Fortune with Lisa Sharon Harper
We’re talking to Lisa Sharon Harper about her new book, Fortune: How Race Broke My Family and the World - and How to Repair It All, which comes out today. The book is about Lisa's journey to trace her ancestry, recover the beauty of her heritage, expose the brokenness that race has wrought in America, and cast a vision for a collective repair.
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Episode Resources
Transcript
Lisa Sharon Harper [00:00:00] And not only that, but do we want a society built on retribution and domination and violence? No, we can't get to the beloved community through violence. So how do we then have a restorative justice community? How do we embark on the project of transformative, transformational justice that transforms our relationships and transforms our systems and structures?
Sarah [00:00:33] This is Sarah Stewart Holland.
Beth [00:00:34] And this is Beth Silvers.
Sarah [00:00:36] Thank you for joining us for Pantsuit Politics.
Beth [00:00:51] Hello, and thank you so much for joining us for a new episode of Pantsuit Politics. We are thrilled today to share a conversation that Sarah had with Lisa Sharon Harper, you've heard on the show before. Lisa's new book, Fortune: How Race Broke My Family and the World, and How to Repair It All, comes out today. The book is about Lisa's journey to trace her ancestry, recover the beauty of her heritage, expose the brokenness that race has wrought in America, and cast a vision for a collective repair. We hope you enjoy this conversation as much as we did. If it speaks to you, you obviously should start with buying Lisa's book. She's also doing a campaign throughout the month of February called Black Fortune Month, where you can read the book and community, do virtual events and get involved in advocacy for H.R. 40.
[00:01:37] If you follow the link in our show notes for the Fortune website, you'll get details on all of that. Before we jump in, we want to remind everyone that on February 22nd, Sarah and I will spend some time with our Pantsuit Politics members. Members are people who support making this show. They are the reason we're able to make the show either on Patreon or Apple Podcasts subscriptions. The connection information for Apple Podcast subscribers will come through email, so please make sure that Alise has your email by following a link in the notes today. If you haven't started supporting the show, but it's something that's been on your mind, this is a great introduction to that community. So, again, February 22nd, we would love for you to join us there. And without further ado, here is Sarah's conversation with Lisa Sharon Harper.
Sarah [00:02:30] All right. This is Sharon Harper, welcome back to Pantsuit Politics.
Lisa Sharon Harper [00:02:33] Thank you so much, Sarah. I've been waiting.
Sarah [00:02:34] We need to get you a title. Yes, you come on. We love you. You're one of our -- listen, few reoccurring guests. We don't have a lot of reoccurring guests here at Pantsuit Politics, but you are one of them because we love you so much.
Lisa Sharon Harper [00:02:47] Wow. I feel the love and I definitely feel privileged. Thank you.
Sarah [00:02:51] And your new book is out, and we're so excited to talk about it. I'm so excited because this book is about your own personal ancestry.
Lisa Sharon Harper [00:02:59] Yes.
Sarah [00:02:59] Ancestry is a passion of mine. Tell us about how you began your journey to uncover, unlock, tell the story of your family's history.
Lisa Sharon Harper [00:03:08] Well, I started literally 30 years ago on a phone call with my mom after watching Dances with Wolves.
Sarah [00:03:15] I love that part of the story. I was like, "Dancing with the wolves?" I didn't see that coming. I didn't see that coming.
Lisa Sharon Harper [00:03:19] A lot of people after watching that started going [Inaudible] American ancestry, that kind of thing. Well, I knew that my grandmother told me, "Yes, we have the American ancestry." So I started asking my mom, "Well, do we know anything more about them?" My grandmother had -- she had Alzheimer's at that point, so I couldn't ask her. And so we just -- within their very first family tree that I ever drew was on the back of a flier for the show that I was working on off-Broadway as an assistant stage manager in the lighting booth. Can you imagine me 21 year old, and that's exactly where I was. I was in the lighting booth sketching this because my mom told me the dates of where my grandfather lived and my great grandfather.
[00:03:59] So all I had was the dates and like the status, great grandfather, grandfather, that kind of thing. And then that grew into names. And then once I got my ancestry.com membership, which I know this is not supposed to be like -- they're not paying us to do this, but it's just what happened. We got my membership. And in the first night, I was able to trace all the way back to Jamestown. I was like, What? What? Like, oh my gosh. But, of course, that was like through marriage. It wasn't a direct like blood link, but it was through a marriage and I was like, wow. So I have been on this journey for 30 years. And my mom -- also my mom back in the 90s went to the archives and she was the first person to discover one of the two Henry Lawrence's that I talk about in chapter two of the book.
