NEW BOOK — 2025

WHITE WORK AND REPARATIVE GENEALOGY  
Reckoning with Ancestral Debt as a Path to Racial Reparations
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2025)

Mary Watkins

What does it mean to reckon with a legacy of white supremacy? White Work and Reparative Genealogy invites white-identifying readers on a courageous journey into the heart of ancestral memory, historical accountability, and racial repair.

Mary Watkins traces her family’s lineage from 1607 Jamestown through generations of slave ownership and racial violence in the American South. Blending personal narrative, historical research, and psychological insight, Watkins models a practice of “white work”—a form of reparative genealogy that confronts the silences and distortions in white family histories. With reflective questions at the end of each chapter, this book offers practical tools for readers ready to explore their own histories and take action toward racial reparations.

This is a book for those who seek to move through guilt and shame—not around them—toward healing, solidarity, and shared liberation.

Editorial Reviews of White Work and Reparative Genealogy:

“Through unflinching and impeccable scholarship, White Work and Reparative Genealogy weaves separated narratives of slave/owner; black/white; self/other; past/present into a single, silken thread of reckoning. Not only is “the past, not even past,” it lives within us all in every cell, defining our present and, absent recognition, condemning the future. White Work and Reparative Genealogy leaves us naked before the truth demanding personal accountability for what and how we each became who we are.” (G.A. Bradshaw, Founder, The Kerulos Center for Nonviolence)

“Of essential relevance for the present moment, this book demonstrates just how deeply racism is embedded in white American society and what is involved in the process of repair. As a descendant of enslavers, Watkins leads by example. She investigates her family’s slave owning history and helps readers understand the importance of reparative genealogy or “white work.” Watkins shows us that truth-telling must begin with a willingness to uncover painful personal histories that have been silenced and discarded. With Watkins we are fortunate to have an expert guide to lead the way.” (Roger Frie, author of “Not in My Family: German Memory and Responsibility after the Holocaust”)

“This book is meant to help those of us who are white to engage in a process of deep ancestral recovery and committed action. While personal and tied to the study of one’s family history, Watkins shows us that such a process is only complete when white Americans choose to carry forward a radical vision of reparations, or what W.E.B. DuBois called, “Abolition Democracy.” Such a vision tends to the material, traumatic, and intergenerational impacts of white supremacy on Black communities while ushering in the society that working people of all colors desperately need, one where workplace democracies reign, economic rights are guaranteed, the natural world we call home is restored, and the solidarity of the masses is no longer broken by manufactured racial division.” (David Dean, political educator and author of the forthcoming book, “Roots Deeper than Whiteness”)

“If the question is (and how can it not be) what to do about white supremacy, White Work and Reparative Genealogy is our guide. Watkins tells a story of radical social transformation—it’s history, hesitancies, imperative, ethics and praxis. It’s a blueprint for how to address racial debt and usher in a more just world.” (Deanne Bell, Associate Professor, Race, Education and Social Justice, University of Birmingham)

“White Work and Reparative Genealogy is “history from the heart” at its very finest. Bravely working through her ignorance about a centuries-long ancestral history of enslaving and racism, Watkins lays out a clear path of repair for white readers no longer willing to turn a blind eye to slavery and its destructive afterlives.” (Lynne Layton, author of “Toward a Social Psychoanalysis: Culture, Character, and Normative Unconscious Processes”)

“A unique and valuable read, White Work and Reparative Genealogy, by Mary Watkins, weaves together the results of a deep dive into her family history and its links to specific, place-based racism and enslavement with psychological theory and possibilities for reparative action. The story and analysis are compelling and insightful, encouraging white readers to cultivate the inner strength and humility necessary for white people to face our collective history and engage in reparative work for the sake of ourselves and the broader community.” (Shelly Tochluk, author of “Witnessing Whiteness: The Journey into Racial Awareness and Antiracist Action”)

“In this carefully researched and clearly written “intervention in current struggles over historical memory,” psychologist Mary Watkins articulates through her settler ancestral narrative the systemic impacts of chattel slavery, Jim Crow, and continuing racial injustice. Her moral discipline of practicing truth over comfort models curiosity and humility over defensiveness and denial, such as reading slave narratives to unmask forgotten or silenced family storylines that perpetuate a “fog of unknowing.” Her focus on supporting Black-led efforts for reparations is a critical catechism for white settlers in the US. Watkins’ masterful exploration of what I call “landlines, bloodlines and songlines” is both personally invitational and politically strategic.” (Elaine Enns, co-author of “Healing Haunted Histories: A Settler Discipleship of Decolonization”)

“Courageously reckoning with her ancestors’ histories and honestly exploring her own personal stories, Mary Watkins raises an essential inquiry. In the wake of colonialism, slavery, systemic white supremacy and capitalism, what is the work of white people, now? By detailing her commitment to reparative action rooted in systems of care, Mary offers a path for white settlers to move forward in integrity, wholeness, and right relations.” (Hilary Giovale, author of “Becoming a Good Relative: Calling White Settlers toward Truth, Healing, and Repair”)

