From “Fortune: How Race Broke My Family and the World–and How to Repair It All” by Lisa Sharon Harper
The 2016 election and its aftermath revealed a great chasm under our feet in the US. Not since the Civil War had our nation been so aware that its unity teetered on a political cliff. According to an April 2017 Washington Post report, there was no greater indicator of the way people voted in 2016 than their attitudes on race.
My family’s story illuminates how the political construct of race worked to protect the agency of European Americans, especially men, while removing agency from women and men of color who God created to help steward the world. That is the heart of the break – the denial of dignity and the removal of agency to benefit the self. Thus the process of repair matters as much as the intent and its result. The process itself must restore equal capacity to exercise agency to all who have suffered subjugation.
Critical to the process of repair is truth-telling. Truth-telling begins the process of re-membering. In the Christian tradition, truth-telling is confession. Lies and half-truths manipulate power dynamics and maintain one group’s control over the other. There can be no repair of relationship between the oppressed and oppression’s beneficiaries without the truth being told.