[00:04:44] And there's there's two possibilities for Henry Lawrence could be, but actually they could be blended. It could be the same person and we decide who and how they connect. There's also been a major advance in genealogy with DNA. So when ancestry.com made DNA research possible, I did it. And I'll tell you what, I wept. Because for people of African descent who have not been able to trace back beyond slavery, beyond the slave schedules which did not use names, it was an amazing thing to find where my people were from. So ancestry.com was my first glimpse into that, and it told me my people were from x y z nations. Benin, I think it said it regionally.
[00:05:30] And then as that science has improved, they've actually gotten more and more accurate. So now it's pretty clear Nigeria, Guinea, Mali and something like that. Senegal is in there as well in 23andme.com. It comes up in 23andme.com. But then I did africanancestry.com. So, yeah, I mean, I've been all up in this thing.
Sarah [00:05:49] Love it.
Lisa Sharon Harper [00:05:50] I mean, africanancestry.com traces your mother's, mother's, mother's, mother back a thousand years and says, this is who she was.
Sarah [00:05:55] Wow!
Lisa Sharon Harper [00:05:56] Yes. And not only what nation or like geographical location, but what ethnic group she was a part of.
Sarah [00:06:03] That's incredible.
Lisa Sharon Harper [00:06:04] Oh, I wept because, again, that's a story. My mother's, mother's, mother's, mother's, tracing back through Lia Ballard all the way to Africa was from Nigeria. And her people were both from northern Nigeria and southern Nigeria, the Hausa people and the Yoruba people. And so the Hausa people are all style and they're stylish. They're all known for their textiles, and they're also a horse culture. Which really makes sense of why when I first time ever got on a horse, I was like, "This feels oddly familiar." The guys were like, "You're doing really good." And I'd never ridden a horse before. And I was like, "I feel like I could be a little cowgirl up in here."
Sarah [00:06:50] Amazing.
Lisa Sharon Harper [00:06:50] My people were horse people back in Africa. And the Yoruba people have the Griots. They have the storytellers. And I really do believe that my family, we come from Gritos, we come from the story keepers. And that has been really my vocation. My calling has been in part to do justice in the world through storytelling. And in fact, that's at the heart of freedom road, right? Like what we do is we reconcile narrative, we reconcile the stories
Sarah [00:07:23] Well, and I think you do such a good and heartbreaking job of articulating why not knowing those specific stories -- even if you can trace the genealogy like the way that black and brown people's stories are raced through oppression, through slavery, that you just you do not know. I thought when I was reading your book about a really good friend of mine whose father was born in a Holocaust refugee camp and the female members of her family carry the breast cancer gene. And she said, but I don't know what that means because so many of them died in the Holocaust. I don't know what that means for my grandmothers and my great grandmother's and my great-aunts.
Lisa Sharon Harper [00:08:09] How did they manage it?
Sarah [00:08:10] What happened? How did that show up? Yes. Like she does not have that history. And I thought, man, are we just... And I think it's so true and also sort of reflector of a bigger reality, which is like modernity sort of erases the power of this in a lot of ways for people. And are really, really, heartbreaking way. So talk about that. Talk about what it means when you can't -- even if you can trace the genealogy and the gift that is, that the stories of these lives are missing.
Lisa Sharon Harper [00:08:42] Wow. Well, I think that that's part of what led me to to do such deep research on the context. It's because especially in the early narratives, all we really had were court records, tax records, things like that. And that's on the Fortune line. Fortune Magee Game was the first American on this soil born person in my family that we know of. She was born here in 1687. And, of course, that's not America then. It's a colony of the colony. The colony of Maryland. But it's what became known as America. But Fortune, you know, she was born into the time when race shaped the world, when race became a thing on in the colonies, and it became a modus operandi of establishing the supremacy of whiteness on this land and in particular, white men on this land.
Sarah [00:09:38] And created whiteness. I think when you say, like, when we create race, it just becomes in your brain like, well, we created blackness, but we also created whiteness.
