Building A Culture of Repair: What It Is, and Why It Matters

This year, America turns 250. It is a milestone that invites both celebration and reckoning—a chance to ask not only what this country has built, but what it has yet to repair.

As we mark two and a half centuries of nationhood, we are simultaneously witnessing a moment of visible and escalating harm. Across the country, communities are feeling the byproducts of concentrated state power, political violence, the assault on immigrant communities, and continued efforts to suppress truth, voting, and overall democratic participation. The biggest question before us is not only how we stop this harm, but how we build the capacity to repair it—and transform our society into something new.

We must build the political will and moral clarity to intentionally address past and continuing harms in the US—particularly the pervasive and insidious nature of anti-Black racial harm.

Recent protests have given a collective voice to what people refuse to accept, but resistance alone cannot carry the full weight of what this moment requires. We also need clarity about what we are building: policy implementation, governance norms, narrative infrastructure, institutional commitments, and everyday behaviors that move us closer to the world we want.

A Culture of Repair must be woven throughout these efforts—both in our resistance and in our reconstruction—ensuring that each is guided by the same commitment to accountability, truth, and transformation. Around the world, societies emerging from violence, authoritarianism, apartheid, genocide, and state harm have demonstrated how to move toward democracy through truth, accountability, redress, and guarantees of nonrepetition. The tools of transitional justice have long been shaped and practiced by leaders and communities in the Global South, and these contexts illustrate that repair is not a naïve aspiration. It is necessary, and it is possible.

We must build the political will and moral clarity to intentionally address past and continuing harms in the US—particularly the pervasive and insidious nature of anti-Black racial harm.

A Culture of Repair, the Repair Framework, and What’s Required of Us

Culture is a society’s way of life, shaped by dominant narratives, laws, customs, and daily behaviors. It is what children are taught and the values modeled by authority figures. It lives in our stories and rituals, but also in the systems that shape what we believe is possible and accept as “normal.” If harm has been embedded into culture, then repair cannot remain episodic. It must become cultural too. I have also learned that cultivating a culture of repair creates the conditions where any time harm is caused, individuals and institutions have the skill and will to repair it. It makes repair a shared practice and expectation.

Culture change matters because it makes policy change possible and durable. Without cultural norms to back them up, policies can be weakened, ignored, reversed, or reduced to symbolism. Alternatively, culture without policy can become aspiration without material change. We need both.

To advance a culture of repair, Liberation Ventures developed The Repair Framework—an ongoing cycle of reckoning, acknowledgment, accountability, and redress. This framework applies the comprehensive UN definition of reparations to the human rights violations of US chattel slavery and its legacies:

• Reckoning is the work of learning and seeking understanding. This is where we grapple with the what, who, how, and why of actions that have contributed to harm—examining how histories, policies, practices, and culture have caused harm and continue to do so.

• Acknowledgment gives voice to what reckoning reveals by naming the harm, its impact, and the responsibility attached to it. It is the public proclamation of truth with such detail and depth that those harmed feel truly seen by what has been said.

• Accountability means taking ownership of harm—committing to changed behavior and nonrecurrence. It is not shame, punishment, or cancellation. Taking accountability is a courageous internal act where repair begins to alter the present. Our report A Dream in Our Name invites everyone to be an “Agent of Repair,” acting from our places of influence and practicing repair in the relationships, institutions, and systems we navigate. Put plainly, accountability includes making systemic changes, so harm doesn’t continue to happen.
• Redress refers to the actions that heal past harm and move people and communities toward wholeness. It should be defined by those who were harmed, not merely for them or presented to them. The tools of redress could include community-level investments, financial payments, returning what was taken, and more.

This framework defines the policies, behaviors, and initiatives that comprise the building blocks of repair. Its logic applies to harm occurring at all levels, whether interpersonal, institutional, or societal.

Applying the Repair Framework

Practicing repair with a cultural lens is not only about resolving conflict or responding to harm after it happens. It’s also the building of moral, relational, institutional, and material conditions that create a path for reparative actions to become a way of life.

