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

0:00No 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. 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. Bridgebuilder Aria Florent 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.

0:45Her answer starts with redefining a word that's often misunderstood. 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. In her talk, Aria makes the case that America needs to develop a better culture of repair when we're making amends for harm is common sense from our closest relationships all the way up to the country as a whole.

1:35And she lays out a framework she believes can work at every one of those levels. That's coming up right after a short break.

1:50Harvard Business School Executive Education creates powerful connections for leaders from around the world. Their programs strengthen organizations and individuals by deepening relationships and fostering new ones. Participants leave with lifelong friends, new potential business partners, and a powerful globe-spanning network of fellow changemakers. Learn more at hbs.me slash breakthrough. That's hbs.me slash breakthrough. This episode is brought to you by TikTok. I used to think great work was about being in the right headspace. Then I found a TikTok video that made me think about my physical space.

2:31An interior designer explores how things like ceiling height and room size might influence how we think. Now I wonder how much of our environment shapes our work without us noticing. Now I'm looking at my workspace, asking what kind of thinking I'm making room for. On TikTok, one idea can change how you see something you thought you knew. Your next discovery is waiting on TikTok. This message is brought to you by Apple Card. Ah, fall, that cozy season where we swap the swimwear for sweaters and sunnies for scarves. But before the Halloween decorations are put away or the Thanksgiving table has been set, there's already holly jolly music playing in the grocery store, reminding you that the year is coming to a close.

3:16Time to kick end of year into high gear. When you use Apple Card with Apple Pay, you earn 2 % daily cash back on all purchases, including food, decorations, gifts, and more. Get a head start on your end-of-year purchases. Apply for your Apple Card in the Wallet app on your iPhone today and start using it right away with Apple Pay. Subject to credit approval, Apple Card is issued by Goldman Sachs, Bank USA, Salt Lake City Branch, Terms and more at AppleCard.com.

3:48And now our TED Talk of the day. 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.

4:43I was excited to be an entrepreneur and so invested in our work. But less than a year into 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. I had worked in racial justice for years and built my identity on being good at it. So when Garrett left, I felt like a failure, and I was consumed with shame that then caused more issues. I was afraid to raise hard but necessary conversations with my team.

5:40I was timid in external meetings, afraid to build relationships with my peers because deep down I thought there was something wrong with me. I set standards of perfection that were impossible to meet, and then that just caused more shame. And I constantly questioned my judgment. At my lowest low, I questioned my entire worth on this earth. It took me and Garrett a year and a half to come back to each other and to begin a repair process. But when we did, it transformed us. And I'm persuaded that America needs that transformation, too. Because right now, we are consumed with shame. No matter your racial identity, most of us have felt some kind of shame about race in America.

6:34For 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. You might be thinking, I don't feel shame. Or you might be thinking, they definitely don't feel shame. But psychologists agree that shame doesn't need to be conscious to be operating. It still impacts how we act, what we avoid, and who we become. This collective shame that we're holding is in large part because we've never repaired the harms of slavery. We've never fully confronted the shame of it. It shouldn't be controversial to talk about slavery or to teach the history in schools or to acknowledge that when enslaved people were freed, they were freed into systems that were designed to keep them from ever catching up.

7:38Compound interest? Just one of them. Instead, we deny the way that slavery's tentacles still impact society today. Most people think that the black-white wealth gap is closing, but it's not. It's widening. This is just one picture of what unrepaired structural harm looks like. 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.

8:37This is what inspired me and Garrett to co-found Liberation Ventures in the first place, to accelerate the reparations movement. There are dozens of cities and states doing this work across the country. It's happening, y 'all. Sometimes people say to me, slavery was so long ago, or my family didn't own slaves. I like to invoke writer Isabel Wilkerson. She said, America is like an old house with a crumbling foundation. We may not have built the house, but if we want to continue living in it, it's our job to fix it. So how do we fix it? Fixing it starts with building a culture of repair, A culture where repair is common sense and commonplace, and everyone has the skill and will to repair harm anytime it's caused.

9:37Now, I used to be a management consultant, for better or worse. And there they teach you to break down big challenges into their component parts. So we dug into the research and came to define repair as four components in an iterative cycle. Reckoning, acknowledgement, accountability, and redress. These four steps have been used in countries all over the world to transition out of harmful periods, often authoritarian ones, and into democracy. And their underlying logic works on a small scale, too. So me and Garrett used this framework, and you can use it to repair in your lives, too. You can start at any point on the cycle, but I'll start with reckoning, which means learning, really understanding the full truth of how harm was caused.

10:38Garrett and I sat down with a facilitator and shared the details of our experiences with each other. And let me tell you, when I started, I had so much going on in my body, I could barely speak words. But we kept trying until we had a shared understanding of what went wrong. At the societal level, over 50 countries have gone through at-scale reckoning processes. The most famous is South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which spent seven years documenting the harms of apartheid. They held 2 ,500 public hearings, took 21 ,000 statements from victims, 2 ,000 of those people read their stories aloud.