Lisa Sharon Harper [00:09:47] That's exactly at the exact same time. One does not exist without the other in our political construct. And so when I was researching that, the thing that just really struck me is that, the stories, the in between the lines of the of the tax records and the court documents, the court records was still very much missing. So I had to fill in that in-between space with what was happening in the context, what was happening around her. And I get that. That's why I say actually pretty early in the book that first for the earlier chapters, chapters one, two and three where we're looking at the roots, it's going to be the case, you know, in several places where the context is the text. It's also the case because context actually does cause people to make decisions that shaped generations, fortunes and futures.
[00:10:46] When we look at the context of Fortune's world, where these race laws are being shaped for the very first time, we have to understand the reality that it's not only impacting her, those first race laws, because she was a mixed race person, so she fell squarely in the line of sight of those first race laws which were created in order to determine the status label tree of mixed race children. But it also impacted her daughter, Sarah, my six times great grandmother. It impacted her son, Humphrey, my five times great grandfather. It impacted because they then became indentured, not enslaved, because they could trace their ancestor, their mother, their mother's line back to a white woman. So that law that they passed in Maryland in 1664, in some ways saved us from being enslaved on that line of my family, but likewise with Leah.
[00:11:47] Leah's life is again, it's one of those ones that you don't have a lot filled in. The things we know gave us enough to be able to say this is how it could have been. This is how it might have been. And then we know the context. When I learned, I learned that in the research, five of Leah's children -- we were told she had 17 children, but only 12 appear on censuses at any point after the Civil War. But she was definitely old enough to have had at least five children, which is what the number would have been according to our family's story and before the Civil War. We'd have no record of those five. We have no way of knowing who they are. But now I know the context, the context that she lived in. She was enslaved in South Carolina. In South Carolina, her children could have been sold away, could have been gifted as a gift to to a family member.
[00:12:35] Or they could have died because only one in three children actually made it out alive past year one. One third of children enslaved in South Carolina survived past one year old. It blew my mind. Can you imagine the loss? Can you imagine the impact of that? So some of her story got filled in by the context. And that was a gift. It's a gift to know that context. And it's something that all of us need to begin to ask the question of our ancestors, not just looking for their names on census, but what was happening then that might have pushed them to make decisions that they need.
Sarah [00:13:20] Well, and I think the context is not just important individually, it's essential individually, but societally. I mean, I think your family's story, particularly that line of your mixed-race ancestors, illustrate in a way, you know, no sort of bare intellectual statement can that race was created. How do we know that whiteness and blackness were created? Because from the very beginning, there were people who did not exist inside that binary, did not exist inside that easy binary. And so the people in power were dealing with that immediately.
[00:13:55] Immediately they saw and understood that these were creations because they had to deal with the people who did not fit inside those definitions immediately. And I think like that is so instructive. And I love what -- like, individually, I think you're so right. I love where you talk about, you know, you go through all the lines of your family and then you say, "Okay, this is what this means. This context means for me individually. This is how it informed my family all the way down the line." And then you move into this other section of the book where you say, "Okay, so what does this mean for all of us?"
Lisa Sharon Harper [00:14:28] That's right.
Sarah [00:14:29] The part that really struck me because I think though the work you do, the research, the ancestry is so important and so beautiful. And when you said white people, people of European descent need to do this work too because if you are just leaning on an easy American narrative and identity based on a story, a harmful, oppressive story about America and not doing the research into your own family's history, then you are missing important context. You're missing context.
Lisa Sharon Harper [00:14:57] Yes. Because that's the thing, is that when people of European descent came to America, they had to actually renounce their families stories, their homelands, and they can no longer say that they were Finnish or Lithuanian or Dutch. They had to actually say I'm white in order to gain the privilege of whiteness, which is the privilege of rulership, which is what whiteness was set up to establish who could rule here. And so in order to rule, they had to renounce their actual story. Well, what that did is it left people of European descent in America, and in all colonized spaces, it left them in this netherworld. This is like you literally float unchored to anything except by a thread anchored or attached to this thing. This construct called whiteness. .
[00:15:48] I have had so many of my white friends say, "You know, I'm just a European, but I don't really don't know what I am." Or they used to come and say, "Well, what good is it going to do me if I find out that I'm Irish, how is that going to change anything today? Or if I find out that I'm Jewish, how is it going to change anything today?" I'll tell you, first of all, it's not guaranteed it'll change anything because you have to make that choice. But if you make that choice, what it could change is what you are anchored to in your identity. If you are anchored to your label of whiteness, then you are anchored to a very, very, thin thread that is attached to a ghost. You are anchored by a thin thread attached to a ghost because whiteness doesn't really exist. It's only the construct we made it.
