Why the Soil Matters: Reparations, Structural Justice, and Generational Repair

Author’s Note:
This post is adapted from my thesis research conducted during my studies at Jacksonville University. The paper explored reparations, structural justice, and generational repair, connecting lived experience to systemic history. I’m excited to share it here as part of The Soul Script.

I have a fear of sharks.

Not because I had ever encountered one—but because of what I had been taught to believe about them. Through movies, news, and repetition, sharks were framed as dangerous, unpredictable, and something to fear. That fear feels real, even without experience.

That changed when I read a classmate’s thesis paper on the importance of sharks. She wrote about how sharks are often hunted, killed, and stripped of their fins. She also explained how media has shaped their image as threats. As I read her work, something shifted. I found myself feeling empathy for sharks in a way I hadn’t before.

And in that moment, I realized something deeper:

Fear is often taught—not experienced.

When Fear Becomes Structure

As I reflected on her paper, I began to see a parallel.

Just as sharks are framed as dangerous, Black communities are often portrayed in ways that emphasize threat, aggression, or criminality—often without context or understanding. These portrayals are repeated so often that they begin to feel like truth. And when something is seen as dangerous, people stop asking questions. They stop caring what happens to it.

That’s how perception becomes structure.

Because those narratives don’t stay on screens. They move into:

• Policy
• Policing
• Education
• Housing
• Everyday interactions

What we are taught to fear shapes who is protected—and who is not.

Sharks, Plankton, and What We Miss

After exchanging papers, my classmate and I had a conversation that stayed with me.

I shared something I had learned from my son about plankton. Despite being small and often overlooked, plankton are essential to life. Without them, humans would not exist.

That led us to a shared understanding:

Sharks are feared.
Plankton are overlooked.
Yet both are essential.

That idea stuck with me, because it reflects something much larger.

In society, marginalized communities are often:

• Hyper-visible through fear
• Or invisible in their contributions

Yet they remain essential to the functioning of everything around them.

The Way I’ve Come to Understand This: Soil

The clearest way I’ve come to understand inequality is through soil.

Soil is the foundation. It holds life before life ever blooms. If the soil is damaged, depleted, or neglected, whatever grows from it may still survive—but survival is not the same as thriving.

The nutrients matter.
The care matters.
What has been taken from it matters.

People are not that different.

The conditions someone is born into matter. Safety matters. Stability matters. Stress, grief, and access all matter. If someone is expected to bloom after being rooted in depleted ground, then we have to ask not just whether they “made it,” but what they were given to grow from.

Because inequality doesn’t begin the moment we can see it.

It begins much earlier—in systems, in history, and sometimes even in the body.

What Is Carried Before We Even Begin

When I think about soil, I don’t just think about theory. I think about my mother.

In 1981, my mother worked in cotton fields at 13 years old in our hometown of New Madrid, Missouri. She continued working there until 1987, carrying responsibilities and conditions that no child should have to carry.

By the time I was born in 1990, that experience didn’t just disappear.

It was still there—in her body, in her stress, in what had not been given space to heal.

And that means I didn’t just inherit a family line.

I inherited conditions.

I inherited what had been carried, what had been endured, and what had never been fully acknowledged.

Because what people are rooted in doesn’t start when they are born.
It starts before that.

It starts in what is already present—in the soil they come from.

That is why it is not enough to look at outcomes without looking at conditions.

Because if the soil has been overworked, depleted, or harmed, then what grows from it will reflect that—not because it is flawed, but because of what it was given to grow from.

When I think about inheritance, I do not only think about family names, photographs, or stories.

I think about the body.

My parents and I all live with severe neck and back pain. Over the years, I have often found myself wondering about the ways our experiences overlap and the ways they do not. I cannot say with certainty where every ache comes from, but I often find myself asking deeper questions about what is carried forward.

Science has increasingly shown that trauma does not always end with the person who experiences it. Researchers studying intergenerational and multigenerational trauma have found evidence that severe stress and adversity can affect future generations in complex ways. While trauma is not inherited in a simple or predictable manner, the body often carries traces of what came before.

What fascinates me even more is the reality that generations are connected long before birth. Female infants are born carrying the eggs that may one day become their children. In a biological sense, multiple generations can exist within one body at the same time.

I find myself returning to that idea often.

Because it changes the way I think about healing.

If trauma can be carried forward, then perhaps healing can be carried forward too.

If fear, stress, and survival can leave their mark, then love, safety, stability, and restoration matter just as much.

When I look at my mother, I do not just see the woman who raised me. I see a young girl working cotton fields. I see someone carrying burdens that should never have belonged to a child. And when I look at myself, I cannot separate my story entirely from hers.

The beginning matters.

And sometimes the beginning starts long before we arrive.

