Shame Into Action
Our friends from The Hour Before Dawn on working towards repair
PHOTO BY JESS DRAWHORN
How do we transmute our shame into action? In this brilliant and heartfelt conversation, organizer Justine Epstein of The Mending Circle explores the role of wealth redistribution and ancestral reckoning in our current climate.
In addition to their work with The Mending Circle, Justine Epstein is collaborating with money coach Iris Brilliant to facilitate The Hour Before Dawn. As they write on their site: “The Hour Before Dawn is a program for inheritors of wealth or family businesses with ties to the Nazi Regime who want to take ancestral responsibility and create a more just world. Through family history research, embodied storytelling, philanthropic planning, and community building, participants will be supported to more deeply learn about their past and explore how their wealth can become a tool for repair in the present.” If you think this program might be a fit for you and your family history, we encourage you to apply here.
LOAM: You’ve been organizing within reparative and wealth redistribution spaces for many years now. How do you define this work, and how can it look?
JUSTINE: For me, it begins with the recognition that we are inextricably connected to stories bigger than ourselves that inform our context, whether we are conscious of it or not. The world we live in, the challenges we face – be it climate collapse, wealth inequality, white supremacy, genocide, authoritarianism, and so much more – are deeply rooted in historical patterns of collective trauma. These aren’t just big concepts, they are systems of power that were created through human decisions that have constructed our current realities in very real ways.
In my case, I have a great-great-great grandfather, James Gamble, who got sick on a flatboat on the Ohio River, as his family was immigrating from Northern Ireland in 1819. They got off the boat in Cincinnati so he could get treatment, and he ended up staying, getting married, and starting a small soap and candle business with his brother-in-law. More than 200 years later, that company, Procter & Gamble, is a multinational corporation worth over 300 billion dollars, and the source of my family’s wealth. His capacity for success was enabled as a European immigrant who became white in the context of the US during a time when slavery was still legal, and he built his industry on land that was stolen from the Shawnee and Miami peoples. This systemic context is essential for understanding how this lineage has directly shaped my own life.
I always find myself coming back to this essay by Aurora Levins Morales, Embracing Rootedness and Radical Genealogy, which is an invitation to address the often contradictory histories of our ancestors, and to allow those stories to inform who we are. I approach reparative and wealth redistribution work from this perspective because I believe that our ancestors – their stories, their lives, their gifts and challenges, and legacies and memories – are an invitation into a deeper sense of belonging. Because, yes, I’m descended from this one lineage of wealth, and I’m also descended from Irish working-class farmers, Yiddish-speaking immigrant shopkeepers, and people who — far beyond my knowledge of names or even places — knew how to tend the earth, community, and each other. If I belong to a deeper sense of time, lineage, and story, I can hold more complexity, and I have more agency in how I choose to participate in that lineage.
What does it mean to consciously inhabit my role within my lineage? What can I learn from the stories of my ancestors who came before me – both from their mistakes and also from their love? What healing can we do together now that was not possible or imaginable when they were alive?
In my experience, both personally and in the communities I work with, allowing money to flow can represent our willingness to relinquish power and control, to surrender to the process of repair that is, of course, so much greater than just giving money away. Many of the harms we are beginning to reckon with are irreparable. The immensity of such violence is impossible for one person or one family to truly reconcile. But that isn’t the point. The point is that, in coming together to reckon, to grieve, to humble ourselves to the task of repair, maybe we can be one tiny part in writing a new chapter in the book of our legacy, and in so doing, plant seeds for a culture in which violence, extraction and harm at that scale becomes unimaginable to future generations.
For me, this work looks like being in community, holding these questions together – which I’m privileged to do with Morgan Curtis and the Ancestors & Money cohort. It also looks like 1:1 support, which I do through my offering The Mending Circle. It looks like being part of Jubilee Justice’s Our Ancestral Journeys. It looks like becoming a member of larger movement organizations organizing wealthy folks for justice and a thriving world, for me, Solidare Network and Resource Generation. It looks like ancestral recovery work, reclaiming ancestral earth-honoring ways. It looks like storytelling in public and in private. It looks like spiritual practice. It looks as many ways as there are people living the inquiry, wherever they are – asking, again and again, how can I offer my life in service to healing, liberation, and repair?
LOAM: What is “The Hour Before Dawn?” Why this project, and why now?
