Introduction
This framework exists because personal history is where the history of race becomes real.
Most white Americans have learned — or are learning — that our country was built on a hierarchy of race. We know the broad contours of that story. But knowing it abstractly is different from confronting it personally, in the faces of your own family. Healing White History offers a structured, step-by-step process for doing exactly that: using your own family history to move from inherited racial stories toward healing — and toward repair.
The process draws on the Truth, Racial Healing, and Transformation (TRHT) framework developed by Dr. Gail Christopher. TRHT calls first for Narrative Change — the telling of hard truths about past wrongs and present consequences. Second comes Racial Healing — the building of trust and relationship. And finally, Transformation of the systems built on the false foundations of racial hierarchy: systems of separation, unjust law and policy, and exploitative economic practice. This seven-step process applies that broad framework to the specific, personal work of reckoning with your white family history.
Why It works
Race history, taught abstractly, can leave us nodding and moving on. This framework does something different: it makes the history personal and unavoidable.
When you research an ancestor — their world, their fears, their ordinary life — and then sit with them in an imagined conversation, you stop encountering a historical fact and start encountering a human being. You see how ordinary people became complicit. You may recognize their logic operating in your own thinking, or in the world around you today. That recognition is the beginning of healing.
This is not a guilt project. The goal is not shame for what your ancestors did. But we inherit more than DNA — we inherit stories. The toxic stories of racial hierarchy have shaped our assumptions, our instincts, and the systems from which we benefit.
Confronting those stories, in the most personal way possible, changes the character of our empathy for those harmed by racial injustice — and motivates us to do something about it. The endpoint of this journey is not a feeling. It is action.
The Seven Steps
1. Learn the History of Race
Build the context you need to understand where your ancestors fit into the larger American story of racial hierarchy.
2. Research Your Family Tree
Establish basic names, dates, and places across multiple generations, working back toward your first American ancestors.
3. Choose an Ancestor
Select one person from your tree to engage more deeply — based on curiosity, emotional resonance, or historical moment.
4. Research Your Ancestor's World
Put yourself in their shoes. Understand their culture, their community, and the racial stories that shaped them.
5. Imagine a Conversation
Using everything you've learned, hold an imagined dialogue with your ancestor — honest, loving, and unflinching.
6. Repeat
Return to Steps Three through Five with other ancestors, deepening your understanding across generations.
7. Repair
Take what this work has revealed and commit to concrete, material action — joining the ongoing work of racial repair and transformation.
The Slave Trader in My Family Tree
Everything changed when I read two sentences buried deep in an ancestor’s biography.
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Confronting My Racist Ancestors: The Method
Guilt without specificity goes nowhere. Here's a better way.
Confronting Charly
My Puritan ancestors said they had 'no choice.' Here's what the record actually shows.
Substack
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.
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.
Ancestral reckoning is what happens when we move past white history in general and investigate what our own families actually did. We can reckon by telling the truth about those actions. And also by confronting our own ancestors – as human beings – people who love their families (and presumably their descendants, but who made terrible, dehumanizing decisions about race. Reckoning requires honest conversation about what your people did and what it means to have come from them.
The word “reckoning” matters. It doesn't mean confession, or self-flagellation, or performing remorse. It means squaring the accounts - white people need to balance the books on race. That's harder than feeling bad in the abstract — and considerably more useful.
Native dispossession refers to the systematic taking of land from Indigenous peoples — through treaties that were broken, purchases that were coerced or based on basic misunderstanding, legal frameworks that were designed to fail, and outright violence. Along with stolen Black labor, stolen land provided the foundation on which most of white America's wealth and settlement was built, and it is one of the least examined parts of white family history.
In my family, it shows up in at least two places that I highlight in this project. My Puritan ancestors in New England lived on and farmed land that had belonged to the Wampanoag people — the same people who shared that first harvest in 1621 and were at war with the colonists fifty years later. My Dutch ancestors were in New Netherlands in the years when the Lenape were being pushed off the land that would become New York.
Most white family histories – including mine – treat these ancestors as 'settlers' or 'pioneers.' The time-travel conversation method asks a different question: settlers of what, exactly? And what happened to the people who were already there?
After the Civil War, the South lost the war but largely won the story. Over the following decades, a coordinated effort — through textbooks, monuments, novels, movies, and organizations like the United Daughters of the Confederacy — rewrote why the South had fought, and transformed violent enslavement into well-meaning familial benevolence. The Civil War became about ”states' rights,” “Southern honor,” and the image of the noble, tragic Confederate soldier defending his homeland.
The plain-English version is simple: it's the whitewashing of the Confederacy — a deliberate effort both to suggest that the South “treated our slaves well,” and to make slavery disappear from the story of the Civil War.
