Psychological reparations: Healing the harms of racism

The field of psychology can offer much in the realm of internal healing and symbiotic repair. When I was an early career psychologist, I considered tools, like therapy and racial socialization, or the communication between parent and child about race and racism, which could contribute to redressing racial stress and trauma for Black families. And yet now, as a clinical psychologist who approaches midcareer status interrogating these tools, I am deeply vested in how my training and advocacy can be applied to go beyond solely individual or familial interventions. As such, I am investigating reparations-a policy-oriented tool that can help bring both material and mental health advances to Black Americans-as a fundamentally psychological practice in nature. Through this autoethnographic text, I ask how we can support the reparations movement to benefit more from psychological strategies and how our field can lend tools to advance the current momentum more favorably into public and private sectors. Although my focus on Black American individuals, families, and communities intends for them to be the beneficiaries of psychological reparations in this introductory prose, advancing reparations policies and practices through a psychological lens can provide much-needed pedagogy, research, and programming that purports to generate subsequent change for all Americans. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).