By Kim Poole, Teaching Artist Institute, future WILPF Africa Diaspora Section
As Juneteenth approaches, there is an opportunity to move beyond commemoration and into practice by examining what reparations could be within our own communities and relationships through a shift toward cultural regeneration.
For generations, systems built on the exploitation of African people have shaped the very architecture of the modern world. As the United States approaches 250 years of existence, the nation continues to wrestle with the unresolved contradictions embedded in its founding. To understand the birth of this nation, nothing less than a 500-year historical lens will do.
The modern reparations movement in the United States did not begin recently. In 1783, Belinda Sutton, formerly enslaved by the Royall family, successfully petitioned Massachusetts for financial support after her enslaver fled to Canada. Nearly a century later, Henrietta Wood sued the man who kidnapped and illegally re-enslaved her after emancipation and won restitution in 1878. Their cases remain early examples of Black people asserting legal personhood and demanding repair within systems designed to deny both.
Today, the language of reparations is finally gaining global attention. Following the African Union’s declaration of 2025 as the Year of Reparations, international conversations have accelerated across policy spaces and civil society alike.
On March 24, 2026, Ghana led a historic United Nations General Assembly resolution declaring the transatlantic trafficking of enslaved Africans and racialized chattel enslavement of Africans “the gravest crime against humanity.” The resolution passed with 123 countries voting in favor.
Argentina, Israel, and the United States voted against the resolution, while 52 countries abstained. That reality clarifies the present moment. Still awaiting the unfulfilled promise of “40 acres and a mule,” first issued through General William T. Sherman’s Special Field Order No. 15 and later reversed under President Andrew Johnson, Juneteenth continues to mark the distance between recognition and repair.
The gross violation of the human rights of African people in the United States did not end with emancipation. Yet African Americans have continued to assert personhood, creatively, despite systems structured against them.
The U.N.’s basic principles on the right to remedy and reparation for victims of gross violations of international human rights outline five forms of reparations: restitution, compensation, rehabilitation, satisfaction, and guarantees of non-repetition. These principles provide an important foundation for accountability and redress.
The question that remains is how repair translates into lived conditions where people of African descent can create, belong, and thrive on their own terms.
The transatlantic system of enslavement and colonial expansion disrupted relationships to land, fractured systems of knowledge, and reshaped cultural continuity. These impacts remain present in economic structures, social systems, and cultural life. Financial compensation, on its own, does not transform the conditions that enabled exploitation. Efforts to reconnect the diaspora to Africa often encounter realities shaped by colonial borders and global economic constraints.
The Cultural Reparations Framework emerges from an inherited, generational audacity of hope, from the entitlement to personhood Black people in the United States have asserted across centuries, and from a demand for dignity that exceeds the limits of justice as repair. It proposes a sixth principle within reparations: regeneration.
Regeneration focuses on creating the conditions for life to flourish. It expands the scope of reparations to include cultural vitality, community-defined value, and the restoration of systems that sustain identity, creativity, and belonging. This approach is grounded in African epistemic sovereignty: the authority of African and diasporic people to define, produce, and live within their own systems of knowledge and meaning.
Within this framework, restitution restores connection, compensation recognizes cultural and communal value, and rehabilitation reconnects people to land, spirit, and each other. Regeneration ensures that these efforts lead to sustained conditions for growth and self-determination.
Practice repair “glocally” by beginning with the places, relationships, and institutions already within reach. Examine how histories of extraction, exclusion, and erasure continue to shape local conditions; then, consider how resources can be redirected toward repair. This may include supporting Black-led cultural work, protecting community memory, investing in cooperative economies, restoring our relationships with language and land, funding youth identity programs, or changing how institutions value African diasporic knowledge.
Practiced this way, Juneteenth becomes a yearly invitation to examine what repair requires where we are, while remaining connected to a glocal movements.
Reparations take shape through decisions made within communities and through resulting policies. Cultural practice shapes how these efforts take root and endure. The visible outcomes of repair are shaped by the invisible values that guide them.
This Juneteenth offers an opportunity to reflect on what repair requires in practice. Our collective work cultivates an imagination that moves through justice to joy.
Contact the author: taitours.org@gmail.com