[00:16:41] And if, as it will, if there comes a day where they're the majority of people in America are not white and rulership becomes no longer assumed as it has been for five hundred years, then your very identity then becomes challenged. But what happens? What happens if you move your identity from this apparition called whiteness to what really happened to your actual people, all of them, to what brough your people to this land, I guarantee you that your people most likely came here because of hardship in another space. Whether that hardship was poverty or oppression, it was one of the two. Usually, it was one of the two that brought you here. And if you can connect to that, if you can connect to the food that was made on that homeland and how that might have been passed down, maybe that's why you have Thanksgiving dinner a certain way. You might have green beans with the -- what do you call them, the little crinkly things on top?
Sarah [00:17:54] The green bean casserole, yes. Those are onions.
Lisa Sharon Harper [00:17:56] Yes, the green bean casserole, as opposed to how we do it in my house. We have greens. Like we have the collard greens. Like you have a very particular way of doing life that actually is passed down from your people. You have to learn that in order to be grounded in this world, not tied by a string to an apparition called whiteness. And I think once white people are grounded, grounded in their humanity and lushliness, then you can join the rest of the community of humanity, and join hands, we're having a party. Like, our music is awesome. Come join us. Your music is awesome too if you would reclaim it. Your food is amazing to if you would reclaim it. Join us. Wonder Bread is not from God now.
Sarah [00:18:44] No. Well, and I think it's so true. You know, in my 20s, I did a lot of very deep ancestry research. And I started it to feel more connected to my European ancestry, to see, like, where did my people come from? And the truth is, I had every reason to like fully dove into that because my people came from one place. In fact, our people have a lot of crossover because we're from Western Kentucky and it's got Ulster ancestry. All my people are Ulstern. All of them. My 23andme results are so boring. It's not even French, no German, no Italian. Scottish, Irish, British period. That's it. That's where my like...
Lisa Sharon Harper [00:19:24] Oh, that's not boring at all.
Sarah [00:19:25] No, that's true.
Lisa Sharon Harper [00:19:26] Your people are among the earliest people on this land to settle.
Sarah [00:19:29] Exactly, exactly. Everybody came through North Carolina or Virginia. You know, I think my eighth great grandfather fought in the Revolutionary War. I have his pension records where he fought, who he fought with. And so I tell people, like, I actually came out of that experience and I'll get a little teary feeling more American and not American in this like 'we are the best.'
Lisa Sharon Harper [00:19:50] No, no, no, no.
Sarah [00:19:51] We are the most powerful. We do everything right. But American in that this place offered refuge. It offered refuge. And it continues to offer refuge to so many people. People all over the world who were defined very ethnically, not that there's anything wrong with that, but like America as a place that is not an ethnicity, but It has as served as a refuge to so many, including generations of my own family, it really connected something for me. And My heart breaks that people hold on to this, like you said, this thread of a ghost that is so empty when there is this beautiful story. It is not perfect. It is also a place of oppression without a doubt. I have slave owners in that ancestry as well. That was heartbreaking to discover. At least it's real. It's authentic. It's human.
Lisa Sharon Harper [00:20:48] It's grounded.
Sarah [00:20:49] It's grounded. Exactly. Exactly.
Lisa Sharon Harper [00:20:53] Yeah. It's rooted. I think the the thing that one of the things we have to do is, we have to become better and really, really, sharp in our truth telling. You know, so we have to tell the truth about who we are. And I love that you just did that. You just told the truth about who you are. And the truth is, yeah, you came from Ulster-Scots. I know that. I know the history because that's also part of my history with Fortune. Fortune's mother was an Ulster-Scots woman. I went actually to Belfast and talked with a genealogist there about the Ulster-Scots and tried to trace back who was Madeleine Magee, because that's who everybody on ancestry.com traces Fortune's mother.
[00:21:58] And not just anscesty.com, court records from Maryland at the time says Madeleine Magee was her mother. And Madeleine Magee was married to George Magee, and they were Ulster-Scots. Well, I now know that history. Ulster-Scots people were being oppressed by the English, forcing them to go to Ireland to man plantations on behalf of the English, right? So they were there for a long time during that plantation period in Ireland. So we think the Irish-British conflict going back to like 1960s or 70s.
Sarah [00:22:36] No.
