How to repair harm — in relationships and nations | Aria Florant

Aria Florant (0:00)

No matter your racial identity, most of us have felt some kind of shame about race in America. For people of color, it's feeling less than, or like we don't belong in a system that actually wasn't built for us.

Or for white folks, it's not wanting to feel like the bad guy.

Elise Hu (0:23)

You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu.

Bridge builder Aria Florant believes a lot of us are carrying that shame, often without even realizing it. In her view, it comes in large part from the fact that America has never fully reckoned with the harms of slavery, let alone repaired them. Her answer starts with redefining a word that's often misunderstood.

Aria Florant (0:50)

To heal these wounds, we need repair, also known as comprehensive reparations. That's what the word means, by the way, from the Latin root, reparare, to repair.

Most people think that reparations are just about money. But the United Nations' official definition has always gone far beyond the financial. Reparations are about holistic repair, making amends in structural, symbolic, and material ways.

Elise Hu (1:22)

In her talk, Aria makes the case that America needs to develop a better culture of repair, one where making amends for harm is common sense, from our closest relationships all the way up to the country as a whole.

And she lays out a framework she believes can work at every one of those levels. That's coming up right after a short break.

SPEAKER_3 (1:51)

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Elise Hu (2:32)

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And now our TED Talk of the day.

Aria Florant (4:01)

We all deal with conflict and the harm that often comes with it. With our spouses, our parents, our friends. More than a third of Americans say that they've gone no contact with a friend or family member in the past year. And that figure rises to 60 percent among Gen Z. We live in a culture that promotes disposability, from swiping left to cancel culture. We think we can just move on, but moving on without repair can leave something behind. Shame. And shame keeps that cycle of harm spinning. For me, this came to light seven years ago, when I started an organization with an old friend from college. I was excited to be an entrepreneur and so invested in our work. But less than a year in to going full time, Garrett and I were having so many issues that he decided to leave. Now, breakups of any kind are terrible, but this one was particularly bad, because our organization was focused on racial repair. And here we were, a black biracial woman and a white man, and we couldn't even do that repair ourselves.