Lisa Sharon Harper — Can Everything Wrong Really Be Made Right?
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In the wake of the devastating and senseless murder of George Floyd, our cities are on fire, people of color are experiencing tremendous amounts of pain, and we all have a million questions. Lisa Sharon Harper joins me on the podcast today to discuss all things George Floyd, riots, slavery, the police, and whether to not everything will be made right one day.
Lisa is a speaker, author, theologian, playwright, and a fantastic human. You can read her incredible and extensive bio here.
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This show was created by me, produced by Chad Snavely, and the music is by our friend Propaganda. We’re part of the Matter Media family. We’re grateful for their partnership.
Have an amazing week, friends! Love y’all!
TRANSCRIPT OF THE CONVERSATION
Transcribed by Tara Little
NICK: Hello friends. Welcome to the Let’s Give a Damn podcast. I’m your host, Nick Laparra, and this, this is a very sad day in America. These last few days have been incredibly heavy. This is not going to be a fun episode, friends. If you were looking for fun, I’m happy to recommend other podcast episodes or other podcasts entirely, because this episode is not going to be fun. I hope you’ll stick around because we have a lot to learn from our guest this week. The topic matter is obviously heavy and huge, and we all need to look at it and feel it and embrace it. But I just wanted to give you a fair warning that this is not going to be fun. I know we all have heavy hearts right now.
We’ve lost a brother and fellow human, George Floyd. Murdered in broad daylight by Derek Chauvin, while three or four other cops looked on and did nothing. This one hits home harder than others for a few reasons. He begged. George Floyd begged Derek to get off. For several minutes. He told him he couldn’t breathe. He said, “My stomach hurts. My neck hurts. Everything hurts. I’m about to die,” over and over again. And that motherfucker of a cop didn’t move. He just stayed there. The video, friends, probably most of you have watched it. The video is indescribably hard to watch. Because that didn’t have to happen. There was no resisting arrest. There were only pleas for help. And power hungry cops killed him.
The second reason why it’s hard to watch and why this one is so hard to experience: that’s my old neighborhood. Not just my old city, my old neighborhood. My wife and I used to live two minutes from there. That Target that was looted and burned, that was our Target. That was our grocery store. That was our police precinct that was destroyed. I have stood exactly where George Floyd died. You know the rest of the story because you’ve been watching it on TV. They fired the four officers later that day, but it took them a couple of days to even arrest and charge Derek Chauvin with third degree murder and manslaughter. The other three still haven’t been charged or arrested.
Many cities in our country are literally on fire. Our president is hiding in a bunker. He is tweeting out inflammatory statements and has not tried to console the country even once. Instead he is stoking and provoking violence and fear and going after the media. And I’ve seen some videos of police kneeling with protestors, hugging protestors, helping protestors, speaking up on behalf of the protestors, expressing their disgust for the actions of Derek Chauvin. But for each one of those videos, I’ve seen 50 videos of police hurting peaceful protestors, inciting violence, and so much more.
I’m tired y’all. And I know that my Black brothers and sisters are one hundred, one thousand times more tired than I am. They’ve been putting up with this shit for hundreds of years. They’ve been hearing white people say, “We will do better, we’re trying.” This and that and the other for hundreds of years. And virtually nothing has happened.
We see these videos every month, but the reality is that police are abusing Black people every hour of every day. It’s not the very month or every month or every other week videos that we see. Those aren’t it. The Ahmaud Arberys aren’t it. The Breonna Taylors are not it. The George Floyds are not it. They are happening every single hour of every single day, they are just not getting caught on camera.
So before I introduce my guest today—that’s coming, thanks for hanging in there—a couple bits of advice for my white friends out there: This is a time for you to listen. This is a time for you to learn. You don’t have to have a hot take on what’s going on. You don’t have to figure out why there is looting and rioting. You get to listen, learn, speak up, call out your friends and family that are downplaying what’s happening here. We can’t experience monumental change in our country if we don’t give a damn about this—all of us, every single one of us no exceptions. No exceptions.
So many friends that I’ve talked to this week that aren’t understanding what’s going on here, they’re looking at this one incident in an isolated way. They are seeing one murder and then one following set of events. But that’s not what’s happening here, friends. Go find a can of soda or a can of beer. Right? It’s carbonated, it’s under pressure. Start pushing on it. Push on it really, really, really hard. When that thing finally explodes, you don’t get to tell the soda where to go. You don’t get to tell the beer where to go. You guys have seen those stupid Tik Tok videos, right? Where they put the rubber bands around the pumpkin? And they get to 500 rubber bands, 600 rubber bands, you can see it compressing, you can see the tension growing, and they don’t know when it’s going to explode, and then finally rubber band 724, the watermelon just explodes everywhere. That is a version of what’s going on here. This is not an isolated incident.
So listen, learn, speak up, call other people out. In love as much as you can, but be bold. This is the time for boldness. Okay. I love y’all. Thanks for hanging in there.
My guest today is Lisa Sharon Harper. As things escalated over the last few days, I rearranged my podcast release schedule, because I knew we needed to talk about this. And as I thought of guests, as I made a short list, Lisa was at the top of it. I’ve admired her work for years. Lisa is the author of several books, including The Very Good Gospel: How Everything Wrong Can Be Made Right. We finish our conversation today talking about that idea and how that’s possible when we look at everything that’s happening right now. The Huffington Post named her one the 50 Powerful Women Religious Leaders to Celebrate on International Women’s Day. She’s a speaker; she is the founder of Freedom Road, her company. She is a playwright. She is a theologian, and she’s just a rad lady. I really enjoyed my chat with her. Fair warning: there’s no doubt in my mind that some of the direct things she shares will stop you dead in your tracks today, make you think deeply, will make you wrestle through whether or not you even believe that, and it may even make you figure out if you’re even gonna finish the conversation with us. There’s some hard stuff coming. But stick with us, folks, we all have lots to learn from Lisa Sharon Harper. She’s a trusted source. I’ve done enough talking, let’s get started, shall we?
NICK: Welcome, Lisa Sharon Harper, to the Let’s Give a Damn podcast. Thanks so much for joining me on such short notice.
LISA: It’s really really great to be with you, Nick. Thank you so much for inviting me. I’m honored to be here.
NICK: Oh well geez the honor is all ours, and unfortunately, I mean, you were on my list of people to have on eventually, and I always have tons of guests in the queue and people I’m going after, and it’s hard scheduling it all. But I reached out to you a couple days ago for a very unfortunate and specific reason. Because once again our country is in the middle of some incredible turmoil, and we’ll get into that in the next hour. There’s so much going on, but I really wanted, I moved around some podcasts cause I was like, “This has to be a conversation piece next week. We need to figure out....”
