by Morgan Curtis, Ancestors & Money Coach

To my fellow white people working on reparations for the harms our ancestors caused, we cannot shy away from this. The young white man who took ten lives in Buffalo last week had written on the gun: “Here’s your reparations!”

This white supremacist violence is not new, and yet it is important we let it shock us, enrage us, break our hearts open. We’ve been socialized for centuries to be numb to our people’s violence against Black people. I’m still learning how to let myself be impacted, to let news like this into my body as something that is mine to metabolize and respond to. It’s about unlearning our separateness and remembering that our liberation is bound up together. If you can: pause here, breathe, go outside, shake, let it in.

I’ve been thinking a lot about shadow projection in the wake of this tragedy. Whiteness has a tendency to externalize its own violence by assigning it to others. Our ancestors raped the people they enslaved, but deemed Black men sexual predators. Our ancestors brutally murdered Indigenous people, but labeled them savages. And now, huge numbers of our fellow white people are afraid of a “Great Replacement”, which is, of course, what we did. We are afraid that what we did will be done back to us. The answer is not repeating ourselves with yet more violence, but turning towards truth-telling, healing and repair.

Let’s not hesitate another moment to resource the movement for reparations in times like this. Two ways to do so:

• Locally, the Fruit Belt Community Land Trust is working to acquire land and build permanently affordable housing for Buffalo’s rapidly gentrifying Black Fruit Belt neighborhood. One of the victims of the attack, Kat Massey, was a longtime neighborhood supporter of the FBCLT.

• Nationally, the #Case4Reparations Fund is a “first-of-its-kind funding initiative that aims to fuel and amplify movement building & campaigns efforts to achieve reparations where wealth (money or land) can be redistributed by institutions and/or governments to Black & Native American communities in the U.S.”

Ancestors & Money Cohort Three: Registration open until June 15th

We are excited to announce a third Ancestors & Money cohort will run from October 2022 through May 2023. We are grateful to be able to offer this transformative space again for our fellow descendants of colonizers and enslavers with inherited wealth who are called to take reparative action. This journey integrates:

• Anti-racist genealogy

• Wealth redistribution & divestment planning

• Ancestral connection & grief practices

• Black & Indigenous guest teachers inviting us into the material and spiritual work of reparations and land return

• Coaching support to move through internal and external blocks towards tangible, healing action

The cohort is also its own redistribution mechanism, with 50% of net income redistributed to Black- and Indigenous-led organizing and land projects. See where.

Initial deadline to submit an interest form is June 15th, with discovery calls being scheduled for July. We’re excited to hear from anyone who feels called to join us or learn more!

“Before this cohort, I was having trouble moving forward aggressively in my redistribution goals, a difficulty that was linked to internalized shame about my whiteness and the violent circumstances that have enabled my wealth. This cohort helped me face my ancestry and the most painful parts of my heritage in a way that has shifted some of the shame and given me new energy to take action. The experience also helped move me in more unexpected ways--in my case, helping me realize that I needed a more holistic approach towards my life and my community (beyond just giving more) if I wanted to truly imagine and enact a new possible world. This cohort also gave me a community that helps me remember that it's not just me that this is hard for, which is an invaluable gift.”

— Cohort Two participant. Read more testimonials here.

“Class traitors” in the news

In April, the Bay Area Resource Generation chapter I organize with got two pieces of mainstream news coverage for our work organizing wealthy young people in the Bay Area towards the redistribution of money, land and power. You can read about some of my fellow organizers in this piece: ‘Class traitors’: Why rich Bay Area millennials are getting rid of their wealth and see my interview on KTVU News here: Growing trend of younger people giving up their wealth and inheritance.

Update from my time in graduate school

I just finished my first of two years at Harvard Divinity School! I’m there to study the spiritual dimensions of reparations work for descendants of colonizers and enslavers. It’s about walking back towards the world of elite education that I come from, learning how to talk about this work in spaces where folks aren’t predisposed to understand or agree with me. It’s also about being in the northeast, with the lands that are so deeply entwined with my family history of colonization. I’m most grateful this year for the chances I’ve had to write, speak, and pilgrimage, as well as the mentors and classmates who have inspired and strengthened me.

Here are a few of my assignments, in case you’d like to read them!

• Sermons: on John Winthrop and reckoning with ancestral harm, on the war in Ukraine as a mirror, on finding the names of people my ancestors enslaved on learning from the natural world on how not be a settler forever.

• A philosophy paper: Repair, Redistribution and Reconciliation: A “self-interested” argument for white Americans to pursue reparations to Black & Indigenous people for enslavement & colonization

• I’ve also been working on a personal essay titled the “Decolonial Dames of America”, still in progress!