Imagine a scenario: A school district reviews its student discipline data and finds that Black students and students with disabilities have been suspended, expelled, and referred to law enforcement at significantly higher rates than their peers for similar behaviors. Families have raised concerns for years, but those concerns were dismissed or treated as isolated incidents.

Structurally, the United States is familiar with repairing harm caused by public policy, institutional failure, disaster, exposure, or economic loss.

Applying the Repair Framework to this case would require more than a statement of regret from the school district—it would require intentional action across the framework’s four components. Reckoning includes examining the historical patterns that emerge from the student discipline data, policies, practices, and assumptions producing harm. Acknowledgment calls for publicly naming the harm and the district’s responsibility with specificity, so that impacted students and families see their full experience reflected in what has been said. Accountability changes the policies, incentives, training, supports, and reporting structures that allowed the harm to continue. Redress means working with the students and families of those who’ve been harmed to determine what is needed to make them whole. This could include multiple approaches such as expunging records, providing academic and counseling support, investing in community-led healing, and compensating families for costs related to wrongful exclusions.

Repair Is Already Familiar

Repair is not new. Repair, as a concept, is older than our nation; it is embedded in every faith tradition, required in every marriage or close friendship, and mirrored through biological regeneration in the natural world and how humans heal physical wounds. Our relationships, planet, and bodies depend on the ability to repair for survival; so too does our society.

There is precedent for repair in our institutions. After 40 years of organizing by community members, Chicago City Council passed the “Reparations for Burge Torture Victims” ordinance for survivors of police harm. It included public acknowledgment along with financial compensation, counseling, a new public school curriculum, and a memorial process—exemplifying institutional repair. It wasn’t perfect and it couldn’t undo the harm, but it proved that institutions can respond comprehensively beyond a public apology.

Structurally, the United States is familiar with repairing harm caused by public policy, institutional failure, disaster, exposure, or economic loss. In the article “Normalizing Reparations: US Precedent, Norms, and Models for Compensating Harms and Implications for Reparations to Black Americans,” published by the Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, the authors conclude that “the government already has the norm, precedent, expertise, and resources to provide reparations to Black Americans.”  They provide examples of federal programs that have compensated coal miners with black lung disease, people harmed by vaccine injuries, victims of terrorism, farmers facing crop loss, and nuclear testing survivors. While these are not equivalent to reparations, they provide evidence that when harm is recognized, compensation is not unimaginable.

Historical Harm and Shared Consequences

Systems built on domination threaten our shared humanity.

As the United States approaches 250 years since its founding, we must acknowledge that we have always lived inside conditions shaped by harm, and for this reason, real change requires intentional practice toward building a culture of repair.

Although dehumanization is a targeted harm, its impact extends beyond those most directly victimized by it; to deny another person’s humanity is also to deny one’s own. This does not mean the harm is experienced equally; it is not. Slavery and its consequences have harmed Black people directly, violently, and disproportionately. However, a culture built through dehumanization impacts everyone, weakening democracy, eroding public trust, and undermining public goods. A culture of repair helps all of us recognize these connections and offers a different path.

In addition, the concept of the “implicated subject” helps us move beyond individual blame or a narrow victim/perpetrator binary to understand that people and institutions can be shaped by, benefit from, and reproduce harmful systems without having personally enacted the original harm. Systems built on domination threaten our shared humanity.

Who We Can Learn from and What We Are Building

The United States must be humble enough to set aside the mythology of American exceptionalism and learn from global wisdom. Our history is not too complex to face, and the harm it produces is not too unique for repair. Without renewed trust and transformation, our democracy will continue to weaken.

Reparations efforts across national, state, and local levels show us what people are beginning to build instead—guiding us toward what the country must become.

At Liberation Ventures, we have nostalgia for a time that has yet to be, which inspires us to envision a society on the other side of reparations, where repair is not exceptional but expected. Building a Culture of Repair will not only help heal Black people and their communities; it will transform this country for us all.