Lisa Sharon Harper [00:22:36] Maybe even not even the 20th century. No. The Ulster-Scots battle was in the turn of the 17th century, right? Turn of the 17th century. So George Magee and Madeleine Magee came over in order to escape what they would have characterized as oppression. But actually, it wasn't oppression. The Irish were saying Get off our land. Thousands of people were dying. Thousands of Ulster-Scots people were dying. So George and Madeleine said, "We're out of here." Where'd they go? They went to Maryland. They went to Maryland. And Maryland's about right across the river from Virginia girl. So right there the colony began, I think, just a few years after and like 22 years after Virginia's colony was established.
[00:23:21] And what we see from from that story is we actually I see the movement of Ulster-Scots through the Magee family. They moved west and south. So I know when you say your people are from western Kentucky, I go, "Oh my God, I know where they're actually from." They came before that. They were in Virginia and Maryland -- into Maryland as well, likely. And so and then they either went to Kentucky or they went south into Georgia and Mississippi and Alabama all the way to Texas. When they got down there, they changed their names from Magee to McGee in order to blend in with the Irish because they didn't want to be found out.
Sarah [00:23:59] Yeah. Well, and I think too it's like you said, it's not just like food and music, but it's those stories. You get context for these stories. This distrust of authority which runs real deep. I remember reading an ancestry book too that talked a lot about how a lot of that particular, like, the Scott-Ulster's intermarried with Cherokees, who also had a very strong distrust of authority. And so you get this doubling down the Appalachian, no outsiders, stay away, not welcome. And you start to like, again, instead of just chasing ghosts, you start to see, oh, this is where... And that's the first step of any sort of truth. That awareness. That not to say a story is good or bad or otherwise, but you just say like, "Oh, well, here's where I came from."
Lisa Sharon Harper [00:24:52] Right. This is why we are where we are right now. I love that you just said that about the Ulster-Scots because I actually think that that's part of something we have to understand is that they were oppressing because they were oppressed. And they ran. But the thing is -
Sarah [00:25:09] If that isn't the story of humanity.
Lisa Sharon Harper [00:25:12] Hello. Right? But then they ran. They ran to America, and they did two things. They did two things. They went up into the hills of Appalachia and they separated themselves from everybody. Or they went down into the deep south and they became the primary plantation owners.
Sarah [00:25:26] So that's their own oligarchy they'd learn from the English.
Lisa Sharon Harper [00:25:29] Yes!
Sarah [00:25:30] Yeah. Yeah.
Lisa Sharon Harper [00:25:32] So it's not inherent. Here's the thing, it's not inherent to white people that you oppress. It's just there's a repetition of the story through the generations because that story has never been faced and never been fully repented of. And I think once it's faced and repented of, then we have a chance at that beloved community.
Sarah [00:25:53] And I think I love this part. You know, you walk through this kind of three steps. You talk about the reckoning and the truth telling. You talk about the repentance and the reparation. And you spend a lot of time in South Africa and you talk about the process there, which is a process I'm endlessly fascinated with. It's particularly, I think, relevant right now and I think everyone is sort of revisiting and thinking about it with the death of Desmond Tutu, who was really just the moral center. I read a really great book called Country of My Skull about this process. I understood Desmond Tutu and why he was important, but like just how he held the center of that whole process in such a profound moral and ethical way. Again, the truth of that process is that it was also not perfect.
Lisa Sharon Harper [00:26:43] Oh God, no. No, it wasn't.
Sarah [00:26:44] Or complete. Or like in South Africa is some paradise of reparations or equality.
Lisa Sharon Harper [00:26:51] They didn't. Actually, they had three major points. Three major goals of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The first was that there be determined who did what. So the truth needs to be told. Then to determine who would get amnesty. In other words, the forgiveness part. And then how would we repair give reparation for what was taken? They did the first two, but they never did the last. And they never did reparation. And so because they never did reparation, South Africa today is just as economically divided as it was then. It's now just de facto segregation as opposed to dejure which is what have in [Inaudible].
Sarah [00:27:33] Which we are familiar with in the United States as well.
Lisa Sharon Harper [00:27:36] Very much, right? So when I look at South Africa's story, one of the things that's most important to understand there is that, they went through a major truth telling initiative where they got the actual truth of what happened. They really did. And that allowed for some healing to happen. But they also included the question of amnesty and that is specifically, I think, guided by their faith. So as people of faith, as black people, people of African descent of faith, one of the things that blew my mind when I really thought about it, is that forgiveness is something that is offered in South Africa not because just because we're Christian and we have to, but for the sake.