As I reflected on what it means to carry history within the body, I found myself returning to a piece I wrote called Trauma in My Bones. It became a way of expressing something I struggle to explain through research alone—the feeling of living in the present while carrying histories that began long before I was born.

In conversation,
 someone said
 grief
 is linear.

I paused.

Because something in my body
 said—
 no.

Deep inside,
 I questioned it.
 I needed to look it up
 for myself.

What I found
 was a hard no—
 with a silent
 yes.

My body
 is in 2026,

but my nervous system…
 my nervous system
 is in
 1955,
 1963,
 1981,
 1987.

I live forward— but I feel in generations.

These years live in me.

1955

The year Emmett Till was murdered.

1963

The bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama— four young Black girls killed, a fifth permanently injured.

1981

The year my mother—
 thirteen years old—
 worked in cotton fields.

1987

The year
 she stopped.

She broke free
 through marriage
 to my father.

I was born
 in 1990.

And when you understand something
 systemically,
you stop asking,

“What’s wrong with me?”

and you start asking,

“What shaped me?”

What shaped me
 was trauma—
 rooted in a history
 my body didn’t choose,
 but learned
 how to survive inside.

Intentional.
 Systemic.
 Oppression.

No wonder
 I feel this weight
 in my body.

My mother
 was still carrying the trauma
 she met in those fields
 while she was
 carrying
 me.

What a weight to carry.

Almost ground-shaking.
 Almost back-breaking.

Is this why
 my mother’s back aches?

Is this why
 mine hurts too?

I wonder.

Because my back hurts.
 My God…
 how it aches.

Her body held
 what the fields demanded.

Her nervous system
 never fully rested—
 still running,
 still fearing,
 still dodging
 the gun pointed at her
 and her siblings.

And still…
 I feel it.

My nervous system remembers
 what she could not
 let go.

Grief does not travel
 in a straight line.

It bends.
 It twists.

It folds history
 into the body,

so that what happened
 long ago
 still lives
 in me
 today.

I grieve
 my mother’s lost childhood.

I grieve
 the life I might have had
 if my body
 had not carried
 that pain.

I grieve
 for the generations of families
 who have carried this pain
 in their bodies,
 in their bones.

And I grieve
 my grief.

But still—
 I am thankful.

Thankful
 for conversations
 with my God.

I asked God,
 Help me let this weight go.

God said,
 “It was never yours
 to carry.”

I asked God,
 Then how
 do I let it go?

God said,
 Keep going.

I said,
 But God…
 it keeps raining.

And God replied,
 Then keep growing.

So I stand here today,
 still breathing,
 still remembering,
 and still healing.

Not because the pain is gone,
 but because I’m growing
 and resting through the pain.

I am sowing seeds.
 I am.

The more I researched reparations and structural inequality, the more I realized that repair is not only about policy. It is also about understanding what people have been carrying for generations.

For me, that understanding led me back to questions of lineage, identity, and what becomes possible when people are finally given access to the histories that were disrupted, erased, or taken from them.

Why Reparations Are Still Being Asked For

Reparations are often talked about as if they are only about the past.

But the truth is, the past has never stayed in the past.

It lives in:

• Neighborhoods shaped by redlining
• Schools shaped by funding disparities
• Healthcare systems with unequal outcomes
• Criminal justice systems that punish differently
• Generational gaps in wealth and opportunity

These are not random patterns. They are the result of systems that have shaped who has access to resources—and who does not.

So when people talk about reparations, they are not just talking about history.They are talking about conditions that still exist.

Repair Is Not a Check

One of the biggest misunderstandings about reparations is that they are only about money.

But repair, if it is honest, has to be deeper than a check.

It has to include:

• Education
• Healthcare
• Mental health support
• Housing stability
• Land access
• Safety
• And the right to know where one comes from

Because what was taken wasn’t just labor.

It was identity. It was lineage. It was connection.

For many Black families, genealogy is not just curiosity—it’s recovery.

Lineage, Systems, and What We Can Access

There was another moment that shifted how I think about repair.

While I was in a Women and Crime class, a Sex Crime detective with JSO came in to speak with us about the cases she works on. She explained how law enforcement uses DNA databases like GEDmatch and FamilyTreeDNA to identify suspects and even trace family lines back to the 1800s.

I had heard of this before, but hearing it explained in that way made it land differently.

It made me wonder how systems can use lineage so precisely for investigation—how they can reconstruct family histories, identify connections, and trace people across generations—yet so many Black families are still left without access to that same clarity for healing.

For many of us, genealogy is not just curiosity. It is recovery.

It is trying to piece together what was broken, erased, or taken.

I feel that absence personally. Because of the disruption caused by slavery, I have not been able to fully trace or recover my maternal family’s lineage.

