Fortune Quotes

“This is a prayer for Jubilee—that economic system instituted by God when God governed the people of Israel in Leviticus 25:8–55. Jubilee came every forty-nine years. In the fiftieth year, all debt was forgiven, all property returned, all enslaved people set free.”
― Lisa Sharon Harper, Fortune: How Race Broke My Family and the World--and How to Repair It All

“The far-flung love of Jesus is a direct challenge to the reigning Western supremacist philosophies and governance of the Roman Empire. The Romans were deeply influenced by the Greek philosophers, including Plato, who invented the concept of race. Plato imagined race as the various metals that people groups were made of. Race ordered society, determining how different people groups contribute to the republic.18 Plato’s student Aristotle introduced explicit human hierarchy, arguing in his Politics that some races are created to rule while other races are created to be slaves.”
― Lisa Sharon Harper, Fortune: How Race Broke My Family and the World--and How to Repair It All

“True to King’s words, White nationalists attempted to kill democracy because it demanded equality. But they lost.”
― Lisa Sharon Harper, Fortune: How Race Broke My Family and the World--and How to Repair It All

“In 1654, mixed-race Elizabeth Key legally challenged her enslavement on the basis of three points: (1) British law barred the enslavement of British citizens; (2) British common law established the citizenship of the child through the status of the father; and (3) British law barred the enslavement of baptized Christians.”
― Lisa Sharon Harper, Fortune: How Race Broke My Family and the World--and How to Repair It All

“Within one generation you will be in the minority in the United States as well. When that day comes, you can wage war or you can lean into truth, lean into repentance and repair, and allow yourselves to be released—forgiven.”
― Lisa Sharon Harper, Fortune: How Race Broke My Family and the World--and How to Repair It All

“Aristotle did not understand race to be determined by the color of a people group’s skin, but he did understand it to be a determining factor of intelligence and whether a people group was “supreme” (his language) or created to be enslaved.”
― Lisa Sharon Harper, Fortune: How Race Broke My Family and the World--and How to Repair It All

“Most Texan children are never taught that Austin imagined Texas as a slaveholding province of Mexico and incentivized new settlers to bring more slaves by offering more land if they did.”
― Lisa Sharon Harper, Fortune: How Race Broke My Family and the World--and How to Repair It All

“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 US lack such humility because they lack such memory. They have come to believe they are actually White, but Whiteness is a phantom.”
― Lisa Sharon Harper, Fortune: How Race Broke My Family and the World--and How to Repair It All

“King wrote of the “unregenerate segregationist,” that these citizens “have declared that democracy is not worth having if it involves equality.”14”
― Lisa Sharon Harper, Fortune: How Race Broke My Family and the World--and How to Repair It All

“In the wake of the May 25, 2020, murder of George Floyd by police officers in Minneapolis, formerly colonized peoples and nations marched for justice around the world. They recognized the knee on Floyd’s neck as the same knee on theirs through the systems of colonization, enslavement, exploitative “apprenticeship” in the Caribbean, Jim Crow in the US, and apartheid in South Africa.”
― Lisa Sharon Harper, Fortune: How Race Broke My Family and the World--and How to Repair It All

“In every corner of the world, a primary weapon of Western domination has been to cut off indigenous and other subjugated peoples from their lands, from their families and communities, and from the stories that tie them together. Colonization wields four crucial weapons of conquest in its arsenal of mass destruction: genocide, slavery, removal, and rape. These weapons hack people groups apart, separating them from land, people, story, and identity. These weapons yield for colonizers more land for production of wealth, fewer foes to threaten wealth, and low-cost or no-cost labor to grow wealth.”
― Lisa Sharon Harper, Fortune: How Race Broke My Family and the World--and How to Repair It All

“We wonder how our nation has come to its present moment. We watch as today’s courtier class—legislators, Fortune 500 businessmen, and celebrities—break every law with impunity. They bilk the system. They pay no taxes. They openly lie and cheat and steal. They even wage war on democracy itself through voter suppression and insurrection. These attacks on the core of American identity are swept under the proverbial rug. This 1662 law broke our nation—even before it began. That is our genesis.”
― Lisa Sharon Harper, Fortune: How Race Broke My Family and the World--and How to Repair It All

“The Virginia House of Burgesses was threatened by the prospect of losing legal claim to generations of free labor and incalculable wealth. So it moved to close the loopholes that Key’s case revealed. It passed legislation in 1662 that was modeled after the Roman law of partus sequitur ventrem, which determined the citizenship status of the child according to the status of the mother, not the father. This shift allowed White slaveholders to continue raping enslaved Black women and producing mixed-race free labor with absolute impunity. British masters no longer had to acknowledge their children before the law, so their children had no claim to citizenship under British law. This single law laid the foundation for the legal construct of race in the US.”
― Lisa Sharon Harper, Fortune: How Race Broke My Family and the World--and How to Repair It All

“The world cracked apart the moment the first European explorers looked at indigenous people who had stewarded land for thousands of years and declared them “uncivilized” and therefore unfit to exercise stewardship of their lands—or themselves.”
― Lisa Sharon Harper, Fortune: How Race Broke My Family and the World--and How to Repair It All