Basically, you know, I described before we even got on the show how every few episodes I kinda have an expert on, someone that can teach us, kinda point us in the right direction. That’s how I see this conversation going, and you’re definitely a damn giver in your own right, and you’ve done some amazing things, and we’ll talk about those. But I’m really hoping, Lisa, that you can just help us today with...there’s a lot of white people listening to this show, there are a lot of people that probably, I think, taking the smart route, and they’re not voicing their opinion too much about the looting and the rioting or otherwise, and they’re simply supporting and standing in solidarity. But there are a lot, probably, that have opinions. I’ve spent the last couple days, I’ll be honest, on social media with friends of mine that are cops, with white people that haven’t said a damn thing, really, about George Floyd’s death—maybe a quick passing thing—but they’re super concerned about the looting and the rioting and how terrible that is and why aren’t I speaking up about it? So there’s so much going on right now. Emotions are flying high, and I can’t imagine what people of color in this country, specifically Black people, are going through right now. I just can’t imagine it. I too, I’m Guatemalan, so I’m not white, but I’m kind of a pasty Guatemalan, so I kind of fit in with everybody else right now.
But before we get into the hard stuff, for people that don’t know who you are, can you give us sort of an introduction to all things Lisa Sharon Harper? Kinda give—where are you from? Who are the people, places, and things that made you who you are today? Let’s start there, and we’ll go from there. I know that’s, like, a super small question.
LISA: That could literally bet its own broadcast right there!
NICK: Give us the short version. Then we’ll do another one.
LISA: Okay, well, I mean part of it, honestly, is because whenever anybody asks me that, it’s very, very difficult for me to say who I am without referencing my ancestors. Because I literally know, according to science, I actually am them. Like, they’re literally in me. I’m a very big genealogy person, and my next book is actually literally going through ten generations of my family, and discovering, in order to mine how they’ve actually influenced who I am—and not even that, but how they’ve impacted the world and by the world.
So, my story in America—I don’t know my pre-America story—my American story began in 1662. And 1667 when the first immigrants that I know of came to work—one came, the other was brought—to America. One came from Ireland but they were actually Scotch-Irish, and the other one came from Senegal, and they actually met here in Maryland and fell in love, and had an affair because the Irish woman was married. And then their baby ended up being, I guess, my ten-times great grandmother. And, you know, I think that there are what Bobby Clinton, author of The Making of a Leader and Focused Lives and several other books on leadership, he says that God gives everyone sovereign foundations. God gives everyone foundations upon which they stand at birth. So in other words, you didn’t earn it, you didn’t work for it, this was literally just the world you’re born into. And those sovereign foundations are in some ways a marker of who you will be, because this is the ground you were raised on.
So, for me, the ground I was raised on, or sprung from, I guess is a better way to put it, is from a family that has deep, deep investment in this country. Like, literally built the country and have literally been here since the first Africans, were among, like within the first fifty years of Africans being in America. We were here. And then, at least according to our oral tradition in our family, we have connection to the indigenous people of southeast North America, and then also according to DNA, which you know you don’t go talking a lot about that, but it’s true, indigenous roots in South America. And I actually know where that comes from. My grandmother on my dad’s side. So you know my mom says she looks at our DNA map, our DNA little pie chart thing, and she goes “You know what this is Lisa?” I go, “What?” “It’s a map of the slave trade.” That’s what I am. I am my body. I’m a map of the slave trade, that’s what I am.
It’s hard for me to go into a room full of people who are really privileged and kind of used to wining and dining and being comfortable around everybody. I go into that room, and I talk to the first person, and I sense immediately the discomfort, because in my body I carry America's history. Like, I am, myself, a revelation of America’s history. And so is my family. If you go back on every side, there are different strains of that history that reveal the breaks, reveal the sin, reveal the ways that we have—I was gonna say we’ve failed each other, but there was never an intent to do good to each other. There was no failing each other because there was never an intent to do good. The intent was to dominate, the intent was to exploit, the intent was to eradicate in various parts of my family. But we survived. And that we survived in my body and in the body of the current generations, that now walk and lead and dream and love among us. So in short, that’s who I am. But I’m a writer, and author, a playwright, an author, a poet, and an activist. I’m a businesswoman and also—what didn’t I mention? A consultant.
NICK: That’s exciting.
LISA: No but it’s very true. I was a playwright before I was—oh theologian. Isn’t that funny? Public theologian is what I missed. So before I ever got into theology or anything like that I was a playwright. I got my master’s in playwriting at USC in LA, and my play An’ Push Da Wind Down, not “the” but “da” d-a, An’ Push Da Wind Down is the story of—I should say this is my first major play—and it was the story of Nellie, an escaped, enslaved girl, who runs with her mama from the plantation in South Carolina, but her mama actually ends up dying in the woods as they’re being chased, and she ends up—she gives her a roll of napkins and says, “Take these, and don’t let nobody read them but you.” And they end up being her mama’s words to her. But she can’t read them because she’s enslaved, so it’s illegal for her to learn to read, so she can’t read them. So she ends up running, and she runs and turns west by accident, and ends up running into a Cherokee village in Georgia, where she’s taken in and taught to read, and she finally does read those napkins, and the last moment of the play is the first moment of the Cherokee Trail of Tears. And it really was inspired by, not based on, but inspired by my family’s oral history of having had connection to the Cherokee Trail of Tears. Someone in our family, I think I know who it is, but someone in our family on my grandfather’s side—I think it was my grandfather’s grandmother—was Cherokee. And/or Chickasaw. And escaped the Trail or escaped going onto the Trail and hid up in the mountains in Kentucky, and they show up on the census for the very first time in 1850. That makes sense because the Trail happened in 1838, so they would have been hiding and not done the census in 1840. But then they were hiding under the assumed identity as white because nobody wanted to be taken to the end of the Trail. There’s a whole story with that.
NICK: Is there any way that I could ever read that?
LISA: Oh yeah! Absolutely. You can get that now. It’s called An’ Push Da Wind Down, and it’s published by Samuel French play publishers.
NICK: I’m gonna go find it. That sounds—there’s so much more I wanna—I wanna read the whole entire thing. But you mention the Cherokee Trail of Tears, and right at this table that I'm at yesterday, Charles Robinson from The Red Road was sitting with me. We were smoking cigars and we recorded a podcast conversation.
LISA: While smoking?
NICK: Oh yeah! I love cigars, and he does too, so he and two of his kids and sat in my shed, and we recorded the conversations. But yesterday, you know, we had to reschedule, because you had just an incredibly busy day. But I was supposed to go right from that conversation to that one, and he was like, “Don’t forget to tell Lisa I said hi.” So anyway. You mentioned that, and I almost forgot until you said that. I’ll tell him you said hi back, or everybody will know you said hi back!
