The Keys We Accept: New Americans, Reparations, and the Practice of Belonging

Writing for Nonprofit Quarterly, Aine Creedon reflects on what immigrants and new Americans owe to the country they choose, and what inherited privilege demands of us. She traces her own family's journey—her father arriving in Chicago in nineteen sixty-eight with an engineering degree and eight dollars, later building a clean-tech company into significant wealth; her mother establishing herself as an environmental protector and community presence. As an Indian American now directing resources in the reparations movement, Creedon confronts a harder question: what keys has her family been handed through migration, education, and citizenship, and what duties come with using them? She describes witnessing a settler family who traced both their ancestral practices and their family's slaveholding history, ultimately contacting Black relatives who share their DNA and asking together what repair requires. Through these reflections, Creedon examines what she calls migration's 'double innocence'—the ability to claim distance from harm in both the country you leave and the country you adopt—and calls us to recognize the signs of othering that persist in both places, signs we often learn to overlook.

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