Editor's Note: This article will appear in the February 2022 issue of Sojourners and is adapted from Fortune: How Race Broke My Family and the World—And How to Repair It All (Brazos Press, a division of Baker's Publishing Group, Feb. 2022, used by permission).
ONE MONTH AFTER thousands of white nationalist men and women stormed the U.S. Capitol while attempting a coup d’état under Trump flags—resulting in the deaths of five people and assaults on 140 police officers—former President Trump’s second impeachment trial began. In the opening arguments, House impeachment managers rolled the tape, illuminating the truth of the horrors of Jan. 6, 2021.
The evidence presented for impeaching Trump was overwhelming, though many leading GOP members turned their eyes, busied themselves, and refused to reckon with reality. House Democrats voted unanimously for impeachment, and 10 Republicans joined them, making it the most bipartisan vote of its kind in U.S. history. While 57 senators found Trump guilty of “incitement of insurrection,” Trump was acquitted—even though the majority of senators found him guilty of leading a coup against the United States.
That vote revealed a fundamental malformation in our national governance. It is not new. It has been with us from the beginning—from the days when my ninth-great-grandmother, Fortune, was sentenced to indentured service, even though the Maryland race law that she was born under had been successfully challenged. The law changed after she was born, yet a judge—an arbiter of what is supposed to be true and just in our nation—bent the truth of the law to sentence her to generations of powerlessness, exploitation, and rape that she (and we) should not have had to endure.
From the beginning, our nation has bent, twisted, and buried truth in service to European, then white, supremacy. It has hidden its addiction to human hierarchy—the supremacy of white maleness and pure power. White male addiction to pure power crushed the opportunities for my ancestors Willa and Lizzie and Henry and Reinaldo and Austin to flourish. They were forced to contort themselves into the small boxes set for them. By law, Willa and Lizzie could only be housemaids or field hands in South Carolina. They were likely assaulted by men in the houses where they served, according to the family story, and the souls of successive generations were gashed by both structural and interpersonal white male lust for power.
Over four years of the Trump administration, the world witnessed GOP senators—the vast majority Southern and white—run rehearsed plays for power: They projected their own sin onto their perceived opponents; they narrowed their lenses to a pinpoint in a wide panorama of sin; and rather than judging based on merit, they claimed foul on the other side—based on technicalities. In the end, these political tactics suppressed legislators’ consciences.
Historian Keisha N. Blain said that the failure to convict Trump “reveals that violence and white supremacy will continue to shape American politics—as they have since the nation’s founding.”
Truth and consequences
WHEN I WAS a child, I loved the television game show Truth or Consequences. Every week contestants were challenged to answer questions truthfully. If their answer was incorrect, they would have to accept the consequences.
As an evangelical I was taught to value truth and the authority of scripture. I was taught there are ultimate consequences for all who do not abide by the truth. I was taught Jesus is the truth itself. But the heritage of white evangelicalism in the U.S. stretches back through Jim Crow segregation to antebellum and colonial slavery to “praying towns” and the Pequot Massacre. All of these regimes required fascist, authoritarian leadership—leadership that always unites racism, nationalism, hard patriarchy, and lies. People of African descent in the U.S. understand fascism intimately. In Rev. King’s last book, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? he wrote, “The segregationist goal is the total reversal of all reforms, with reestablishment of naked oppression and, if need be, a native form of fascism.”
African Americans were stunned but not baffled on Jan. 6 when we, along with the rest of the world, witnessed the noose erected by Trump supporters in the crowd outside the Capitol, the Confederate flag moving through the halls of Congress, and the lynch mob searching for Nancy Pelosi—the Catholic woman, third in line to the presidency, who defied and helped dethrone their symbol of white male power.
The 2020 presidential election and Trump’s second impeachment acquittal were revelations. They revealed the extent to which our nation is rejecting both truth and consequences.
The apostle Paul lists lying as one of a handful of sins worthy of hell. Lies break and block peace from entering the world. They sow confusion and obstruct the reign of God, which is characterized by shalom. At the heart of shalom is truth. Truth-telling and integrity are basic requirements for healthy relationships. Without truth, trust is broken. Without trust, relationships are broken—individual, communal, and systemic relationships.
Our narrative gap
IN DANIELLE SERED'S book Until We Reckon: Violence, Mass Incarceration, and a Road to Repair, she writes, “Acts of individual and structural harm are meaningfully different, but the key elements of accountability—acknowledging responsibility for one’s actions, acknowledging the impact of one’s actions on others, expressing genuine remorse, taking actions to repair the harm to the degree possible, and no longer committing similar harm—apply to both.”
She issues this challenge: “Just as we ask people who cause interpersonal violence to reckon with their actions, so should we as a society call on ourselves to reckon, too. Until we do, no different future will be possible.”
Perhaps the highest point of American consciousness during the Trump administration came the day its members ordered National Guard troops to shoot projectiles into a peacefully protesting crowd assembled outside the White House to clear space for Trump to walk across the street and stand in front of a church he did not attend to hold a Bible that wasn’t his own for a photo op. In that moment, Trump showed the world what American fascism looks like.
We saw who we are and realized we can choose the nation we will be. There is only one condition: We must reckon with the nation we have been—all of it. This requires truth. We must search for the truth. We must listen to the truth. We must tell the truth.