[00:28:21] And Archbishop Desmond Tutu says it explicitly in his book No Future Without Forgiveness, there are things that can never be repaired. There are things that are simply gone. There are things that cannot be restored. And for those things, for the sake of the oppressed, we must release the oppressor from their debt to us because it will not ever come. So if we spend our whole lives demanding that which cannot be restored, then we are the ones who rot inside and who die without our needs being met. But if there is a God, and there is, if there is a just God, if there is a God who owns cattle on a thousand hills, then we can release the ones who took so much from us that which they cannot repay and we then can turn to God and say, "Okay, God, now it's time for you to ante up."
[00:29:26] And I needed to be very clear. I am not saying that we should not have reparations. I spent a whole chapter on the need for it and then how it should happen. But what I am saying is that there are still things even after reparation, after the process of repair, people who died, who will not be able to be brought back to life, land that was lost and communities that were broken up that will never come back together again, for which we must we must release, release, our oppressor from that debt that they owe us because it cannot be repaid. It can only be redeemed by God.
Sarah [00:30:09] Yeah. I thought that part was so powerful. You know, we are recording this on January 1st. So as I was like preparing for this interview and finishing your book, I was also preparing for January 6th. And you do this really beautiful job of specifically talking about, like, we have criminal culpability, but then we also have political guilt.
Lisa Sharon Harper [00:30:31] Yes, that's right.
Sarah [00:30:32] Like, laying out these different levels of guilt, I thought that was so powerful. Political guilt, moral guilt, metaphysical guilt just from like being present.
Lisa Sharon Harper [00:30:40] Oh, thank you. Yeah.
Sarah [00:30:40] And I thought with the political guilt in particular, I think you do a good job of like we have -- and I think that's what we're in the process of doing with January 6th. We have to delineate the two. We have to talk about the criminal guilt, people who actually struck an officer. And also, those same people also hold political guilt participate in this political environment that got us all here. And what do we do with that? Because there is no retributive punishment that's going to fix that. Like, that's just not available to us, so we have to look somewhere else for that.
Lisa Sharon Harper [00:31:18] And not only that, but do we want just to perpetuate a retributive society built on retribution and domination and violence? No, we can't get to the beloved community through violence. So how do we then have a restorative justice community? How do we embark on the project of transformative transformational justice that transforms our relationships and transforms our systems and structures?
Sarah [00:31:49] And I think you do a beautiful job of not just answering that, but showing us that this process that feel so individual of providing context to your own family's history is not anything bad. When we move forward with truth telling in our own individual families, that impacts everyone.
Lisa Sharon Harper [00:32:13] Everybody.
Sarah [00:32:14] Everyone that matters because the story is both individual and collective. And you cannot affect one without the other. And that truth telling as it informs that redemption of the beloved community is essential. It's essential. I think what you've shown here is essential.
Lisa Sharon Harper [00:32:39] Wow. Thank you so much. I appreciate that. And I feel like in the conversations that I've been having in recent days about Fortune from people who have been reading it, I feel like my hunches are being confirmed. People are saying, "Yes, this is real and we need to really stand back and take a look at this." And I do think that as as we begin to understand the impact of policies and structures on the course of individual families lives, as well as on the course of millions of our lives and Fortunes, then we will have the opportunity then to do some real deep interrogation of the assumptions about how we should be living together. You know, we have lived for 500 years now, more than 500 years on land that had at its base, at its foundations, the legal foundations of this land, the assumption of rulership of people of European descent.
[00:33:41] But we're coming into a time where people of European descent are going to be in the minority of people who are in America. Already in our kindergartens and nurseries, that is the case. They're already in the minority. And give it time, and the assumption won't be there that people of European descent will be the ones leading. Well, so if that's coming, then it's really, truly necessary then for people of European descent to face the assumptions of privilege, the assumptions of status, the assumptions of nobility, the assumptions of goodness, the assumptions of truth telling the assumptions of might, the assumptions of divine right that have established the supremacy of whiteness on American soil.
