Liza J. Rankow
she/her
Dr. Liza J. Rankow is an interfaith minister, educator, activist, and writer. Her lifework centers the deep healing that is essential to personal and social transformation. Liza was the founding director of OneLife Institute, an organization that served for almost 20 years to nurture the well-being of frontline changemakers. She has been a spiritual counselor and teacher for more than three decades, working with individual clients, facilitating healing retreats, and offering classes and workshops in a variety of community and academic settings. Liza is the producer and co-editor of The Living Wisdom of Howard Thurman audio collection, and author of the award-winning book Soul Medicine for a Fractured World: Healing, Justice, and the Path of Wholeness.
Author statement: This brief reflection considers reparations as an act of tikkun (a principle in Judaism meaning to repair or make whole), not only for those harmed by centuries of genocide and enslavement in what is now called the US, but for soul repair of the white-bodied perpetrators and beneficiaries of those harms.
The piece is excerpted and adapted from Soul Medicine for a Fractured World, Orbis Books (2026).
The Grassroots Reparations Initiative, a program of the Truth Telling Project, describes reparations as the midpoint between Truth and Reconciliation.1 They believe reparations are a spiritual practice of healing moral and material harm, not merely a transactional event. As a matter of justice, the mandate for reparations to the descendants of kidnapped and enslaved Africans and to the descendants of the original peoples of the Americas is inarguable. However, there is also a deep repair needed for the souls of white-bodied people. The damage of centuries of white supremacy is carried in each of us (regardless of our political views and personal “woke-ness”) and must be addressed. The simple fact that we, as white-bodied people, have benefitted from another’s pain, from another’s displacement and disenfranchisement, or even their death, is a soul wound that we carry.2
In Jewish teaching, the Hebrew term tikkun means to repair or make whole. You may have heard the term tikkun olam, the repair of the world. Alongside this is another component—tikkun ha’nefesh—the repair of the soul. It takes both, tikkun olam and tikkun ha’nefesh, the healing of the world and the healing of the soul. They are deeply entwined. I think of reparations as an act of tikkun, a step toward healing, toward wholeness and just-ness, for everyone.
Reparations are not something that white-bodied people give Black, Indigenous, or other communities of color as a favor, or even a penance. Reparations are how white people get whole, how we get free. Reparations can be engaged not only as a necessary component of establishing economic justice, but as a collective ritual of remorse, grief, and amends . . . as a transformative spiritual act.
Inner and outer transformation are not separate from one another; both are essential to genuine and lasting change.
Some people argue that the harms of slavery and genocide occurred too long ago to warrant compensation, but the epigenetics of trauma make it clear that even the bodies of Black and Indigenous people alive today are shaped by—and suffer from—the traumas of the past. Certainly, the social impacts of centuries of systematic oppression are an ongoing legacy. And the benefits conferred by a legacy of systematic advantage are alive in the bodies and circumstances of white people. But white people are also harmed by this system that divides the majority of humans against one another, struggling to preserve our little piece of safety while those at the top amass obscene wealth and power. The process of reparations can lead us to a broader social restructuring that fosters equity, and ultimately benefits everyone.
“Reparations must not be only an effort to compensate for past harms,” writes theologian Kelly Brown Douglas, “they must also chart a pathway to a just future. Otherwise, reparations become little more than a salve for white guilt while the sin of white supremacy continues to thrive.”3 To repent is not just to feel remorse and contrition, but literally to turn and go in a different direction. In this sense, the repentance of white people is necessary—not just our guilt, shame, or regret, but to make a radical turn to a new way of being, living into an embodied anti-racist culture. Understanding how “whiteness” was constructed allows us to deconstruct it; understanding how it is legitimized and maintained, we can cease to legitimize and maintain it. This is the collective project of reorganizing an unjust society, centering the vision and leadership of the communities most impacted by generations of harm.
The power of white supremacy and other forms of domination is neither inherent nor immutable. It is a result of subterfuge, manipulation, and deceit—and we can change it. True Power, inherent Power, is a spiritual quality residing in each of us, in Nature and in Life itself. How we invest that Power is up to us.
Footnotes:
- Grassroots Reparations website: https://thetruthtellingproject.org/grc ↩︎
- The term “soul wound” was introduced in the context of intergenerational racial trauma by Indigenous psychologist Dr. Eduardo Duran (Tiospaye Ta Woapiye Wicasa) in his book, Healing the Soul Wound: Trauma Informed Counseling for Indigenous Communities (Teacher’s College Press, 2019). ↩︎
- Kelly Brown Douglas, “A Christian Call for Reparations,” Sojourners, July 2020. https://sojo.net/magazine/july-2020/christian-call-case-slavery-reparations-kelly-brown-douglas ↩︎
