bio
From Ferguson to New York, and from Germany and South Africa to Australia and Brazil, 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.
Quotables
“At every single juncture, American laws benefitted white men. Not white women. White men.”
“The choice that they made was one of domination. And I think it is because the scriptures have been interpreted in a hermeneutic of domination since Constantine. That’s how you get John Calvin’s Geneva supporting the slave trade.”
“You look at my DNA and you see a map of the slave trade. 36% of my DNA was forced into my family line.”
“Hatred does nothing to the person being hated. Hatred rots one’s own soul. I don’t hate because I love myself.”
“Love is more powerful than power.”
“What it will take is for people of European descent is to lay down their arms against God, against the image of God on earth.”
“This way is the way of domination, of blood and tears and rape.”
“So the question really stands: Do people of European descent who say they follow Jesus, brown, colonized, serially enslaved Jesus. Do they really love God? Because if they really love God they will lay down their arms against the image of God.”
“Literally, within the first 400 years of Europeans being on this land, we went from 100 million indigenous peoples to 100,000.”
“About 12 million Africans were brought into the New World…Why? For the benefit of white men.
“January 6th happened because we see coming, in less than one generation (23 years), we see coming the day when the majority of people in the United States of America will not be white.”
“The same people who were at the forefront of the Jim Crow movement is now at the forefront of the Republican Party.”
Timestamps and References
[04:54]—Lisa shares the story of her seventh-great grandmother Fortune and how she became a slave
[06:05]—The first race laws in America and why they were created
[15:12]—Lisa’s emotional response to learning her family’s story of slavery
[17:07]—How and why, as a black women who is the descendant of slaves, she does not hate
[20:46]—The invention of “Whiteness”
[22:58]—The lie of American exceptionalism
[28:00]—The backlash against CRT and the reasons for January 6th
[30:30]—How white evangelicals have benefited from and participated in the rise in white nationalism
[35:07]—What Lisa sees when she looks at the future of American public life as it relates to race, white supremacy, and Christian Nationalism
[38:19]—Practical ways you can resist white nationalism today
[43:15]—How to Decolonize the Bible
[44:33]—Why reparations are a “biblical” concept
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Credits
This episode was produced by The Sophia Society and written by Kelly Lamb and Gary Alan Taylor. Music is by Faith in Foxholes.
No amount of faith is going to protect you from deep pain. I used to view faith as this thing that is going to protect me from deep suffering, or make meaning out of it, and I don’t think there always is meaning. Sometimes, it just hurts.