There is a narrative gap in our nation. Wide is the distance between the stories we tell about ourselves and the actual truth of how we got here and who we are. The gap is the distance between “Make America Great Again” and Martin Luther King Jr.’s “dream” of the beloved community.
If one’s story of America is grounded in the myth of Manifest Destiny and John Winthrop’s “city upon a hill,” then one’s vision of the future erases, justifies, and spins the sin and oppression that made white American prosperity possible—stolen land, free labor, rape to breed more free labor, and continued exploitation of non-whites to protect one’s destiny on the hill.
But if your story of America is shaped by the dream of the beloved community, then your vision of the future struggles forward toward a common peace and common justice that our nation has never seen. Our narratives shape our politics—our conversations and decisions about how the polis (the people) should live together.
Narrative shapes worldview.
Truth-seeking as spiritual practice
SHRINKING THE NARRATIVE gap is the first step of transitional justice—the process of transforming a society steeped in oppression into a just democracy. To do this, we must seek the truth, listen to the truth, and tell the truth.
Truth-seeking is a spiritual practice. It requires one to admit they do not already possess the whole truth. They have need. There are things they don’t know—things that matter. Truth-seeking requires humility. Humility sees the image of God in the other, the inherent dignity of the other, the mind of the other, the heart of the other—and it respects the will of the other. The practice of humility is the first act of repair. For it was the absence of humility that broke the relationship between people of European descent and the colonized world to begin with. It was the assumption that all who are not like the self are not fully human, not called by God to exercise agency, not capable of stewarding the world. Humility is an act of repentance. Practicing humility heals the European soul.
Truth-listening begins the process of peeling back the death grip of spin and false narratives. Truth-listening leans in. It centers the narratives that rise from the margins and recognizes the expertise of those most affected by oppression. Drawing from humility, truth-listening steps back and invites the other forward. It recognizes the other’s divine call to help steward the guiding story and lay foundations for the guiding vision.
Truth-telling fans the flames of human agency, giving democracy breath and citizens in a democracy the ability to govern themselves toward just peace. It fills the narrative gap with perspective and details usually erased. Truth-telling moves us from the realm of ideas and grounds the transformative process in the reality of what happened. No justice is possible until we reckon with the truth of what happened.
Truth-seeking, truth-listening, and truth-telling are critical to the process of re-membering public memory—reuniting public memory that has been disjointed and dismembered by spin and justification.
The Bible compiles narratives of the oppressed to establish a common public memory. From its first page to its last, more than 40 authors from a serially colonized and enslaved people attempt to establish common public memory in a context that breeds fragmentation. While they could have cordoned off the storytelling and story-listening within their own community, the biblical writers often invite immigrants and adopted members to share their common memory as an act of confession of truth that leads to communion.
Excavating our own stories
A KEY STRATEGY of white supremacy is to dismember, warp, and erase the memories of peoples of European descent. People deemed “white” in the United States have forgotten who they really are. They have forgotten their own histories of oppression and degradation in Europe. They have forgotten why and how they came to this land.
God charges the Hebrews again and again to remember that they were once enslaved in Egypt. This is the source of their humility—this is their grounding memory. People of European descent in the U.S. lack such humility because they lack such memory.
They have come to believe they are actually white, but whiteness is a phantom. It is not real. It is constructed by governments and entrenched by common lived experience in relationship to public policy and the cultural mores that grow around them. Whiteness has no common struggle, no common people, no common story.
Rather, it floats like a figment, elusive and yet claimed at the same time. Myths and lies are its foundation and beams. And all truth that threatens the constitution of the house called “whiteness” is eradicated in service to pure power ... and the promise of it.
People of European descent have work to do. They must dismantle the myths of their identity and reckon with their actual origin stories. There is no more powerful way to do this than through the process of uncovering family history.
Family stories uncover the things that happened—our untold origin stories that root us in actual time and place and peoples. They have the power to tell us who we really are and how we really got here. They have the power to show us the moment of the break—the moment we were broken and the moment we broke others. We cannot repair the collective until we know when and how we broke it.
My process of re-membering my family story has been pure revelation. Repair requires truth. Truth does not bow to packaged simplicity. Family stories have the power to subvert fabricated hierarchies of human belonging and ground us again in truth.
On Jan. 6, white nationalists followed Donald Trump’s call to march to the Capitol building to stop the process of Congress recognizing states’ certified votes. The culture war became actual war—not a spontaneous act, but an organized attack on American democracy that was months in the making. They stormed the Capitol building. They hunted for congressional leaders, saying they wanted to kill them. They ran the Confederate flag through those near-sacred halls. True to King’s words, white nationalists attempted to kill democracy because it demanded equality. But they lost.
Twenty days before he died, Martin Luther King Jr. ended his speech at Grosse Pointe (Mich.) High School with a clarion call for the truth to be told: “We shall overcome because Carlyle is right. ‘No lie can live forever.’ We shall overcome because William Cullen Bryant is right. ‘Truth crushed to earth will rise again.’”
There can be no repair of relationship between the oppressed and oppression’s beneficiaries without the truth being told. Repair requires repentance. Repentance requires reparation. Reparation is the process of repairing what has been broken through the oppression and subjugation of human dignity. This is how to remember people and people groups with their own divine call and capacity to steward the world.
Lisa Sharon Harper, a former Sojourners columnist, is the founder and president of Freedom Road and author of Fortune and The Very Good Gospel. You can follow her work at lisasharonharper.com.
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