LISA: Hi, Charles!
NICK: I don’t think I’ve ever had anyone, when I’ve asked them, “Tell me the who, what, when, where, and why of your life,” went back 350 years.
LISA: Yeah that’s right.
NICK: But we should do that.
LISA: Yeah we should.
NICK: We should be doing that. I actually think, and I don’t know if maybe we’ll just go here right now, but I actually think that’s part of the problem with what’s going on right now. The very myopic kind of . . . so right now people are saying . . . they’re looking at this one instance, especially white people, they’re looking at this one instance. They’re saying, “One Black man was murdered in broad daylight for allegedly forging a check, something that no one should ever die for, and then subsequently all this looting happened.” Right? And we can see the videos. They’re busing people in. Like, the St. Paul mayor said yesterday they didn’t arrest one person that wasn’t from out of state. There’s so much crazy shit going on there, so we won’t even go into who’s looting and why and all that stuff. But that’s not the problem. They’re looking at this one thing and saying, “Look at Target and Cub Foods and AutoZone and all these small businesses like ‘blah blah blah,’ like, this is no okay.” The reason you think it’s not okay is, first of all, you’ve never experienced anything that a Black person has experienced every single day. But you are looking at this as one thing: one instance on one day in one city in one America in one country.
LISA: And that’s willful. Let me just say: that’s willful. It’s not like they don’t know. And we just a week before that had two—two—the week before. This is not something happening in isolation. This is literally a cluster of events that have happened. And another whole event happened the exact same day in New York City. So you cannot—to do that is, I believe, honestly, to do that is sin. It is literally sin. Because what you’re doing is you’re lying. You’re lying to yourself, and you’re lying to whoever you’re talking to, because you’re trying to paint a world. You’re using the structure of your argument, which is willfully myopic, willfully focused in super, super tight, so that you can’t, through the structure of your argument—it actually intentionally leaves out the rest of the context. It decontextualizes the events of the day. And that—you’re right—it is the problem.
And I'll tell you what: it’s also the problem with our faith. So the evangelical, the white evangelical faith, has decontextualized brown Jesus. Physically brown, politically Black Jesus. Literally brown, politically Black Jesus. Lifted him right out of the context, put him in a purple robe, gave him milky white skin and blond hair and blue eyes and then made him think like a western European. Homeboy didn’t do that! Homeboy was killed by western Europeans. That’s who killed him. So I literally believe it is a mode of operation that is violent. It has impacted our world violently. It has impacted the faith violently. And, honestly, it has done violence to the white soul. Because by limiting, by lifting out, by decontextualizing, not only the gospel, not only what happened to Mr. George Floyd, but by decontextualizing their very bodies, their very selves, they have done violence to themselves.
Because what they did when they came here, when they came here back in 1492, and then when the pilgrims were here, and the puritans, and they created in the 1660s in Virginia and then the 1670s and 80s, and my own ancestors who were here were direct, direct recipients of those first race laws that created the construct of whiteness. When they created that construct, what they did was they severed their own rootedness to land and people. And they made themselves white. So they uprooted themselves. They are people without roots. When you are a people without roots you will be violent. Because you will violently try to maintain what sense of self you have, and the only sense of self given to anybody who claims whiteness is what whiteness offers. And the only thing that whiteness was created to offer was the belief that you as a “white person” were created by God with the divine right and unique capacity to exercise dominion in the world. In other words, to lead everybody else. As a person of European descent, you, if as a white person, when you let go of your European heritage, when you let go of the fact that you’re Irish or Italian or German or Scandinavian or Lithuanian or Russian, when you let go of that, and you say, “No I’m white,” which is exactly what they did throughout the whole 18th and 19th century. People fought their way all the way to the Supreme Court literally to prove that they were white legally.
Now why would you do that? Why does it matter? It matters because the laws, as they were set up, only saw people who were declared white as the ones created to exercise dominion on this land. So if you don’t wanna be a slave, then you need to be white. And if you’re in between, you’re nobody. And you’re a perpetual non-citizen. So you have to be white in order to be human in that construct. So when they created that construct, they created, they basically created a funnel into identify-less people. People who have no roots and who will fight to the death in order to keep the one thing they have, which is the declaration that they were created to exercise dominion on this land. Unique. Uniquely created in that way. And it has permeated everything. So I really literally think that that has influenced everything. It uproots them from self; it uproots the scripture from the actual context of the Bible. Decontextualiztion is the project of whiteness.
NICK: I would venture to say that the last five minutes, that monologue you just gave, perfectly plays into what you were saying before and what I was getting at, which is that most people probably haven’t heard that. That was a simple bit of context, that was five minutes of truth based on real historical facts and how things have progressed through the years. And you’re so right. It is willful ignorance for people to not know about this. Because the books are there. The lectures are there. The podcasts are there.
LISA: The news reports are there.
NICK: Everything is there, but it’s—and I’ve said it very plainly to some people in the last few days—if I’m gonna be very honest, it’s laziness on your part because they’ve asked, like, “What can I do?” and all that. It’s just laziness. Because you have the time to watch your Netflix shows. You have the time to nap whenever you want, whatever. Just name your leisurely activities, or just name all the things you do to choose to do, choose to make time for. And then when these things come up, we get excited, we get angry, we get outraged for a couple days, and then when it’s over, then we’re back to normal. Even though things like George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor, Christian Cooper in New York in the park, like that could have almost been horrible. I mean when I watched that video, I was so seething with anger. The way that she morphed her voice to make it sound like he was actively attacking her—that was evil. I don’t wish evil on her, but I am so fine with all the backlash she’s getting right now, because you put a man’s life in danger because you didn’t want to put your damn dog on a leash. That was it, that was it. You didn’t like that someone, maybe namely a Black guy, but at least you didn’t like someone else telling you to put your dog on a leash in a place where they want your dog on a leash. There’s birds flying around, they don’t want dogs eating birds, and it’s just safer or everyone. So anyone until the next thing happens, white people just keep going up and down. We’re angry, and then it’s back.
