The Keys We Accept: New Americans, Reparations, and the Practice of Belonging

The key ring our Airbnb host handed us included one tagged “forest key.” It opened a private gate onto the trails above Cape Town’s leafy Southern Suburbs. The padlocked gate stood between stretches of barbed-wire fence, restricting access to trails beside neighborhoods once reserved for White residents. Three decades after South Africa’s first fully democratic election, the area remained overwhelmingly White. We passed through as visitors with borrowed access and followed the worn, pine-covered paths uphill. What am I entitled to as a visitor in a place whose beauty and privilege are bound up with dispossession? What do I owe?

The question opened backward into my family’s American story. My father landed in 1968 with an engineering degree and eight dollars. As the eldest child, he felt responsible for supporting his widowed mother and siblings back home. He arrived on Chicago’s South Side as the Civil Rights era was reshaping the country’s racial order, unsure where a brown immigrant belonged within it. But work and family left him little time to dwell on the uncertainty. He devoted long days to refining engineering designs and his nights and weekends to his growing family. Over time, he found his footing and helped build a clean-tech company. Backed by hundreds of millions of dollars in government research grants, it eventually went public—a classic American dream trajectory. The wealth that followed—made possible by many people’s labor, public investment, and luck—gave our immediate family economic freedom and provided a safety net for our extended clan.

My mother made a different kind of life in the United States. An environmental engineer, she spent years at OSHA protecting workers across Connecticut. During a career hiatus, she bought and ran an ice cream store in a quaint town center; on the Fourth of July, the queue would wrap around the corner. She wanted our culture to have a place in civic life: she dressed my sister and me in maroon and marigold, and we performed a folk dance at the Danbury Ethnic Festival. If my father’s story showed me how opportunity can become wealth, my mother’s taught me how belonging is built through service, celebration, and cultural presence.

But amid the language of Black leadership, the flow of philanthropic capital, and my own role as an Indian American helping direct some of those resources, the question became harder to avoid: Do I belong here? And if so, what parts of my own history am I responsible for bringing with me?

By the time I stood at that gate in Cape Town, I had begun to wonder what keys my own family had been handed through migration, education, citizenship, work, and community—and what duties came with using them. Some keys are handed to us before we know who fought to open the door. When my parents became citizens, they studied the branches of government, but they had not yet learned how deeply their path to the United States was indebted to the Black-led freedom struggle, to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the immigration reforms enacted the following year. As new Americans, what has this country made possible for us, and where has its welcome stopped short?

A week later, I flew from Cape Town to California, where I joined leaders of the US reparations movement beneath the ancient canopy of the redwoods. In the opening ceremony, they invoked movement ancestors who had fought for justice long before the cause was fashionable or fundable. They honored Belinda Sutton, an enslaved woman in 18th-century Massachusetts who petitioned the state for compensation after decades of bondage—and won. They honored Congressman John Conyers, who introduced legislation to establish a federal reparations commission in every Congress from 1989 until his retirement. Washington largely ignored his effort, but we had gathered to carry it forward.

The welcome packet’s call to accelerate “the Black-led movement for racial repair” sharpened my uncertainty about my place in the work. The incubator I lead supports two organizations in the reparations movement. A portion of my own salary is paid through those budgets. Work that earlier generations sustained with little money now passes, in part, through organizations like mine: translated into grants, deliverables, and reports for foundations, many of them White-led. I believe in helping build the infrastructure this movement deserves. But amid the language of Black leadership, the flow of philanthropic capital, and my own role as an Indian American helping direct some of those resources, the question became harder to avoid: Do I belong here? And if so, what parts of my own history am I responsible for bringing with me?

As the ritual called forth ancestral wisdom, I searched my own inheritance for what it might offer this moment. I murmured my own liberation lineage: Gandhi’s influence on nonviolent resistance; my maternal grandfather, Ratanshi Shah, who published a revolutionary pamphlet in the final years of British occupation and was imprisoned for it; Jain teachings affirming the equal dignity of every soul. These were not credentials but charges: inheritances that asked something of me, too.

Later, I walked with a friend to the campus’s Mother Tree, a redwood four or five times older than the American republic. My breath caught at the clarity of her self-description: a “twelfth-generation European American settler.” She had followed her lineage in two directions. She had reclaimed ancestral practices: ceremonial toasts and a Celtic ritual honoring the moon. But she had also traced her family’s slaveholding past and contacted Black relatives who shared her family name and DNA. Over time, branches of the family had begun to gather and ask what repair required, including in material terms. Several White participants now send money each month directly to Black participants. The larger group is considering a shared mechanism for financial redress while continuing to ask how racial harm lives on in the present.

There’s something to be cautious about here. How much burden can we place on our children for the sins we commit today, when they arrive so innocently, shiny-eyed and soft-bellied? This family’s example is not a ledger passed from one generation to the next, consigning descendants to rival camps of guilt and grievance. It is a family recovering the intimate traces of a larger system and resisting the public forgetting that allows its harms to persist. In their practice of repair, they carry forward what is worth keeping and interrupt what is not. What might come into view, within my own family and beyond it, if I looked past the parts of my inheritance I knew how to celebrate?

Migration can lull us into a double innocence. In the country we adopt, we can say: this harm happened before I arrived. In the country we leave, we can say: I am no longer of that place.

From the faded memories of childhood visits to India, one scene remains sharp: an abrupt warning not to use a particular stainless steel cup in a relative’s Bombay apartment. It was “kept” for certain domestic workers. Only later would I understand the belief buried inside the instruction: that their touch could contaminate what belonged to us. I did not yet know how to read these signs of othering, nor how often their stakes are deliberately diminished. The post-racial stories that shaped my American upbringing had a counterpart in India: that caste belonged to the past, even as its rules persisted in ordinary life. The forest key, the stainless steel cup—I am learning to pause over what such ordinary objects reveal.

On my desk today sits Suraj Yengde’s Caste Matters, a book whose title echoes Cornel West’s Race Matters and insists that caste, too, must be regarded as an ongoing struggle rather than a settled past. I am only beginning this inquiry. I do not yet know what repair asks of me in relation to caste, Partition, or the other histories my family crossed and carried. But I know I can no longer imagine those histories safely behind me, softened by distance or redeemed by the parts of my lineage I know how to honor.

Migration can lull us into a double innocence. In the country we adopt, we can say: this harm happened before I arrived. In the country we leave, we can say: I am no longer of that place. We can pretend to stand outside both histories and their ongoing harms, accountable to neither. But can we claim belonging while disclaiming responsibility?

I carried the question into Independence Day weekend. While many friends left Washington, D.C., for the weekend, I felt a pull to stay. However discouraged I felt about the country’s integrity, I did not want to surrender the day. A few of us gathered in a public library to piece together fabric and story in a quilt we called a Declaration of Interdependence. I thought of Frederick Douglass asking what the Fourth of July meant to the enslaved. I thought, too, of the repair traditions my ancestors practiced: gathering torn scraps of clothing and stitching them into something useful and beautiful.

What if repair could be a practice of belonging? Not the thin belonging of gratitude to an adopted country or nostalgia for an ancestral one, but a thicker belonging woven from contribution and responsibility to the places and peoples that have made us.