Last week, an email arrived that I keep returning to: a photograph of a smiling family on the day they closed on their home, the first recipients of a $10,000 grant for Black first-time homebuyers in Germantown. One family, one closing, one set of keys: a small thing and an enormous thing at once.
That grant came from Green Street Friends Meeting’s annual $50,000 reparations redistribution for Black Germantown neighbors through the organization birdSEED, and it is one small piece of a far larger effort. Through the Rise Up for Reparations campaign and reparationWorks, 20 congregations across this city have committed to substantive reparations, accountable not to their own comfort but to Black-led grassroots organizations. Our goal is 100 majority-white congregations, and we are a fifth of the way there.
These communities practice what we call the alchemy of reparations: real repair happening across three dimensions at once, namely relationship, Spirit, and resources. They reckon honestly with their own histories of complicity, change their internal cultures, build solidarity with Black-led organizations, and move resources including money, guided by the people most harmed rather than deciding among themselves what counts as enough…