Instead of when there’s, in the middle of these, when there isn’t the newest one in the news, the newest one on Facebook, take the time. Go audit a class at your local college on Black history or whatever, like, there’s so many things we can do and yet we don't and so that’s kind of what I’ve . . . it really is just laziness to get outraged right now about all this looting and to not understand what is happening and why it’s happening and why we don’t even have to—it’s right now I don’t have—they keep—why don’t you talk about it? Is what they keep saying over and over again. I’m not gonna talk about it because I don’t understand it. I don’t understand the full context of what’s going on. I did this yesterday for my buddy, we were having beers, and we were talking about some of the things that were happening and I picked up the can of beer, the one that was closed. I said I, and I don’t even know if this is a good analogy, but this is what I was thinking in the moment, “I take this beer can, there’s pressure inside, it’s carbonated, I can push on it and push on it and push on it, and it’s not breaking yet so I step on it, and then I’m gonna stomp on that at some point, and it’s gonna explode. And I, the one that put the pressure, the knee on the neck of this can of soda or this can of beer, I don't get to tell the beer where it goes when it explodes.”
LISA: You don’t get to be mad at the beer that it exploded. You put your freaking knee on our neck, and then you get mad that we fight back? Come on, man. Come on. You know in the words of our current democratic person who’s running for president, “Come on, man.” I just love how he does that. I think he was around Obama a little too long.
NICK: Yeah that was a learned phrase from his buddy Barack. How are you, like very genuinely, how are you feeling? These things keep happening, in fact, one of my friends said today, because I was describing the whole up and down thing white people do with the weeks in between the next thing, and she stopped me and said, “No, no, no stop. You’re talking about the ones that get filmed. Every hour of every day this is happening somewhere in the US; it just doesn’t get filmed.” So all that said: how are you feeling? How are you processing through all this? It can’t be easy.
LISA: Well, I mean, you know honestly this is—I think where I’m at, and I said this to, I was talking with Leroy Barber earlier this week and Shane Claiborne. We’re friends, we collaborate a lot.
NICK: I love Shane. Good friend.
LISA: Yay Shane! I was talking with them, and I said, you know, and they were in the same place, I said, “You know, I don't have any tears left.” I’m kinda done with the tears. I barely have any rage left. I’m not enraged. I mean, I'm in a cussing mood, because I think I’ve cussed more than I have in a while this last week, but it’s more, I feel, literally, utterly determined. Like utterly determined and take no shit.
NICK: Yeah.
LISA: Take none. Throw it right back at you if you throw it. Don’t you throw me no shit. You throw me some shit, you gone get some on your face. Because it’s clear to me what is, what is the shit and what is not. And I will let you know if you’re throwing shit. And so because we don’t have—I don't have—a second to waste on your shit. Not you, Nick!
NICK: Maybe I’ll give you some shit that you don’t wanna take; no I do get your point.
LISA: I don’t have a second to waste because people are dying. Because my people are dying. Because my dad, because my brother, because my brother-in-law, because both my brothers-in-law, because my nephew, any one of them, because my mom, because my sister, because I could be the next person. I could be the next Breonna Taylor. She wasn’t doing anything wrong, she was in her fricking bed. She was in her bed.
NICK: I think that’s the frustrating thing is that, you know I saw and posted a photo a little while ago of this older woman, 1965 Selma, Alabama, holding up a sign that said, “Stop police killings.” That was 55 years ago. Not a damn thing has changed, like, literally nothing; nothing has changed in 55 years. I’ve seen some people posting online, you know we’ve seen a lot of things posted online, but they posted something, and I didn’t really have a pushback for it, and they were like “Let’s abolish the police force and start over.”
LISA: Well that’s me. I said that.
NICK: I don’t know if I saw yours or not, but this is not working. And I have great friends that are police officers, and I've had lots of engagements with them, and they are having conversations within their team and to their sergeants and their captains and their chiefs saying, “Just so we’re clear, that was not okay. The dude needs to go away for murder, right?” I know there are good ones in there. I know it. I know it. I know a lot of them personally. The system as a whole needs to go.
LISA: Listen, what I said yesterday is what I’ll repeat here for your audience. That when you plant a tree, a fruit tree, and that tree bears fruit, it’s not enough to take the bad apples off the tree. Right? It’s not enough. You have to understand what kind of tree is this. Now I know I just mixed metaphors, but if you have to understand you’re getting this fruit, and if that fruit is consistently coming from this tree, it means the problem is not the fruit it’s the tree. It’s the tree. You’ve gotta ask, “What’s the seed? What is the seed of this tree? And what was the intent when it was planted?” Because the thing is it’s too consistent. It’s too consistent to be a bad apple. It’s too consistent to be not intentional. So when you go back, I'll share with you the history of the police department.
I mean when you go back to how the police happened, what’s the seed? The seed was slave patrols. That was the seed that planted the police in the United States of America. There were no police for hundreds of years here until slave patrols. And slave patrols weren’t even technically the police, they were slave patrols. They wore a star that is in the exact shape as the sheriff’s badge now, and it said “Slave Patrol.” And after the end of the Civil War, when the Civil War ended, that star got transformed into the sheriff's badge. Do you hear me? So what is the slave patrol? Slave patrol was basically a bunch of people who banded together after thousands—there were thousands of revolts by people who were enslaved throughout the south, thousands. Not only Denmark Vesey and the Cato Rebellion and other rebellions that happened in South Carolina and others, but literally thousands of revolts. Especially after the end of the Atlantic slave trade in 1808, when at that time it also coincided with the rise of king cotton in the south and the invention of the cotton gin, which did not cause the need for less enslaved people, but actually caused the need for more because they were producing more cotton, and so they needed more enslaved people to pick that cotton and to begin to pick it apart and all that.
So you start having breeding farms, let’s be real y’all. Throughout all of Virginia, Virginia became the main place where they had farms they literally created, plantations that existed to breed people. Sit in that for one second. And it wasn’t just Virginia, it was all of the states, but Virginia was the main provider of human beings that they had bred to the whole south. So when you have breeding farms that are breeding people to be sold into the deep south, and in that deep south they are then whooped silly if they try to escape, which every human being tries to escape a lack of freedom, you’re gonna have rebellions, and that’s what happened. You had thousands of rebellions, or at least a thousand rebellions, that happened across the whole south between 1808 and 1858-1860, when the Civil War started. So that’s why the slave patrols started, because they were afraid of Black people killing them in the middle of the night. Or leaving, stealing their “property” from them by escaping. So after the Civil War, when there are no more “slaves,” and it was, for nine years, it was actually okay. You know, we had the national guard down in the south, and they were keeping the peace, but then there was a big compromise that was made, the Harding Compromise, that was made in 1877-1878, and it basically, the democrats, the north said, “Okay, we will pull the troops out, actually it wasn’t democrats it was the republicans. “We will pull the troops out of the south, and you can deal with your race thing in your way, in exchange for you cooperating with us as in the union.” And they did that, and that’s when Jim Crow happened. That’s what started the flood of more than 4,000, some now estimate up to 5,000, a little beyond, 5,000 people dying within the next 90 years. Not even 90. I'm sorry I keep doing that, but from 1877-1950, so that’s like 80 years or something.
