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.
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Steven Baughman Jensen
Steven Baughman Jensen spent twenty-two years demanding the truth in courtrooms, representing ordinary people against powerful institutions. Now he demands it from his own family's history. Healing White History, his forthcoming narrative nonfiction book, traces his white family's entanglement with slavery, Native dispossession, and the mythology that still surrounds the Confederacy
Full Narrative Bio
I started this project because I loved my grandmother.
When I retired, I thought I was writing a biography and tribute to her — the keeper of our family scrapbooks, the one who told stories about pioneering Texans and loving family role models. I wanted to honor that legacy.
Then I joined a racial equity task force at my church. For the first time, I learned how slavery, Indigenous dispossession, Jim Crow, and mass incarceration created ongoing systems of racial hierarchy — and how white families like mine were inoculated against harms from all of those systems, and benefited directly from many of them.
When I went back to my grandmother's scrapbooks with those new eyes, the heroes began to look different. A “pioneer” became a land-taker. A “lawyer” turned out to be a slave trader. I realized I had inherited not just their DNA, but also their stories — including the false, toxic stories of race and white superiority.
I spent 22 years as a trial attorney at Baron & Budd and Allen Stewart — two of Texas's most prominent firms specializing in representing people who have gotten sick from toxic exposures — representing ordinary people against some of the most powerful corporate interests in the country. In 2006, I was part of a team that won the Trial Lawyer of the Year Award for representing more than 1,600 families whose water had been contaminated by industrial polluters. I learned in those courtrooms that the truth is rarely volunteered — it has to be demanded, document by document, witness by witness, question by question. That same discipline is what I brought to my family's history.
I created this framework for repair and healing because I needed a way to face my own ancestors without either excusing them or disowning them. I couldn't find any resources that showed white people how to do that work. Healing White History is my attempt to offer the resources I needed.