White Work and Reparative Genealogy Reckoning with Ancestral Debt as a Path to Racial Reparations

What does it mean to reckon with a legacy of white supremacy? White Work and Reparative Genealogy invites white-identifying readers on a courageous journey into the heart of ancestral memory, historical accountability, and racial repair.

Clinical psychologist Mary Watkins traces her family’s lineage from 1607 Jamestown through generations of slave ownership and racial violence in the American South. Blending personal narrative, historical research, and psychological insight, Watkins models a practice of “white work”—a form of reparative genealogy that confronts the silences and distortions in white family histories. With reflective questions at the end of each chapter, this book offers practical tools for readers ready to explore their own histories and take action toward racial justice.

This is a book for those who seek to move through guilt and shame—not around them—toward healing, solidarity, and shared liberation.

Part I The Price of Becoming White.- Chapter 1. Reparative Genealogy: The Role of Ancestral Reckoning in Racial Reparations.- Chapter 2. Becoming White: The Creation of Race and Racial Hierarchy in 17th-Century Virginia.- Chapter 3. Wrestling with White Hypocrisy, Racism, and Self-Interest: Quaker Complicity with Slavery (1657-1776) and White Supremacy.- Chapter 4. Building Whites’ Double Consciousness: Looking in the Mirror Held Up by Slave Narratives from North Carolina.- Part II The Afterlives of Slavery.- Chapter 5. Economic, Political, and Social Lynching: The Afterlife of Slavery in Fayette County, Tennessee.- Chapter 6. Enslaving the Environment, Exploiting Black Workers: The Destruction of the Mississippi Delta Forests (1880-1920).- Part III Collective Remorse and Repair.- Chapter 7. The Reckoning: Tracing Ancestral Debt and Embracing Reparative Action.- Chapter 8. From Acknowledgment to Action: Joining in Solidarity with Black-Led Struggles for Racial Reparations.- Chapter 9. Afterword: “Unsuturing” the White Self: Creating Freedom and Integrity by Reckoning with the Past.

Mary Watkins, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist, educator, and activist whose work has helped reorient psychology toward social justice, decoloniality, and collective liberation. Her influential books—including Toward Psychologies of Liberation and Mutual Accompaniment and the Creation of the Commons—have supported grassroots movements and reimagined how communities confront historical trauma.