So you have this period where now with Jim Crow where the police, the slave patrol, the same people who were the slave patrols now are they have a badge on their chest in order to what? To keep those Black people in check. To make sure they work for us for near free. To work to make sure, and also to round them up off the streets and put them back into now new prisons, and those prisons, which did not exist before the Civil War but now exist, they exist in order to take advantage of the 13th amendment, which gives you the ability to enslave a person in the united states under one condition: that they are imprisoned. Oh, now we need to build prisons. And now we’re gonna lower the bar of criminality, we’re gonna sweep ’em up, we’re gonna put ’em on the plantations, and that’s the job of the sheriff. That’s the job of the slave patrol, I’m sorry that’s the job of the new police.
So now we have Jim Crow, and that goes all the way through the 60s, really all the way through, yeah, through the Civil Rights Act, when it’s ended. And now you have from there about a ten-year period where we were somewhat free trying to figure out what this freedom looks like, and then you get mass incarceration. Right? So now you have again, they lower the bar of criminality, this time focused on drugs. And the police are doing the same thing: they’re patrolling the streets, not to enforce the law, not to enforce the law. But to enforce white supremacy. To enforce white flourishing. Because they are not patrolling the white streets looking for law infractions. They’re not. They’re still not. Look what we have, we have, before our very eyes on the evening news, we are watching the president pardon traitors, people who sold out the entire United States to another freaking nation, and they’re walking free. Meanwhile, George is dead, because he forged a $20 check—maybe.
NICK: And meanwhile, our prisons are chock full of, our jails are full of, people that can’t post bail. Our prisons are full of young men who smoked weed, sold weed, did some, you know, whatever it is. Something that white people can do all the time and talk about it on TV, and talk . . .
LISA: And sell!
NICK: And sell. Like, how many actors and stuff get on night shows and talk about—and I have no opposition to weed, so I’m not saying that—but I’m just saying they can get on there and talk about how they smoke weed all the time, and yet our prisons are full of Black people because of that very thing. And yes, and then our president pardons, like you said, actual traitors, traitors of this country, friends of his, pals. You know, because of COVID and other things, we wanna keep them safe, you know they’re not safe in there, you know it’s horrible.
LISA: See that all comes from a fundamental belief in a hierarchy of human being. That’s where this comes from, and that’s where the construct that we call the police department comes from. It is the seed. The seed was to enforce that. So, whatever, I don’t care when that seed is planted, whether it's planted in the antebellum period, whether it’s planted in the Jim Crow period, whether it’s planted in the 1980s or 90s or 2020s, that seed is gonna bear the same fruit everywhere, every time, because that’s what it was created to do. And that is what it’s doing. And that is why our babies are running on the streets now lighting shit up. Because they’re saying, “No more.” So I actually did post at the beginning of this week, I think it was on Monday when we first saw the videotape of, I wanna call him King George, of Mr. George Floyd. When we first saw the videotape of his death, I just said, “You know, look. I have literally lived through too many riots. Too many uprisings.” I was there in the middle of LA ’92.
NICK: That’s what I was gonna ask, if you were there for that, because you said 13 years.
LISA: I was. I was there on the place, on the corner where the flashpoint the second day, at the point, at the time when it flashed. And I lived through the cleanup. I lived through the whole thing. And it had the same cycle, the same cycle as all the rest, except Ferguson. Ferguson was more. Ferguson was amazing in terms of the impact of the organizers. They changed the story, actually. But I was there in Ferguson, I was there for not a prolonged period of time, but I helped to organize people, and I experienced it for myself. And I was there in Baltimore, again, there just to help organize some people in the church to engage, right? But it’s the same fruit. It’s the same tree. And it’s the same response from white Christians, and I use that term Christian lightly, quite honestly. Because what it means to be Christian is to be a Jesus follower. And what I understand it means to be a Jesus follower is to be a follower of physically brown, politically Black Jesus. There’s only one Jesus. There’s not a thousand Jesuses. There’s one. And that one was physically brown and politically Black. And why does it matter? Somebody might be saying to themselves, “Why does that matter? She’s saying he’s brown.” It matters because of his context.
Because he was in his context. He was a part of a brown, colonized people, who at the time were being colonized by an explicitly white supremacist empire. Now hear me. That’s for real. Aristotle was a student of Plato. Plato is the first person in western philosophy that we begin to see, craft, this thing we call race. But for him race was not about the skin color. It was about the metal that people were made of. Some people were made of gold, others were made of silver, some were made of copper. Others tin, whatever metal they’re made of determines how they will serve the polis, how they will serve society. Well his student, Aristotle, ten years later, writes something called “On Interpretation” where he’s trying to figure out who is actually human. What does it mean to be human? And he’s talking about language. How people talk tells you how human they are. And so he has all these pontifications about how language shows you how human they are. And scholars, many scholars, now believe that what would have been in his head at the time, because it was somewhat common thought, was that to be fully human, according to Greco-Roman thought, was to be white, to be male, and to be able-bodied. So where does that put Jesus? He is male. He’s a carpenter, so he’s definitely able-bodied, but he’s not white. He’s not European. This area was connected to Africa and Asia. This area was understood to be a part of that region, and it also was there before the words “Africa” and “Asia” actually even existed. So they didn’t understand themselves that way. So when Joseph and Mary ran to escape Herod, and they needed a place to hide, they didn’t go north to Lithuania. They could have, but they didn’t go to Rome. They could have done that. They went to Egypt. Because that’s where they could blend in. You hear me?
NICK: It matters so much.
LISA: It matters!
NICK: Physically brown, politically Black Jesus matters a ton.
LISA: Yes. So when somebody tells me they’re a Christian, and, “Okay, are you following Jesus?” “Oh, yes, I follow Jesus.” “No. Are you following physically brown, politically Black Jesus?” Because those words, every word that he said, you have to read differently than if you think Jesus said any of those texts in Starbucks. He didn’t say any of them in Starbucks. Not as a worker or an owner or a latte-sipper. That wasn't Jesus. So context matters.
NICK: So what did, well, first of all sign me up for whenever we really push to abolish the police force and replace it with something more just and more pure. So I'm in, because I think we can’t keep going this way. Anybody that looks at it now and says, “Well, we’re making progress . . ..” Hell no, we're not. Fifty-five years ago and 400 years ago, it’s the same story over and over again. And we do know better. We know better. Coming full circle to our beginning conversation, like, to claim ignorance, and to claim that we’re just trying, and to claim that it’s a few bad apples, and to claim this and claim that, is just pure willful ignorance, and it’s lazy.