JUSTINE: The Hour Before Dawn is a program for inheritors of wealth with family or financial ties to the Nazi Regime who want to research, grieve, and take meaningful responsibility for this legacy in community with others. It is a container for 10-15 people with this identity to explore how moving money in response to their history can support healing and repair. Over several months, with both in-person retreats, virtual meetings, peer support and site visits, we will grapple with big questions: What will it take to break from this cycle of historical violence? What transformation is possible when descendants of Nazis examine how their family histories live on in their bank accounts? What might it take for silence, shame, and guilt to become courage, solidarity, and repair?
We don’t pretend to have the answers to the questions we are asking, but we do believe in the healing potential of exploring hard questions together, and that making space for the challenging emotions that come with looking at difficult things directly is an essential step in transforming culture. With compassion and guidance, we will support participants to confront this troubling history through research and political education, and to move money in reparative ways that both address historic and present-day violence.
Why now? Fascism is rising globally. The billionaire class is concentrating wealth and power. The far-right political party in Germany, the AfD, is gaining power and momentum in an unprecedented way. At the same time, Israel is bombing Gaza with impunity, and any criticism whatsoever is deemed anti-semitic. The dehumanization of immigrants, of trans people, of international students in the US has haunting echoes of 1930s Germany and the seeds of the Nazi Regime. Meanwhile, some of the wealthiest families in Germany still hold fortunes built on the Holocaust, with little to no accountability. The culture of silence, fear, and guilt has stagnated a true reckoning with this history. And sadly, this work of personal reparations and ancestral healing is not really happening in Germany, especially not with a lens on inherited wealth. We’ve gotten immense feedback about how relevant and necessary this type of program is.
LOAM: In a recent essay for Kosmos Journal called “Surrendering Wealth” you share a few questions you are asking of yourself as you live into this work. You write, What happens to a psyche, to a soul, to a people acculturated into thriving on the suffering, abuse, and extraction of others? Who am I, who are my people, on the other side of whiteness and wealth accumulation? What patterns of whiteness and wealth accumulation are you navigating or unlearning right now?
JUSTINE: There are so many threads I could unravel here. I’m grateful to have come across this resource on Class-Privilege Patterns several years ago that supported me to become conscious of some of the ways I was socialized as a class-privileged person. A lot of these patterns also show up in white people, and especially those of us at that race/class intersection, both internally as a belief system, but also externally in cultural norms and values: entitlement, individualism, mistrust, numbness, perfectionism…
I’ve been reckoning a lot with individualism as a pattern that perpetually has me looking out for myself, looking to myself (and “my wealth”) to solve problems rather than leaning into community and relationship. This is so ingrained through capitalism, this belief that I need all these material things to be happy, to be successful, to belong, to survive. Our whole US mainstream culture is set up around this – I need my own house, my own car, my own computer, my own this and that. I think it's given all of us entangled in this system such a narrow view of what is possible for how we can live otherwise. The line between what we’re told we need and what we actually need takes a lot of parsing apart.
I think the deepest thing I am grieving about growing up white and wealthy is the cultural poverty that comes with whiteness and wealth on stolen land – an underlying disconnection from a sense of belonging to place, people, and spirit. And the social isolation of not being able to meaningfully relate to the experiences that most people are living on this planet who are struggling to make ends meet within racial capitalism. And in fact, the wealth that provides the buffer from that struggle is actually creating that suffering for others. This isolation from a sense of shared humanity and shared stake in a healthy society and planet is incredibly lonely and disconnected. I think it really atrophies us from our humanity. I think that kind of numbness over generations is a kind of spiritual trauma that is part of what has enabled my people to enact so much violence.
There’s this belief that if I have enough money, I’ll be able to pay my way through whatever shit goes down, rather than recognizing our own stake in a world where everyone, for example, has healthcare, housing, universal basic income. It’s the trope of wealthy people just shooting off to Mars when the Earth is no longer habitable, rather than taking that wealth, collectivizing it, and doing what we can to heal what isn’t working. White, wealthy people have built our identities and our systems of control on this isolated power-over dynamic, and it can be so difficult for us to recognize that we actually do have a stake in a more just world, and also the resources to fund the movements fighting to get us there.
Breaking out of individualism is an ongoing practice for me, but I can honestly say learning how to be vulnerable, imperfect, and human in figuring out how to make sense of my lineage and inheritance with others, both with shared and very different backgrounds, has been very healing. It reminds me that this work is non-linear, lifelong, and rigorous. But it also has to be humble, playful, and humorous. Learning how to lovingly make fun of myself and my people as we recover from our waspy perfectionist upbringings has been critical, too!