[00:34:31] Because it's not until you do that, really, that you'll be able to let go of that construct called whiteness and join hands with the rest of the human family that is down here holding hands, having a party and struggling together. But you won't have to be the one we struggle against. You could struggle with us because you understand that you have a story too. You have a people too. You have a people group and a culture. You are not white. German-American, Irish-American, Dutch-American. You are Swedish-American. You are Lithuanian. You were Jewish-American. You are are Italian-American. You are British-American. And then you can join hands and become human again, not needing to control everyone and everything.
Sarah [00:35:31] Well, and I think that that's what's so hard. Is people feel like they're having something taken from them and it's so hard to articulate. No, you're being invited to something.
Lisa Sharon Harper [00:35:40] Yes. Yes, that's it.
Sarah [00:35:41] You're being invited to something. It is not less an American to show all these beautiful things that are before the hyphen. Like, it doesn't take anything from that. It's more beautiful.
Lisa Sharon Harper [00:35:55] That is Central American. That what it means to be American. That hyphen. That hyphen is American.
Sarah [00:36:04] Because it's connective. How beautiful that it puts those two pieces together, and not just those two contained in your identity, but the universe of identity present in this country, that almost every other place on the globe is joined in that beautiful little hyphen to America.
Lisa Sharon Harper [00:36:23] That's right.
Sarah [00:36:23] And I just look back and I think you write really well about not just the election of President Obama, but the election of Trump. But I think particularly with President Obama because who was better at articulating that than him?
Lisa Sharon Harper [00:36:36] Yeah, that's so true.
Sarah [00:36:37] And that's why he was so inspiring and also so threatening. Because if people bought his vision, what was left of the old vision that's so motivating, that's so fearing? And so you see that battle, I think, between those that only something's being taken from you versus now you're being invited to something that's been here the whole time. It's been here the whole time.
Lisa Sharon Harper [00:37:00] Yes. You're being invited to be simply human and yet to be fully human. You're being invited into the the family, the human family, and a community of humans trying to figure out how to live together. But as simply a human being, you are invited into deeper ties, listening, negotiation conversation, understanding so that when we legislate towards that shared future of flourishing, we are making sure that we all flourish. Not just some, not just the noble class that became the white folks in America.
Sarah [00:38:00] When you allow that complexity, when you allow the real truth of the story, you allow the reality that both the oppressor and the oppressed have been an essential part of every good thing that has happened in America. What I mean by that is like, you articulate that so well with your family stories. I think about, you know, it's not just you take this mantle of the reality of slavery or the reality of America's history, and it's all bad, right? What I mean is, it's all a part. It's all a piece that black people were brought to this shore in just inhumane, despicable ways and that their contribution from the second their feet hit the soil is indisputable. Indisputable. Like they were never just one thing while they were present here, right?
Lisa Sharon Harper [00:38:59] That's really true. I mean, it's actually a profound thought that you're bringing out. I'm intrigued that you found this in the book, right? Because I think it is there, but it's not something that's chiseled out so well. But I think that there's something that Ruby sales when she read the book -- when Ruby sales read the book for her endorsement, she really took it seriously. And one of the things that she said was that it's a normal story to read about an African-American family, that it had enslaved people and to and to just focus on the subjugation. But something that is brought out in your family story, which I didn't even realize until she named it, because I was just writing the story, right?
[00:39:40] But she named it. She said, "What we see in your story is we see the strategies of resilience, the strategies of survival, the strategies of healing, the the strategies. Like the ways that somehow from Fortune forward, our family found ways to make sure that the family was taken care of and the community was taken care of. And we found ways to dance it out when it was too much for us. You know, like the Bomba in Chapter five in the Caribbean, we found ways to push and to join in with the larger community that was pushing when my mom joined the Civil Rights Movement and SNICK in the 60s. I am part of that legacy and it makes sense now. Oh my gosh, that's why I'm part of the the push for the beloved community now and this current generation.
[00:40:36] Why? Because black families were not only subjugated. Like always mourning. And always... No. We experienced the full weight of the wrath of race. And yet came out with the faith that moved the mountain called America to let go of slavery through abolition and the Civil War. That was our faith that did that. We came out having sung our way. We found song to be a source of power under the weight of that immense oppression. So yes, it is not all doom and gloom, and it's also resilience and contributions.
Sarah [00:41:27] Contributions. Yes, like a vision. And I think you write about the Whitney Plantation and they're institutions in their role in truth telling. And I think about when you step foot, you notice immediately that they always say enslaved people. Never, never do they use the word slaves. Enslaved people because that's not the entirety of their humanity. And I think, again, people of European descent., the same is true for oppressors. I think you write really well about Thomas Jefferson. And I remember one time in an interview with the historian, I can never remember her name, who really broke -- like she is credited with the Sally Hemings story. And someone asked her, "How could this be? How could someone who's writing every person is great or every man is created equal be in this situation?".