LISA: Can I add something? And this might get you in trouble with some of your base, but I don’t care.
NICK: Eh, go for it.
LISA: I mean, here's the thing: you can’t say you’re trying if you voted for Trump in 2016 or if you didn’t vote, you just can’t. You can’t. You can’t say you’re trying. You can’t say, “We’re getting better.” If you voted for Trump, you just can’t. Why can’t you? Because he’s a white nationalist. You can’t say things are gonna get better, or we’re trying to make things better racially, when you vote for a white nationalist. You just can’t. It’s literally not possible. It’s like saying that the air, that there’s lots and lots of oxygen in a room, saying there’s, claiming there’s oxygen in a room, you should be able to breathe, meanwhile you have something sucking the air—you set this up! You set up something to suck the oxygen out of the room, and you’re claiming to all the people who are choking in that room, “It’s getting better.”
NICK: Yeah. Yeah. It doesn’t make sense.
LISA: Don’t you know that this person that you voted into office is the same person who within months of becoming, literally within one month of becoming the president, directed his attorney general Jeff Sessions to basically dismantle the justice department, the civil rights department of the justice departments. The civil rights office of the justice department, which was set up after the Civil War to protect formerly enslaved people.
NICK: Not to mention within seven days of being in office, instituting a Muslim ban. I mean literally seven days. January 20 to January 27. I agree with you, if somebody comes to me today and says, “I really screwed up in 1026, I’m starting fresh, please teach me,” then I’m like I’m down. But if you’re still into that, I totally agree with that. If you’re still into what’s happening, and you think it’s, if you still think that that man actually loves Jesus, and if you think that he is the best person for not just Christians, but all Americans, that is some willful ignorance shit right there.
LISA: It is. I’m sorry I gotta break you one more time, because here’s the thing: their justification for voting for him is not that they think he’s a Christian. They don’t. They know he’s not a Christian. They’ve said that. They’ve said, in fact even Franklin Graham has said, “We know he’s not a Christian.” Their justification is that they think he’s Cyrus. They think he’s Cyrus. They think that he is supposed to be the horrible king that actually does benevolent good, right? Well, friends, I just want you to know in the span of biblical interpretation and as we interpret that text, nowhere, nowhere in the text does it say that God wants you to vote for Cyrus. God doesn’t—you have to own your vote. You have to own—your vote must come in line with the principles of the kingdom of God. And if your vote comes in line with the principles of the kingdom of God, and then God somehow brings Cyrus, well, okay, then it’s an act of God. But if your vote brings Cyrus, that’s not God. That’s you. That’s you. You own that. You can’t hyper-spiritualize that. Who are you to say that God told you to vote for a white nationalist? When would you ever see physically brown, politically Black Jesus vote for Caesar?
No. Jesus said, “Pray like this: our Father in heaven,” which was directly opposed, diametrically opposed, to the way that Caesar told people to call him “father” “Abba” “papa.” That’s what Caesar told his subject to call him. Jesus said, “No, no, no, no, no our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name.” Directly diametrically opposed to Caesar, who told his people, “I am the highest name. My name is the hallowed name.” “No,” Jesus said, “Father in heaven is the hallowed name. Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven, not Caesar’s kingdom. God’s kingdom. God’s will. Not Caesar’s will. Give us this day our daily bread.” Not Caesar’s daily bread that he would literally go through the streets of the city and had his centurions or other subjects throw bread into the crowds. That’s how he dealt with his subjects, because his centurions had already thrown salt all over the ground, so that it couldn’t grow anything in colonized areas. And they would be dependent on Caesar, so he threw bread to the masses to look like he was benevolent. No. Not Caesar’s bread, God’s bread from the ground. “Give us this day our daily bread as we plant the seed and put it in the ground that Caesar has salted.” Do you see? So brown Jesus would not vote for Trump.
NICK: I agree. I agree. Then there’s something, we’re gonna shift gears here in a second because I wanna kind of crescendo to a really helpful note, not that this has—this has been really helpful—but some things, some talks you've given, some ideas that you've put forth that will put a bow on what we’re talking about. Before we get there, it is so interesting, I mean, I’ve always seen people get very excited about their candidate. You know? If you think there’s somebody that should be in, I mean, there was tremendous amount of excitement in 2008 when Barack Obama, first Black, like that’s all, that makes total sense. But the fanatical nature, the over-the-top, MAGA red photo shopping Trump’s head on white Jesus’s body, on you know? Hercules’s body. The fanatical nature that he has been able to create and stir up, especially among white evangelicals, it baffles me. I’ve studied people for fifteen-twenty years in my work, and I am completely, I shouldn’t say completely at a loss because I have some inklings, but it is unprecedented. I think you’re right that they want this terrible but benevolent king. They look at, like that drug lord, what’s-his-face, the guy from the Narcos show, how did he keep people in line? He’d go by, into these towns, pat heads, give some hugs, hand over cash, give them food. They’re happy. Here’s this incredibly wealthy, like the world’s never seen before drug lord, that kept people at his behest, that kept people coming back for more. Whatever you say, whatever you want us to do, and Cyrus, Caesar, the whole thing makes total sense in this context where they want Trump as lord and savior. That’s what they want. They want him to save them from…
LISA: Save them from what? Say it.
NICK: The terrible liberals? I don’t know. Progress? I don’t know. What were you gonna say?
LISA: I think they want Trump to save them from a nation that is browning. That that nation, our nation, because I’ve seen it, I’ve been here now in D.C. for going on my ninth year, so next month will hit nine years. And in that time, the demographic projections for the United States of America have actually gotten slimmer, so they used to say 2055, then they said 2045, now demographers actually are looking at 2035 to be the year when the—there’s arguments right—what they’re basically saying is it’s already here. In our grade schools, that generation is here. Like in grade schools, the majority of children in grade schools are children of color. So it’s already here among us, so give it just twenty years, fifteen, not even twenty, fifteen years, and that’s who’s gonna be voting.
NICK: And they can’t stand the idea of that.
LISA: Now think about this for just one second, and I want all your listeners to think about this too, okay? Name a time. Name a time since the Roman era, when people who were white were not ruling.
NICK: I don’t know.