And that raises a deeper question:

If lineage is treated as valuable enough to solve crimes, why is it not treated as valuable enough to restore identity?

Naming Repeated Harm

There was another moment in that same class that stayed with me.

I asked the detective at what point someone is considered a serial rapist, and she answered: after two victims.

That answer stayed with me.

Because if two repeated acts are enough for us to recognize a pattern, then what do we call the repeated violation that occurred under slavery?

What do we call the forced breeding, the sexual violence, the bodily control, and the use of Black bodies for labor and reproduction?

What do we call it when that violation was not hidden, but written into the structure of the country itself?

At some point, the language has to get honest.

That was not only abuse.
That was a system of repeated violation.

A system that operated across generations, across families, and across time.

And if we are able to recognize patterns of harm at the individual level, then we should also be able to recognize them at the structural level.

Because when harm is repeated, normalized, and sustained over time, it becomes something more than isolated acts.

It becomes a system.

And when harm operates at that level, repair cannot be minimal.

When people hear the phrase “structural inequality,” it can sound distant or abstract. But often, it shows up in everyday interactions with institutions.

I have felt it while dealing with healthcare systems, schools, banks, homeowners associations, childcare providers, and even while trying to further my own education.

What stands out is not always one dramatic event.

It is the accumulation.

It is the repeated experience of being told different things by different people. It is conflicting records. Missing information. Endless paperwork. Being transferred from office to office. Having to prove, explain, document, and advocate for yourself over and over again.

From the outside, these experiences can seem small.

But when the burden consistently falls on the same people, they stop feeling small.

They become exhausting.

Over time, I began to realize that structural harm is not always loud. Sometimes it appears as confusion. Sometimes it appears as delay. Sometimes it appears as systems that are technically functioning, yet still leave people carrying the weight of navigating them alone.

The harm is often found in that imbalance of power.

One side holds the records, the policies, the authority, and the decision-making power. The other side is left trying to make sense of it all while protecting their family, their housing, their education, their health, or their future.

That experience has shaped the way I think about reparative justice.

Because repair is not only about correcting historic wrongs. It is also about creating systems that are transparent, humane, and accountable to the people they serve.

People should not have to fight so hard simply to access what they need.

And when they do, we have to ask whether the system is truly serving them—or whether it is asking them to carry burdens that should never have been theirs in the first place.

When Systems Respond to Harm with Punishment

Another layer of this shows up in how systems respond to trauma.

Instead of addressing root causes, systems often criminalize survival.

People navigating poverty, grief, or instability are often met with punishment instead of support. And those patterns are not evenly distributed—they fall hardest on Black and Brown communities.

This is what structural harm looks like:
Not one moment.
Not one system.
But a pattern that repeats.

While researching mass incarceration, I came across the work of Michele Goodwin, a legal scholar, public health expert, and advocate whose work focuses on race, gender, reproductive justice, and the criminal legal system. In her TED Talk on incarcerated women, she discusses the racial disparities that exist throughout the American justice system and the ways institutions often respond to vulnerability with punishment rather than support.

One statistic from her work stayed with me.

Goodwin points out that Black men and Black women face dramatically higher risks of incarceration than their white counterparts. These are not small differences. They are significant disparities that reveal patterns in who is most likely to be criminalized, punished, and pushed deeper into systems that are difficult to escape.

That reality forces me to ask harder questions.

Why are some communities more heavily policed than others?

Why are some groups more likely to be arrested, prosecuted, incarcerated, and burdened with lifelong consequences?

And what role do history, poverty, housing, education, and opportunity play in shaping those outcomes?

Too often, statistics are presented without context.

People see the numbers but never ask what produced them.

They see the outcome without looking at the conditions.

But that is exactly why I keep returning to the soil.

If one community has spent generations facing barriers to housing, wealth, education, healthcare, and opportunity, then we cannot honestly evaluate outcomes without acknowledging those conditions.

This does not mean individuals are free from responsibility for their actions.

It means that accountability and understanding must exist together.

Because justice should not only ask what happened.

It should also ask why certain patterns continue to appear generation after generation.

When I look at the disparities in arrest and incarceration rates between Black and white Americans, I do not just see individual choices.

I see systems.

I see history.

I see policy.

And I see the long-term consequences of what happens when communities are expected to grow in damaged soil.

If we only focus on who was arrested and never ask what shaped the conditions around them, then we risk mistaking the symptom for the cause.

While researching for my thesis, I came across a ProPublica article about a young Florida woman who was taken to court while she was in labor because she was refusing a C-section that doctors wanted her to undergo.

What made the story especially difficult for me to read is that I know her personally.

With her permission, I want to acknowledge how much her story stayed with me.