“This is the book I’ve been waiting for. Reading White Work and Reparative Genealogy feels like sitting with the wise and unflinching elder I know I need. Mary Watkins brings her lifetime of liberatory scholarship, spiritual inquiry, and community-rooted practice to the work of racial reckoning and repair. She speaks directly to those of us called to do the inner and ancestral work that can make reparations possible. Her words hold the grief, clarity, and vision we need to move toward long overdue action. As someone who supports white people to redistribute inherited wealth, I know how needed this book is—for grounding, for guidance, and for the long haul.” (Morgan Curtis, ‘Ancestors & Money’ Cohort Facilitator)

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Mutual Accompaniment
and the Creation of the Commons

Mary Watkins; With a Foreword by George Lipsitz and a Contribution by G. A. Bradshaw

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A landmark book, published in 2019, that maps a radical model
not only for the “helping” professions but for the work of solidarity

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This timely and pathbreaking volume maps a radical model of accompaniment, exploring its profound implications for solidarity. Psychosocial and ecological accompaniment is a mode of responsive assistance that combines psychosocial understanding with political and cultural action. Accompaniment—grounded in horizontality, interdependence, and potential mutuality—moves away from hierarchical and unidirectional helping-profession approaches that decontextualize suffering. Watkins envisions a powerful paradigm of mutual solidarity with profound implications for creating commons in the face of societal division and indifference to suffering.

Mary Watkins, a leading voice in liberation psychology, is co-author of Toward Psychologies of Liberation, Up Against the Wall: Re-Imagining the U.S.-Mexico Border, and Talking with Young Children about Adoption, and is author of Waking Dreams and Invisible Guests: The Development of Imaginal Dialogues. She is co-founder of the Community, Liberation, Indigenous, and Eco-Psychologies graduate specialization at Pacifica Graduate Institute.

Read Review in Friends Journal

Read more at Yale Univ. Press website. 

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Acompañamiento Mutuo y la Creación de la Vida en Comunidad
Traducción al español de Montse Chanivet

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Up Against the Wall   (2014) As increasing global economic disparities, violence, and climate change provoke a rising tide of forced migration, many countries and local communities are responding by building walls—literal and metaphorical—between citizens and newcomers. Up Against the Wall: Re-imagining the U.S.-Mexico Border examines the temptation to construct such walls through a penetrating analysis of the U.S. wall at the U.S.-Mexico border, as well as investigating the walling out of Mexicans in local communities. Calling into question the building of a wall against a friendly neighboring nation, Up Against the Wall offers an analysis of the differences between borders and boundaries. This analysis opens the way to envisioning alternatives to the stark and policed divisions that are imposed by walls of all kinds.



Tracing the consequences of imperialism and colonization as citizens grapple with new migrant neighbors, the book paints compelling examples from key locales affected by the wall—Nogales, Arizona vs. Nogales, Sonora; Tijuana/San Diego; and the lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas. An extended case study of Santa Barbara describes the creation of an internal colony in the aftermath of the U.S. conquest of Mexican land, a history that is relevant to many U.S. cities and towns.Ranging from human rights issues in the wake of massive global migration to the role of national restorative shame in the United States for the treatment of Mexicans since 1848, the authors delve into the broad repercussions of the unjust and often tragic consequences of excluding others through walled structures along with the withholding of citizenship and full societal inclusion. Through the lens of a detailed examination of forced migration from Mexico to the United States, this transdisciplinary text, drawing on philosophy, psychology, and political theory, opens up multiple insights into how nations and communities can coexist with more justice and more compassion.

Chapter 5:  The Creation of an Internal Colony
Santa Barbara, a City Divided Against Itself

– See more at: https://utpress.utexas.edu/index.php/books/casupa#sthash.skrOH7Qg.dpuf

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Toward Psychologies Of Liberation “This landmark book takes us on an unforgettable journey across disciplines, countries, spiritualities, and techniques to teach us twenty-first century psychologies of liberation. Authors Watkins and Shulman transform the discipline of psychology, showing us its connections to all disciplines concerned with liberating the imagination. Across international fields of difference, these authors never give up the prize: social and psychic emancipation. In doing so, they define what “decoloniality” means for the twenty-first century.”



Chela Sandoval, Associate Professor of Liberation Philosophy; Chair, Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara

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Spanish Edition: Hacia Psicologías de Liberación

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Edição Portuguesa/Portuguese Edition:

Em Direção às Psicologias da Libertação

Clique aqui para baixar o arquivo PDF

 

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Opening to the Imaginal: Waking Dreams and Invisible Guests
New Two-Volume Compendium Edition:     (order here)

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Talking With Young Children About Adoption. Review “Current wisdom holds that adoptive parents should talk with their child about adoption as early as possible. But no guidelines exist to prepare parents for the various ways their children might respond when these conversations take place. In this wise and sympathetic book, a clinical psychologist and a psychiatrist, both adoptive mothers, discuss how young children make sense of the fact that they are adopted, how it might appear in their play, and what worries they and their parents may have. Accounts by twenty adoptive parents of conversations about adoption with their children, from ages two to ten, graphically convey what the process of sharing about adoption is like.”