[00:42:12] And she's like, "He was just obsessed with democracy. He was just obsessed with it -- single handedly obsessed with it." And it's like, again, that's the complexity of humanity. That is what's true of everyone. Like, it's never one thing. Like, it's never one thing. There's always that complexity that that connection that we are human and that we are never one thing in America because it is such a representation of that complex humanity is never one thing. But release that. There's so much freedom, there's so much beauty when you release that one thread, that one ghost that you have staked everything on and are invited to this complexity that all of us exist within.
Lisa Sharon Harper [00:42:55] The fleshliness of humanity.
Sarah [00:42:56] Yes.
Lisa Sharon Harper [00:42:57] We are allowed to be imperfect because God doesn't expect us to be perfect. God expects us to love and love is messy. Love is human. Perfection is not human. Perfection is God. Love, that comes from God and that's what we're called to do as humans. And it is hard because we are humans, right? But that's the core.
Sarah [00:43:21] So messy. Like, democracy is the messiest.
Lisa Sharon Harper [00:43:26] And democracy when truly worked out as a true democracy, one person, one vote democracy that is love in public because that is the recognition. That's the recognition of the divine image of God and the call of every person who is a citizen in that realm to exercise stewardship of that realm. And when we can get to that, that's the beloved community. I mean, I think that America as a project has roots in absolute evil and has roots in an amazing idea that came in fallible containers called European men who were hell bent on maintaining that power for themselves.
[00:44:17] And what we see over the course of America's history is we see the struggle, the actual struggle between the ideal, the idea of democracy and the struggle to maintain supremacy of white men. That's the struggle. That's the struggle. But I believe that we're coming to a place a time where it's possible for people of European descent to reclaim their actual identity, not their white identity, but their actual European rootedness and their American rootedness and their human rootedness, and join in with the rest of the community of creation and the rest of the human family to determine together how we live together in the world.
Sarah [00:45:04] That love in public I love that so much. And I think that your book is such an act of stewardship just like you were articulating. Thank you so much for writing it and sharing your family's story and calling us all to this beloved community. Thank you so much.
Lisa Sharon Harper [00:45:19] Thank you, Sarah.
Beth [00:45:25] I know I got a lot out of that discussion, I hope that you did too. Thank you to both Sarah and Lisa for the conversation. Thank you for joining us today. On Friday, we'll be back in your ears talking about sports. We're going to talk about the Olympics. We're going to talk about football. Hopefully, that will be a timely and interesting discussion. If you want to stay in touch with us on everything we're talking about and all the places that we talk besides your podcast feed, our newsletter is the best way to do that. You can go over to pantsuitpoliticsshow.com, give us your email address. We promise we will only show up in your inbox one day a week, and we work really hard to make sure that when we show up, we have something interesting to share with you. So pantsuitpoliticsshow.com to sign up for our newsletter. We'll see you here on Friday. Until then, have the best week available to you.
[00:46:17] Pantsuit Politics is produced by Studio D Podcast Production. Alise Napp is our managing director.
Sarah [00:46:23] Maggie Penton is our community engagement manager. Dante Lima is the composer and performer of our theme music.
Beth [00:46:28] Our show is listener-supported. Special thanks to our executive producers.
Executive Producers (Read their own names) [00:46:33] Martha Bronitsky, Ali Edwards, Janice Elliot, Sarah Greenup, Julie Haller, Helen Handley, Tiffany Hassler, Emily Holladay, Katie Johnson, Katrina Zugenalis Kasling, Barry Kaufman, Molly Korhrs.
[00:46:50] The Kriebs. Laurie LaDow, Lilly McClure, Jared Minson, Emily Neesley, The Pentons, Tawni Peterson, Tracy Puthoff, Sarah Ralph, Jeremy Sequoia, Katie Stigers, Karin True, Onica Ulveling. Nick and Alysa Vilelli, Amy Whited,
Beth [00:47:08] Jeff Davis, Melinda Johnston, Ashley Thompson, Michelle Wood, Joshua Allen, Morgan McHugh, Nichole Berklas, Paula Brimmer and Tim Miller.