Reading the article, I could not stop thinking about the reality of what was happening. A woman was in one of the most vulnerable moments of her life—actively giving birth—while legal proceedings were taking place regarding decisions about her own body.

The story raised a question that I continue to sit with:

At what point does care become control?

I understand that medical situations can be complex. I understand that people may have different opinions about the decisions involved. But what stayed with me was not simply the legal or medical debate.

What stayed with me was the reminder that institutions often hold tremendous power during moments when people are at their most vulnerable.

As a woman and a mother, that reality unsettled me.

It also reminded me that structural issues are never just theoretical. They are lived. They happen to real people. They happen in hospitals, courtrooms, schools, neighborhoods, and homes.

When I think about reparative justice, I think about more than financial repair. I think about dignity. I think about trust. I think about the ability to make decisions about your own life and body without unnecessary intrusion or coercion.

Because repair is not only about restoring what was taken.

It is also about restoring agency.

And if we are serious about healing, then we have to ask whether our systems are truly caring for people—or simply controlling them in ways we have learned to accept.

When Stories Become Structures

As someone majoring in film and minoring in sociology, I cannot talk about structural inequality without talking about storytelling.

Stories do more than entertain us. They shape how we understand the world, how we see one another, and what we come to believe is normal. Over time, those beliefs influence policies, institutions, and social attitudes.

Film has played a powerful role in shaping racial narratives in the United States.

One of the clearest examples is The Birth of a Nation (1915), a film that portrayed Black people as dangerous and uncivilized while presenting the Ku Klux Klan as heroes. The film became one of the most influential movies in American history, helping reinforce racist stereotypes and contributing to the resurgence of the Klan. Its impact extended far beyond the screen because it helped shape public perception of who was considered a threat and who was considered worthy of protection.

Another important example is The Jazz Singer (1927), often celebrated as the first feature-length “talkie.” Yet the film also relied heavily on blackface performance, a tradition in which white performers caricatured and mocked Black people for entertainment. While the film is frequently remembered for its technological significance, conversations about race and representation are often treated as secondary.

That matters.

Because what society chooses to remember is just as important as what it chooses to forget.

As someone studying film, I have come to see that media does not simply reflect existing beliefs. It helps create them. Repeated portrayals of certain groups as dangerous, criminal, inferior, or less deserving can become part of the cultural soil from which future policies and attitudes grow.

Stories shape perception.

Perception shapes behavior.

Behavior shapes systems.

And over time, those systems shape people’s lives.

That is why representation alone is not enough. Structural change in media requires access to authorship, funding, production, and distribution. It requires making room for people to tell their own stories rather than continually being spoken for through the lens of others.

Reparations Are About Restoring Balance

Reparations are not about creating advantage.

They are about restoring balance.

There are historical examples where reparations have been attempted—whether through compensation, apology, or policy change. But many of those efforts have been incomplete. They did not fully restore what was lost, nor did they eliminate the conditions that caused harm in the first place.

That matters.

Because if harm was systemic, repair cannot come in pieces.

What Repair Actually Requires

If we are serious about repair, it has to reach the foundation.

That means:

• Addressing structural inequality
• Restoring access to resources
• Supporting mental and emotional healing
• Repairing disrupted lineage
• And changing the conditions people are expected to grow within

Because you cannot expect different outcomes from the same soil.

Why the Soil Matters

We cannot judge what grows without understanding what it was planted in.

And if we want different outcomes—real outcomes, equitable outcomes—then we have to be willing to repair the foundation.

Not just acknowledge it.
Not just talk about it.
But repair it.

Part of that repair also requires us to be honest about what damaged the soil in the first place.

Fear has played a powerful role in shaping our institutions, our policies, and our relationships with one another. Throughout history, fear has been used to justify separation, exclusion, control, punishment, and inequality. It has shaped who is seen as a threat and who is seen as deserving of protection.

That fear has come at a cost.

It has harmed Black communities through generations of oppression, displacement, violence, and exclusion. But it has also limited our collective ability to see one another fully, to tell the truth about our history, and to build something healthier together.

Repair is not about replacing one form of harm with another.

It is about creating the conditions for healing.

Healing for those who inherited the weight of oppression.

Healing for those who inherited narratives rooted in fear.

Healing for communities that have been divided from one another.

Healing for a nation still struggling to reconcile its past with its future.

Because if trauma can be carried forward, then perhaps healing can be carried forward too.

If fear can be taught, then understanding can be taught.

If systems can be built, then systems can be rebuilt.

And if we are serious about blooming in every community, then we have to be just as serious about the soil.

That, to me, is what reparative justice means.

Stay Soulful

— Deshonna Buchanan
Founder, Sunflower Soul Studios
Storytelling | Healing | Structural Truth