LISA: You can’t because it doesn’t exist. There are places that fought off European colonization, like Egypt actually at one point at the turn of the century, but in terms of colonization, right, going and taking over land and dominating, that has been the project the European project for at lest 2,000 years and actually probably 2,300 years, if you go back to the Roman and maybe the Greco-Roman era, right? So since that time that’s been the norm of people of European descent’s existence. But here’s the thing: it’s a sinful norm. It’s not the way we were created to live in this world. We were created by God with every last human being being made in the image of God and created with the call from God to exercise dominion in the world. It is sin that led European nations to believe in their own supremacy and to try to then dominate the earth. And they did it pretty successfully for a long time. And now within the United States of America, which is Rome, right, it is the current empire, and D.C. actually is our Rome, or New York, depending on who you’re talking to. We are now coming into an age where the center of empire in this age is now actually within fifteen years going to have the majority of voters be people of color. I think that, and it’s not even just me, there have been polls about this.
In fact PRRI did a poll last year with the Atlantic that is really revealing. I’ll share that, they did this poll, and it was one of the widest swaths of polling of any polling agency, I think 30,000 people that they polled. And they asked a lot of questions, but these two questions toward the end of it really stuck out to me. The first one was: do you long for the 50s? Do you have nostalgia for the 1950s? And they cut it across multiple cross sections and basically every single group, every single cross section, said “yes” except for people of color. People of color did not, right, but white, all the white people did. White democrats, white republicans, white Catholics, white protestant, white evangelicals, white everybody longed for the 50s, except for no people of color longed for the 50s. None of the majority longed for the 50s, which is really interesting in itself, right? Because the 50s are pre-Civil Rights Act. The 50s are Jim Crow. The 50s is when Emmitt Till was lynched.
So, but then the next one that they asked was: within 35 years we’re going to have a majority people of color nation, where the majority of people leading will probably be people of color. Do you think America will be better off or worse off when that happens? And across the board everybody except for one group said “better off.” all the people of color said we’re gonna be better off. But the white democrats also said we’re gonna be better off. The white Catholics said we’re gonna be better off. These are by small margins sometimes, but then others by large margins. The white historic protestants said we’re gonna be better off. Only two groups said—it was actually two groups. Said we’re gonna be worse off. One was white republicans said we’re gonna be worse off, but at an even larger margin, white evangelicals said we will be worse off. Maybe white evangelicals voted for Trump, not despite his white nationalism, but because of his white nationalism. That he is giving them what they want. It’s not that they just want Roe v. Wade; it’s not that they want, you know, gay people not to be able to marry or whatever. What they want is a white-ruled nation. And that fundamentally is what he promised. And that is fundamentally what he’s giving them. And that is fundamentally why the majority—70 percent—are still with him.
NICK: It’s a tragedy. It really is. It produces situations every day, like the video that was shared the other day of this lady in a park that approached a Puerto Rican family, who were just having lunch and playing music. That’s it. And she walked up, and she cussed at them, and she said, “This is America, we speak English here. Can you speak English? That’s not American music.” First of all, what the hell is even American music? That’s just such an ignorant, stupid thing to say, but she went off. Her son had to come over and pull her away, and she did not go easily. But in there, she peppered in, “Trump’s gonna come and get you.” Like, “Trump’s gonna come and get you.” She said, “I’m gonna call the cops,” and she said, “Trump’s coming for you.” And so that dude can stand in the White House all day and say, “I’m not a white nationalist, I don’t embolden them. You misread what I said.” But what these people, tens of millions of people all around the US are hearing is, “We can get our white nation back. We can get our 1950s back. We can go back to the good ol’ Andy Griffith, sit on the porch sipping sweet tea, nobody else that doesn’t look like us around. We can go back to that, if we just push hard enough.”
LISA: Right. And the thing is, the people who are trying to get back to that, to get back to the era of sipping mint juleps on the southern porch in a rocking chair, while a Black person fans you, goes back to the kitchen and makes your tea, those same people are the same ones who say that they’re followers of Jesus. That’s why I ask, “Which Jesus?” I ask, “What color is your Jesus? Is your Jesus indigenous, or is your Jesus an imperialist? Is your Jesus a settler, who settled somebody else’s land? A plantation owner? Is your Jesus an explorer, who goes off and explores other lands, and then brings the cross behind him in order to religiously colonize the people? And then the money to financially colonize the people? And then the government, and the military to militarily colonize? Is that your Jesus? Who’s your Jesus? Because, friend, there was really only one Jesus. What you say you’re following is an illusion of your own making. And what you think you’re going towards, which is this past that you can get back to, is an illusion. You are moving towards that. You’re moving towards that illusion, but that illusion is gonna drive you literally off a cliff.”
And you can see that most clearly, I think the clearest demonstration of that, manifestation of that right now, is the demonstrations about staying at home for COVID. Which of course that was a week ago. Now we have demonstrations of another kind on the street. All those demonstrations with all those white people out there without masks, all I could think was, “They’re trying to support their president not having a mask on.” All I could think was, “Y’all are gonna get COVID.” Like, “You are literally killing yourselves by being out here. You’re ensuring, by being out here, you are ensuring that we win in November.” So I mean in some ways, “Thank you,” but in other ways, that’s kinda the dumbest stuff I’ve ever seen in my entire life. You realize you are chasing an illusion? But they are so desperate, so desperate, and this gets back to the identity piece. They are so desperate to maintain the identity, to maintain the power of whiteness. Because it’s the only identity they have. Because they renounced their connection to their ethnic heritage when they got here in order to become white. So when all you have is an identity that is rooted in your ability to exercise dominion on this land, and that’s now being threatened by these “foreigners” or these “savage Black people,” then you have got to fight to the death to maintain your own sense of self. So it makes total sense to me.
NICK: Yeah. Yeah it does. Okay. Let’s head in this direction as we finish up here. If people go to your website right now, they will see a quote: “Everything wrong really can be made right.” And if they google your name on YouTube, for example, there are, you know, a lot of the topics for your talks are like “The Gospel and Shalom.” Shalom is kinda this all-encompassing peace. Staying peaceful despite circumstance, how everything wrong can be made right. We talked about some pretty intense things. Real things. Real shit that we have to wade through as Black people and white people, and we have to figure a lot of stuff out.
LISA: And Guatemalan.
NICK: And Guatemalan. Hell yeah. Everything wrong really can be made right? Talk to us about that.
