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FORTUNE How Race Broke My Family and the World—and How to Repair It All Lisa Sharon Harper Foreword by Otis Moss III Drawing on her lifelong journey to know her family’s history, leading Christian activist Lisa Sharon Harper recovers the beauty of her heritage, exposes the brokenness that race has wrought in America, and casts a vision for collective repair. Harper has spent three decades researching ten generations of her family history through DNA research, oral histories, interviews, and genealogy. Fortune, the name of Harper’s first nonindigenous ancestor born on American soil, bore the brunt of the nation’s first race, gender, and citizenship laws. As Harper traces her family’s story through succeeding generations, she shows how American ideas, customs, and laws robbed her ancestors—and the ancestors of so many others—of their humanity and flourishing. Fortune helps readers understand how America was built upon systems and structures in ways that blessed some and cursed others, allowing Americans of European descent to benefit from the colonization, genocide, enslavement, rape, and exploitation of people of color. As Harper lights a path through national and reli- gious history, she clarifies exactly how and when the world broke and shows the way to redemption for us all. The book culminates with a vision of truth telling, reparation, and forgiveness that leads to Beloved Community. It includes a foreword by Otis Moss III, illustrations, and a glossy eight-page black-and-white insert featuring photos of Harper’s family. LISA SHARON HARPER (MA, Columbia University; MFA, University of South- ern California) is the founder of Freedom Road, a consulting group dedicated to shrinking the narrative gap. A sought-after speaker, trainer, and consultant, she has written several books, including the critically acclaimed The Very Good Gospel: How Everything Wrong Can Be Made Right . Harper previously served as chief church engagement officer at Sojourners, where she led campaigns on immigration reform and racial justice.
FEBRUARY 2022 • 240 pp. • cloth • $24.99 • 9781587435270
FROM THE BOOK More than a decade of genealogical and DNA research has helped me, and all of us, make connections previously unfathom- able. The fleshed-out picture clarifies the profound costs of the political constructs of race and gender in the US and on my family and all those trapped in the talons of America’s hierarchies of human belonging. . . . Mine is the first generation in more than four hundred years with enough distance from slavery and Jim Crow to try to assess the damage—and to demand repair. In the shadow of the four hundredth year since American slavery imposed itself on African lives—as scholars, documentarians, policymakers, and artists clarify the shape-shifting systems of control and confinement crafted to secure white supremacy on American soil—we are compelled to ask one question, lest we find ourselves in the same controlled, confined, shackled space four hundred years from now: How do we repair what race broke in the world?
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