In reporting and editing on the Monitor’s ongoing reparations project, I’ve been reminded repeatedly by sources that reparations are a process – institutional as well as personal. They are not a big-fix payoff with an endpoint. Most often, they are not financial at all, but an acknowledgment of, atonement for, and education about the cascade of damage sent rolling down the centuries by slavery.

As Monitor reporter Ali Martin reports in today’s Daily, California’s Reparations Task Force sent the legislature its recommendations yesterday, but that’s just the beginning; the state has to figure out what it can actually do. 

“When will this be finished?” is a frequent question reparations advocates field from white people. 

“There is no endpoint,” answers Debby Irving, who wrote the book “Waking Up White: And Finding Myself in the Story of Race.” The undergirding of reparations “isn’t linear. It’s cyclical. ... Reparations is not a one-and-done. Who knows when there will be sustainable balance? But that’s going to take years and years.”

When she first started to probe her own feelings about race, wrote Ms. Irving, “I didn’t think I had a race, so I never thought to look within myself for answers. ... I thought white was the raceless race – just plain, normal, the one against which all others were measured.”

She points to an “inexplicable tension” many white people admit to when considering race, a feeling of “something’s not right.”

Addressing that feeling can often be the first order of business in the reparations process.