LISA: It’s actually quite simple. It’s called repentance. It’s actually very biblical. It’s actually that simple. Because we are human, we have the capacity to exercise dominion, to exercise agency, to make decisions that impact the world. That’s literally at the heart of what it means to be human, is to have that capacity to exercise agency. So if we are able to make decisions, and we did, that crushed the image of God in some and protected it in others, or that exploited creation rather than served creation or protected it. If we can make those decisions, then we can make decisions in the opposite direction. We can decide to protect the earth. We can decide to cultivate, protect and serve the image of God in every corner of our communities and nation and world. It’s repentance. It’s very simple, actually. So it is possible, insomuch as we are able to repent. Insomuch as we repent. The Scripture is clear on this: “If my people, who are called by my name, would humble themselves, and come to me, confessing their sins, I will forgive their sins and heal their land.” The image that’s given to us in Psalm 85: “Lord, lord,” you know? “When are you going to come to our rescue? When are you going to give us shalom? When are you gonna give us peace?” and God says, “I will give you shalom, and this is what it’s gonna look like: it’s a declaration. It’s not a question. This will happen. Justice will shine down and truth will rise from the earth. Justice and peace will kiss.” There will be a time, I believe because I believe my Scripture; there will be a time when we repent. And that can happen now. It’s supposed to start now. It’s not supposed to be in some “ever after life.” Jesus taught us to pray, “Our Papa in heaven, hallowed be your name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done.” Where? “On earth.”
NICK: Yeah, I think we gloss over that too much, don’t we? Christians or not Christians, everybody knows the Lord’s Prayer, and we have all these grandiose ideas of what heaven is like, right? And it’s where there isn’t any more injustice, and where there is peace, and where there is inclusivity and love and all these things. And we’re told in that instruction on how to pray that we can have that here. And yet, so many of us don’t seem all that interested in figuring out how to get that done. We think, especially and unfortunately, so many evangelical Christians, they think, “To hell with the earth, because we’ve got this far-off place called heaven we’re going to.” And we totally forget that one of the most key parts of our instructions on how to pray is to pray that it comes here also.
LISA: Yes.
NICK: And that we’re supposed to work really hard to make that happen.
LISA: Yeah, and the thing is what you see of Jesus, brown Jesus, politically Black Jesus, is that at every turn, what he’s really doing is he’s subverting the hierarchies of human belonging that were established by multiple generations of enslavement. They were serially enslaved, the Hebrew people, by multiple different empires: Babylon, Assyria, the Romans, the Persians. They were multiply, serially enslaved, and so, when Jesus comes, he is freeing them, not only physically through healing, but he’s also freeing their minds to know that they can exercise agency in the world. I mean to the Samaritan woman, who as a woman she was somebody her own people prayed—the Pharisees would pray every morning, “Thank God I’m not a dog, a gentile, or a woman”—but by the end of her conversation with Jesus, she is utterly empowered. She exercises agency. She runs back to the very people she was trying to avoid, and she tells them what’s what about Jesus and then they all convert in a day. They all become followers of Jesus. “Convert” wasn’t really their term, but they started following Jesus. The way that Jesus went about Jesus’s work was to go to the margins, to the people who were crushed by the empire. Who were utterly vulnerable to the empire, and to say to them, “You have agency.” To actually make it possible for them to exercise agency. And then we see it work its way out in Acts.
I just did a Bible study through our Freedom Road Institute. We have a really awesome four-week webinar series that I just wrapped up. You can actually get it On Demand now, but we just wrapped it up, I think two Fridays ago, or sorry, last Monday. And we were studying Acts 2:1-13, which is basically the time when the Spirit comes. I had never seen this before, but do you realize that there is a very clear movement of power happening in that passage? That the power goes from the Roman Empire out to all the people who are colonized by the Roman Empire? That the tongues was not a heavenly language? It was them speaking each other’s languages? Languages that had been oppressed and suppressed by the Roman Empire, which only had Greek as its one universal language in the same way that we now use English? So that the speaking of many languages was actually a liberating of the tongue, which is the first thing that needs to be liberated among people who need to be told you can exercise agency? That’s happening. That’s the first thing that the Holy Spirit does. The first. This is what God is concerned about. This is what God came to do.
The way that I’ve come to now articulate The Gospel, what is the Good News, it is that the king of the kingdom of God has come to earth in order to confront the kingdoms of men that are hell bent on warring with God for supremacy and crushing the image of God in the process. So the work of Jesus on the cross was to absorb the violence of the empire, to absorb the violence of the colonizer as Black Jesus. And then to rise. And because he beat death, then of course he could beat every other power of domination that we have: gendered domination, domination of the earth, domination of the self through shame, domination across ethnic groups and racial groups. That is the power of the resurrection. And you use it work its way out through Acts, through all of Paul’s letters, even to Revelation, to the last chapter of Revelation, when you get that one tree that is—now the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is no longer there. It’s only the tree of life. And that tree of life, the leaves serve for the healing of the nations, which have dominated each other. So what is the Good News? The Good News is yes, hell yes, everything wrong can be made right, because we are human, because we have the ability to exercise agency over ourselves, our tongues, our actions, our institutions. We can repent. But insomuch as we decide not to, insomuch as we’re lazy or insomuch as we don’t trust God’s way to peace, we grab at it ourselves, well, then you will always have the poor among you.
NICK: So good. We’ll have to do a round two some time, because there’s so much more. I mean, I just feel deeply encouraged, deeply challenged. I know people listening, again, even if they don’t adhere to the Christian faith. Like the word and act of repentance isn’t exclusive to Christians. It means you are faced with a fork in the road or turning away from something that you know is no longer right, is evil, and you make the active choice, using your human agency, to turn away from it and go the other way. So that applies to everybody, regardless of who you are and what you do and what you believe. We should all be repenting, as we grow as Christians or non-Christians, as we grow as humans, as we grow in knowledge. Like people in this conversation will have things to repent of afterward. As you’ve been explaining and teaching and sharing differing things about the police force, about segregation, about slavery, about when your relatives came here, like all of that stuff. As they’re faced with things, there’ll be a lot to repent of, and to actively decide, “I’m gonna go the other way. I’m gonna start giving a damn more. I’m gonna learn. I’m gonna become a student, and I’m going to do things differently from here on out.” As we wrap up, I’ll put all this in the show notes, but where quickly can people find your stuff online? Where can they begin to follow who you are and what you do?
LISA: You can follow me at lisasharonhaper.com, that’s my personal website where you can find out more about my speaking or if I’m writing, I’ll post there a lot with my writing. You can follow me also at freedomroad.us, because freecomroad.us is my business, it’s actually a fee for service consulting group that also has an institute, so if you personally want to grow, we’ve actually built out and are building out this institute to offer opportunities for individuals to actually grow. And so there are webinars, there are growth communities that are a little less structured than webinars, and there are coaching cohorts, that are actually taking like handfuls of people on a journey through the course of a year or six months or that kind of a thing. And then you can also obviously find me on twitter, Facebook and Instagram. I love social media.
NICK: Lots of great conversations to have there. Lisa Sharon Harper, thanks so much for joining us today. This was so helpful. We’re rooting for you and praying with you for the work ahead, the tremendous work ahead. Thank you so much.
LISA: Thank you, Nick.