I’ll also mention that I’ve also taken so much solace in studying and reclaiming ancient European and Jewish earth-honoring cultural ways as a form of spiritual practice that gives me cultural belonging outside of the identity of whiteness and class privilege we’re living in now. I think recognizing that these patterns of whiteness and wealth accumulation show up within each of us as structural and cultural issues has supported me to find my agency in creating new ones.
LOAM: In your invitation to this program, you and your co-facilitator Iris Brilliant share that you are two US-born Jews with ancestors who were targeted and killed in the Holocaust, and that you are also inheritors of wealth. How do you reckon with carrying a lineage that is both connected to the oppressor and the oppressed? How does this inform “The Hour Before Dawn?”
JUSTINE: Both Iris and I have grappled deeply with being inheritors of wealth generated through systems of harm in the US, where we grew up. While this is a lifelong and even multi-generational process, these years of personal reckoning with race, wealth, and privilege within an unjust system have given us both an understanding of our stake in collective liberation, as well as the healing potential of engaging in reparative action.
So, what does that look like for us as Jews in the context of the Holocaust? Can we extend the same compassion, understanding, and accountability that we have been extended by Black and Indigenous people and communities here on Turtle Island? It is an opportunity for us to walk our talk. I believe that our capacity as facilitators to navigate, understand, and embody the complexity of our own identities as both perpetrator and victim in these different contexts will enable us to offer a depth of both accountability and compassion to participants in The Hour Before Dawn.
I am hopeful that this complexity will support us to relate deeply to the experiences of the participants in the program, while simultaneously presencing and grieving the stories of our own ancestors. As a Jew, it is my responsibility to look deeply at my narrative of victimization and how it is being weaponized by the state of Israel to commit yet another genocide, or here in the US to rationalize the illegal deportation of international students speaking out for the sanctity of Palestinian life. This is my personal stake in this work – what makes this work real, honest, relational, and embodied. The fact that there are descendants of Nazis who are ready to grieve this with me is so moving, just as there are Jews standing for Palestinian liberation. That’s why I’m choosing to show up for it. I recognize that our safety and healing is intertwined.
LOAM: This work also offers a container for people to work through shame. What exists on the other side of shame, and how can this strengthen our movements for repair and collective liberation?
JUSTINE: There are many kinds of shame. What we’re talking about here is shame connected to the perpetration of harm or violence against another. I think this shame is a very human and natural response to the infliction of harm or violence. It is a powerful physical, emotional, and psychic response that plays a role in our ethical orientation as human beings to one another. It is also a very uncomfortable experience to hold. When we experience shame, we have two choices – to try to escape it through denial and repression, or to acknowledge it as an invitation towards responsibility. Denial is easier, but it is fragile. I believe that true healing and liberation come from making space for our shame to shapeshift into responsibility, which requires a willingness to hold space for the pain you or your people have caused. I believe that, given adequate space, time, and context, shame does want to transform.
On a cultural level, we are currently witnessing how attempts at memory culture have not successfully uprooted bigotry, hate, or anti-semitism in Western Europe– as the current rise in power of the AfD, the far-right party in Germany, so glaringly reveals. I think this is such an important thing to learn from, as people committed to repair: that shame and guilt are not the end point of this work. I’ve heard from the German and Austrian friends and colleagues I’ve spoken to about this that shame has become so calcified into the cultural psyche in response to the history of the Holocaust that it becomes defensiveness. It makes having nuanced and complex conversations about both the past and the present difficult to have in any meaningful way. It reinforces the reflex to deny and deflect. The fact that so much wealth was built during the Holocaust through the theft of Jewish homes, businesses, not to mention the infrastructure used to exterminate millions of people, is still held by the families who perpetrated these harms is a testament to the healing yet undone.
In the essay by Aurora Levins Morales that I mentioned earlier, she writes:
“Taking full responsibility for this legacy of relationships is empowering and radical. Guilt and denial and the defensive pull to avoid blame require immense amounts of energy and are profoundly immobilizing. Giving them up can be a great relief. Deciding that we are in fact accountable frees us to act. Acknowledging our ancestors’ participation in the oppression of others (and this is ultimately true of everyone if you really dig) and deciding to balance the accounts on their behalf leads to greater integrity and less shame; less self-righteousness and more righteousness, humility, and compassion; and a sense of proportion.”
If taking responsibility can actually be a pathway to our own healing and liberation, and we do it step by step, then we can actually begin co-creating the world we want to be free in, together.