11:24This level of truth-telling has no American equivalent, at least not yet. The next is acknowledgement, which means naming and voicing that harm in public, saying, yes, this happened. Garrett and I spent hours reflecting each other's stories back to each other so that we both felt seen and heard. At the societal level, we can look to post-war Germany and how they healed after the atrocities of the Holocaust. Germany built acknowledgement into physical space at extraordinary scale. They built around 300 memorial sites, and 70 ,000 small brass plaques were installed in front of the last known addresses of Holocaust victims.

12:17In Germany, Holocaust education is required in every school. Next, accountability, which means taking ownership and committing to change. I took what I learned from the process I went through with Garrett and put practices in place at Liberation Ventures to help ensure that that kind of conflict and harm never happens again. And at the macro level, we can look to Colombia. After 52 years of conflict, 5 million people displaced, 200 ,000 people killed, the Colombian government took accountability for healing. they passed a victim's law, which was designed to repair not only physical harm, but also psychological trauma.

13:09And then, two years later, they passed a universal mental health care law for everyone, not just victims. Finally, redress. Acts of restitution, financial compensation, returning what was taken, healing the wound. For me and Garrett, this mostly looks like finding small ways to help each other in each of our respective endeavors. He helped me with this talk. And at the societal level, we can look right here at home. In 1988, President Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act, which acknowledged that the federal government had forcibly incarcerated 120 ,000 Japanese Americans without due process. $20 ,000 was paid to each survivor, totaling approximately$1.6 billion.

14:08And that program was implemented over multiple presidential administrations from both parties. And by the way, Germany has also made ongoing payments to Holocaust survivors and descendants of victims. They've paid almost 100 billion euros over time. Reckoning, acknowledgement, accountability, and redress. Repair requires all four because together they make each other real. Each of these stories is an example of a country choosing to move through shame and toward repair. and none of them are perfect. All of them are unfinished and some of them have been intentionally tested, eroded or undone. But we can't do nothing just because we can't do everything.

15:09If all of these countries can do it, so can we. Building a culture of repair starts with each of us in our own lives. A few years ago, I was at home for the Christmas holidays in Colorado, and I was sitting on the couch across from my mom when she looked up from her phone and asked me, are you ashamed of me because I'm white? I knew why she was asking, but I pretended not to. I denied it because I didn't want to face it. but she had been looking at photos that I had posted on social media of my family over the holidays, and I hadn't posted a single one of her. And when I got back to my apartment in Brooklyn a couple days later, I realized I don't have any pictures of her on my wall either.

16:13My shame about my mom's whiteness, and therefore the whiteness in me, it's not about my mom. It's shame about where the story of American slavery stalls, with harm to millions of people across centuries. I started working through this shame, through acknowledgement. I stopped hiding my whiteness, and I started telling that story publicly, very publicly today. And over time, I started to feel more whole. I was claiming my whole biracial self and clear that my whole self belongs. And I realized that's the same journey that this nation needs. Because repair doesn't just fix what's broken. Repair transforms us.

17:16It transformed me and Garrett. It transformed Colombia and Germany and South Africa. And it can transform America, too. Imagine the genuine pride that we would feel if repair was the last chapter in this story. For 250 years, the shame of slavery has haunted us. It has corroded our democracy. Building a culture of repair is the only path that will change that. It's the only path that gets us to our highest national ideal. One nation. Indivisible. Thank you.

18:10That was Aria Fleurant at TED Democracy Philadelphia in 2026. If you are curious about TED's curation, please visit ted.com slash curation guidelines. And that's it for today. TED Talks Daily is a podcast from TED. This episode was fact-checked by the TED Research Team and produced and edited by our team.

18:42additional support from learn more at podcasts.ted.com. I am Elise Hugh. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed. Thanks for listening.

19:12This episode is sponsored by Defender. Summer is on its way and now is the time to start planning your next great outdoor adventure. If you're setting your sights on higher peaks, deeper rivers, and bigger dreams, embrace the impossible with Defender. Built with legendary capability and tested on some of the most difficult terrain, Defender brings the toughness you need in a vehicle to take you to faraway places with the comfort and smart tech that makes the journey feel luxurious. Choose between the sleek two-door Defender 90, the purposeful Defender 110, or the Defender 130 with seating up to eight people for bigger expeditions.

19:51Defender's robust materials mean you can adventure without compromise and innovative driving aids like ClearSight technology help you view the world around you in powerful new ways. With the available three models, you have the potential for up to 89 cubic feet of cargo space. This summer, adventure with confidence. Explore the full Defender lineup at LandRoverUSA.com.

20:17Hi there, it's Adam Grant from Ted's Rethinking Podcast, and this episode is brought to you by ServiceNow. I get to spend my days studying how people think and what it actually takes to change our minds. It's work I find deeply meaningful. But even in meaningful work, there's still busy work. The admin, the repetitive processes, the invisible load that pulls attention away from what really matters. That's where ServiceNow's AI specialists come in. They don't just tell you what you should do about your busy work. They actually do it. Start to finish. Cases closed. Requests handled. No extra work for you.

20:50To learn how to put AI to work for people, visit servicenow.com.

21:15Change your mind whenever you want, because at Schwab, you can invest your way. No matter your goals or appetite for investing, Schwab has everything you need, all in one place. Visit schwab.com to learn more.