Reparations Are Not a Handout. They Are Justice.

By Gemma Flora Ortwerth

Reparations are not about white guilt. They are not about making people pay for something they did not personally do. They are not about giving anyone free stuff. Reparations are about repair. They are about returning what was stolen. They are about beginning to dismantle the structures that continue to define who gets to thrive and who gets discarded.

I am a white, autistic, trans woman. I grew up in Montgomery County, Maryland, in a middle-class family. It is one of the wealthiest suburbs outside Washington, D.C. I was in special education programs surrounded by underserved kids, many of them Black and brown, who were disciplined more harshly, believed less often, and given fewer resources. Their struggles were labeled as behavioral. Mine were seen as emotional. That distinction was not accidental. It was racial.

My grandparents were Italian immigrants. They were mocked for their accents. They were called slurs. They were told to assimilate or be shut out. I carry that history with me. But I also know they were allowed into whiteness in a way Black, Indigenous, Asian American, and Latine people have never been. My family was eventually able to own property, accumulate wealth, and gain respectability. That door was opened for us. For others, it was slammed shut.

When people say “I wasn’t alive during slavery,” what they are really saying is that they do not want to take responsibility for the systems that benefit them. But generational harm does not disappear when the people who caused it die. It lives in laws, in property lines, in access to healthcare, in neighborhood zoning, and in school funding. It lives in wealth gaps, arrest rates, and life expectancy. You do not have to have owned slaves to benefit from a system built on their labor.

White households today hold, on average, eight times the wealth of Black households in the United States. That is not a coincidence. That is the result of hundreds of years of racist policy. Black veterans were excluded from the GI Bill by local administrators. Black families were denied mortgages through redlining. Black farmers lost land through discriminatory USDA practices. Black neighborhoods were gutted by highways and then overpoliced. Black children were pushed out of schools by zero tolerance policies. These were choices made by people in power. These were choices made to consolidate white wealth.

Indigenous people remain under occupation. Tribal lands are seized for pipelines and mining. Clean water is still not guaranteed. The Indian Child Welfare Act is still under attack. Treaties are ignored. Land acknowledgments are offered in place of land return. Puerto Rico is still treated as a colony. The wealth generated from these lands is funneled to corporations, not communities.

Asian American communities were banned from immigrating. They were excluded from citizenship. They were placed in internment camps. They were targeted by surveillance. They were blamed for diseases. They were denied the right to testify in court, own land, or marry across race. These exclusions were legal. They were written into policy and upheld by the courts.

Latine people have been deported during economic downturns. They have been denied asylum and healthcare. They have been exploited for labor while being called criminals. Children have been caged. Families have been separated. Whole communities have been scapegoated for political gain.

All of this is real. All of it is documented. None of it has been repaired.

Reparations are not about making white people feel bad. They are about naming the truth. They are about addressing structural harm that continues to this day. Reparations mean giving back what was taken. They mean redistributing land, wealth, and power. They mean restoring autonomy and self-determination. They mean telling the truth and funding the repair.

The United States has paid reparations before. Japanese American families received reparations for their internment during World War II. Holocaust survivors received payments from Germany and some compensation from American institutions. Even white enslavers in Washington, D.C., were paid by the U.S. government for their “loss of property” when slavery was abolished there in 1862. The idea that reparations are impossible is not rooted in logistics. It is rooted in resistance to Black and Indigenous liberation.

Reparations are not about inclusion in a broken system. They are about restructuring that system entirely. That includes cash payments. It includes land return. It includes free healthcare and education. It includes debt cancellation, especially for communities targeted by predatory lenders. It includes housing guarantees, universal childcare, clean water, and accessible transit. It includes the dismantling of the prison-industrial complex. It includes record expungement for those criminalized by racist laws.

Reparations are also owed to disabled people who were institutionalized, sterilized, and experimented on. To trans people who have been pathologized, criminalized, and denied care. To sex workers who have been exploited, arrested, and erased. To survivors of conversion therapy. To the chronically ill. To those made poor by a system designed to starve some while feeding others.

This is not about generosity. It is not about charity. It is about justice.

Reparations are not just economic. They are emotional. They are spiritual. They are political. They require white people to give something up. That might mean wealth. That might mean comfort. That might mean the illusion that you are self-made. If that feels hard, sit with it. Ask yourself why it is acceptable for your ancestors to pass wealth down to you but not for communities harmed by slavery and genocide to receive anything back.

Wealth can be inherited. So can trauma. So can stolen land. So can exclusion. So can health disparities. So can surveillance. So can criminal records. So can forced removals. So can red ink on maps and broken treaties and unrepaired harm.

I am a white woman who has experienced trauma. I have survived institutions. I have been denied safety and care. But I also know that my whiteness has protected me. When I speak, I am assumed to be credible. When I cry, people believe I am in pain. When I make mistakes, I am offered grace. I have seen my friends—Black, brown, and Indigenous—denied all of that. I have seen them punished for surviving.

Reparations are not the end. They are the beginning. They are the minimum. They are the first step toward building something rooted in honesty. They are not about making things equal. They are about making things right.

If that feels radical, it is only because we have accepted injustice as normal for too long.

References

Coates, T.-N. (2014). The case for reparations. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-for-reparations/361631/

Darity, W. A., & Mullen, A. K. (2020). From here to equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the twenty-first century. University of North Carolina Press.

Federal Reserve Board. (2021). Survey of Consumer Finances. https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/scfindex.htm

Katznelson, I. (2005). When affirmative action was white: An untold history of racial inequality in twentieth-century America. W. W. Norton & Company.

Naeem, Z. (2020). The Land Back movement demands a reckoning with American mythology. Teen Vogue. https://www.teenvogue.com/story/land-back-movement