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Most of us have ancestors we glorify.
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The sharp lawyer.
The brave soldier.
The rugged pioneer.
But look closer. Through the lens of research, those stories shift.
The Confederate ancestor who
“just loved his heritage”
was actively defending slavery.
The “pioneer”
becomes a colonizer.
Now the sharp lawyer
is an enslaver who profited from stolen labor.
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Healing White History is about traveling back — first in the historical record and eventually in imagined conversations, to learn who your ancestors truly were, and to face them.
To have the hard conversations about race your living family never had. To sit with those ancestors in their own time. To let them explain themselves. To hear the objections, the justifications, the certainties that made sense in 1858 and make considerably less sense now.
This is intense work on an intellectual, emotional, and spiritual level.
And then to deliver the rebuttal they never had to hear.
You don't excuse them.
You don't disown them.
You stay in the room —
and learn and heal from
and possibly with them.
Healing White History: The Method
Healing White History is a practice for white Americans who want to face their family's role in creating and expanding the false stories of race and white superiority, and building institutions of racial hierarchy. This could include slavery, Native dispossession, lynching and other racial violence, segregation, redlining and racial covenants, and a host of other racial harms. Through time-travel conversations with my own ancestors, I show what it looks like to stay in relationship with the people you came from, while telling the full truth about your family's complicity in racism — how those false stories were built, justified, and passed down.
This is white work. I’m doing mine.
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Featured Substack Articles
Not everything here is a conversation with an ancestor. Some essays are about history. Some are about the present. Some are about what it costs to look honestly at where you came from — and what it might be worth. All of them are part of the same project.
About Me
I am a writer, speaker, and award-winning trial attorney from Dallas, Texas. For 22 years I represented ordinary people against powerful institutions at Baron & Budd and Allen Stewart, P.C. — two of Texas's most prominent firms specializing in representing people who have gotten sick from toxic exposures. I won landmark cases in trial and appellate courts across the nation, and in 2006 I was part of a team named as national Trial Lawyers of the Year by Public Justice. Now I apply that same refusal to look away to the history my family left behind.
FAQs
Commonly asked questions about
the Healing White History Method.
This project begins with a white American investigating how his family participated in slavery, Native dispossession, the whitewashing of the Confederacy, and other racial harms. Telling the truth about that history, and then going back to confront those same ancestors as human beings. The result was dramatic transformation – inspiring a life-long commitment to racial repair. Now, the heart of the Healing White History project is bringing other white people into this work, to heal their own family histories, leading to further repair. We made race, and we can unmake it. Together.
The method at the heart of this project. I gather every primary source I can find about a specific ancestor — census records, property deeds, court documents. Then I research their time, place, and culture. What was the racial ideology that they learned from their parents and culture? Where did they go to church, and what did it teach about race? What did their legal system say? And then, after getting a picture of who they were and how they thought, I write an imagined conversation with them, set in their own time. I give them every defense they would have made. I let them be fully themselves. And then I respond. Every claim an ancestor makes is sourced from the historical record. It's not mere emotional catharsis. It's a method grounded in research.
No. None of us are individually to blame for what our ancestors did decades or centuries ago. But collective responsibility is a different animal. We have inherited the toxic stories of race and white superiority that our ancestors developed, used, embellished, and spread. And we have benefited from the systems that were built on the foundations of those false stories. We bear responsibility to tear down those systems and build new systems built on the truth.
Start with one name. Pick one ancestor and spend an hour with census records or property deeds. See what turns up. Download the free worksheet on The Method page — it walks you through the process from scratch. Subscribe on Substack to read the conversations. Or just reply to the welcome email and tell me where you are on your reparations journey. Every reply comes directly to me.
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