In my family, the whitewashing showed up both in my ancestors’ enthusiastic involvement in heritage groups like the United Daughters of the Confederacy, and in family biographies, which described Confederate soldiers as honorable heroes without ever mentioning what they were fighting to preserve. Our family’s version of the story wasn't malicious — they believed it. That's precisely what makes it worth examining.
Because it didn't end. The land taken from Indigenous peoples has never been given back. The wealth generated by enslaved labor was passed down through inheritance, education, and opportunity in ways that compound over generations. And the story of white superiority was used to justify racial hierarchy that still persists – segregated neighborhoods, mass incarceration, food deserts, health care inequities – which continue to cause racial harm. And the underlying false story of white superiority is still shaping how we build systems today.
The question is whether you want to understand your family's relationship to these racially harmful systems, or whether you'd rather inherit the advantages without looking at where they came from.
No. You need one name and a willingness to look. Start with a census record, a property deed, or a family Bible — and go from there. The worksheet available on this site walks you through the process step by step, starting from scratch.
If you've already done genealogy research and found something you don't know what to do with — an enslaver, a colonizer, a deed transferring land that wasn't yours to transfer — you're already further along than most people. The method gives you somewhere to put what you've found.
No. The whitewashing of the Confederacy is one thread in this project, but it's far from the only one. My family's history runs through Puritan New England, Dutch New York, and Texas — and the harm shows up differently in every context: land taken from the Wampanoag, deals made with the Lenape that weren't what they appeared, enslaved people bought and sold in Texas long after others had stopped.
Even if your family immigrated to any part of North America only a few generations ago — there is almost certainly something in the record worth looking at. First, you can look at aspects of your ancestors’ ethnicity that got boiled off in America’s melting pot – with only whiteness left over. Second, you can examine how your ancestors were conditioned into anti-Blackness in order to become “white.” The method works regardless of geography or denomination.
The method and the book are written for white readers, because the work of confronting white family history is work that white people need to do.
That said, many people who follow this project are not white. Some genuinely want to volunteer support for this work. Some find the ancestor conversations useful as a way of understanding how white families have historically thought about and justified harm. Others are researchers, educators, or people whose own family histories intersect with the families I write about. All are welcome here.
Yes, this is about reparations. I use “repair” and “reparations” to encompass any concrete action in the present – whether by governments, other institutions, families, or individuals – to compensate for past and ongoing racial harms. It is not about guilt or confession. It is not a symbolic acknowledgment that slavery was bad. Repair is specific. It is directed toward communities, institutions, or relationships that carry the legacy of a specific harm today.
In accordance with the TRHT framework, reparations means creating material change in any of three areas where racial systems cause ongoing harm: 1) segregation, 2) laws and policies, and 3) economic practices and policies.
The policy question of government-level financial reparations is a related conversation. I encourage everyone to engage in that discussion, but it's not the primary focus of this project. The focus here is on what individuals and families can do with what they find. This may include advocating for governmental financial reparations. But it can (and, I believe should) include a lot of other types of reparative work.
Blame, shame, and guilt dont interest me. Accountability and responsibility do. You don’t have to feel guilty or shameful to be accountable and take responsibility for systems that created a racial hierarchy that has unfairly benefited you and your ancestors. We need to feel that we’re all in this together, and that racial hierarchy is wrong. We need to understand that we have all inherited false stories that built harmful systems. We need to feel in our bones how our families contributed to building and spreading those stories and systems. That’s what my method did for me, and what I hope and believe it can do for you.
Most racial justice books for white readers work at the level of systems, history, or ideology — they explain how racism works, how it was built, and why it persists. This is valuable and I've learned from it.
This project works at the level of the specific family. It doesn't just ask you to understand racism in general — it asks you to find out the role your people took in building systems that cause racial harm – and to have an honest conversation about it. The method is something you can do, not just something you can read.
Think about Octavia Butler's Kindred — a novel in which a Black woman is pulled back in time to confront slavery directly. I'm doing something similar, but I'm white, and I'm going back to put myself in the shoes of the people who did the harm, rather than the people who suffered it.A few things, at whatever level feels right:
• Start with one name. Pick one ancestor and spend an hour with census records, property deeds, or your family's own documents. See what turns up.
• Download the free worksheet on The Method page. It walks you through the time-travel conversation process from the beginning.
• Subscribe on Substack. The full conversations are there — reading how I do it is the fastest way to understand how you might do it too.
• Bring it to a group. The discussion guide on the Speaker page is designed for book clubs, churches, and community organizations. The conversations are better with other people in the room.
• Reach out. If you find something in your own family history and don't know what to do with it, I want to hear about it.
Healing White History is a work in progress. The best way to follow it as it develops — and to read the conversations and essays as they're written — is to subscribe on my Substack. Subscribers will be the first to know when the book is available.
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