Editor’s Note: The author used AI tools for grammar checks, structuring, and verifying references in the writing of this article. The ideas, context, and writing itself are entirely the author’s own.
Dear America,
On July 4, 2026, you marked 250 years as a sovereign nation. This entire year is being positioned as a milestone of triumph, achievement, and celebration. But for many of us, this year arrives as a reckoning. We are a year and a half into an administration that has worked methodically to dismantle the scaffolding of our multiracial democracy. The question hanging over this anniversary year is not how to celebrate but what we will choose to build next.
I am writing because I still believe you can become the country you have always declared yourself to be. However, the path through this period requires a serious commitment to telling the full, unvarnished history of this beloved, imperfect country and to repairing it. Repair should be practiced not only as a moral concern, although it is that, but also as a matter of economic policy. If we emerge from this perilous political and economic moment, it will not be sufficient to restore institutions to their prior form. We will need a broader framework for collective recovery—one that addresses the erosion of public trust, institutional legitimacy, and social stability during this period of deeply divisive governance. That recovery will require more than piecemeal reforms and procedural safeguards. It will also require revisiting what we measure, what we protect, and whom we believe our economic institutions are designed to serve.
I believe our long-running policy disputes are based fundamentally on how we measure and who is worthy—whose human rights are inalienable and deserving of protection in the pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness. We rely on indicators that are indifferent to the nature of the activity they track. GDP expands as incarceration rates climb, as neighborhoods are uprooted, and as predatory financial practices drain the lifeforce from families. A dollar spent building a prison and a dollar spent building a school register identically in the economic record that runs this country; the instrument cannot tell a social wound from a wage. We are attempting to gauge national health and wellbeing with a tool that remains blind to the distinction between creation and catastrophe. This critique is not just a description of harm that our current systems capture incompletely; it is a limitation on what those systems allow us to see and value. A country cannot repair what its own instruments are built not to register.
This recognition drives our development of the Black Happiness Index. Our work is grounded in a clear reality: The experiences of Black people are the most precise barometer of whether our economy functions to extract or to generate. History shows that every major apparatus of extraction—from chattel slavery and convict leasing to redlining and mass incarceration—was first refined on Black bodies and Black populations. Therefore, when Black communities truly flourish, it is definitive evidence that those extractive structures have been unmade. In this frame, wellbeing, which we term Happiness, is the metric of systemic transformation that aggregate output can never provide.
The Index evaluates wellbeing across five dimensions: belonging and safety, economic dignity, mobility and access, repair and restitution, and joy and possibility. We use these metrics to assess whether people are protected, wealth is multigenerational, and opportunity is truly accessible. Healthcare is one example of why this matters.
According to the CDC, across this nation, Black women face a maternal death rate three to four times higher than that of their White counterparts, while their infants die at more than double the national rate. An economy measured by the Index would ask whether this mother survived, received equal care, and was not left with crushing debt. When those answers improve for Black people, an extractive system gives way to a generative one—and a system that finally works for the people it has failed most works better for everyone. This is not a hypothetical instrument.
At the Reparations Finance Lab and the new Center for Reparations Finance and Practice, we have been building the infrastructure to make this kind of seeing operational: tools that score portfolios, company and sectoral operations, and capital flows—not only for what they promise to do but also for the harm they have already done that negatively impacts Black communities and wellbeing, and the repair they have yet to make.
Once you begin measuring this way, the economic research and reporting that dominates our current debates reads differently—not as the starting point for concern, but as confirmation of a limit already visible through the Index. Our current economic reports and concerns present a clear picture of what we have lost, measured even by the incomplete instruments we still use. The rollback of diversity programs, the erosion of hard-won Black employment gains, and the gutting of the Voting Rights Act are often debated as moral and policy questions. However, I see them as deeply expensive mistakes. Citi has estimated that closing racial gaps in wages, housing, education, and access to capital would have added roughly $5 trillion to US GDP over two decades; separate research puts the two-decade cost of racial discrimination as high as $16 trillion. Brookings has reached parallel conclusions: Economic exclusion is not free. It is a standing tax on national prosperity, paid in foregone growth, suppressed entrepreneurship, and talent that never reaches the work and contribution of which it is capable. Economists, including Lisa Cook and William Darity, have shown this is not a moral abstraction but a measurable drag on innovation and productivity—the same dynamic the Index is built to track in real time, not discover decades later.
The gutting of the Voting Rights Act is not only a civil rights failure. It is an economic one. Only after Black representatives were seated in significant numbers did federal investments in housing, education, and economic initiatives begin to reflect the needs of those communities. This historical precedent underscores a critical reality: The voices included within our halls of power directly dictate which policy priorities are codified into law. In the most literal fiscal sense, we are a country that can no longer afford to leave value on the table, and economic exclusion leaves enormous value on the table. A more bounded America—one that narrows who belongs and who is protected—is not only a smaller democracy. It is a poorer country.
For funders, investors, and nonprofit leaders, the community I serve, this part is worth sitting with: The case for inclusion no longer rests on conscience alone. The math now agrees with the conscience.
There is a further reason this measurement matters now: artificial intelligence. If AI constrains employment broadly, and disproportionately for Black workers, as early evidence suggests it may, then a metric anchored to aggregate output will report a healthy economy even as a generation of livelihoods erodes beneath it. We will need instruments that can see that harm as it happens, the same way we need instruments that can see it happening now in housing, lending, and labor markets that AI is already beginning to impact. I develop the fuller argument elsewhere in a paper titled “AI: As an Intellectual Commons”; for this article, it is enough to name the threat and to insist that our measurements be equal to it.
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Once we see the problem this way—as a failure of vision, not merely a failure of law and policy—the question shifts from what happened to what becomes possible. I believe, as many others do, that the economic and social harms of Indigenous dispossession and chattel slavery constitute your original sin, and that your refusal to fully reckon with that legacy created the distance and dissonance that made this political moment possible. In my work at the Lab, I have spent years asking why you remain unwilling to confront that legacy. As I see it, the core of this resistance rests on a persistent belief that the descendants of enslavement, and Black people more broadly, are not equally deserving of constitutional protection and economic success.
A second idea anchors my work: the private sector’s role in enabling inequality, and at times racist public policy itself. The harms are well documented; redlining is a familiar example, but the history runs deeper, to the beginning of your founding, through the financing of slave ships, of plantations, and the invention of financial instruments designed to extract wealth from the bodies of the enslaved. Through these inquiries, we have distilled a reparative approach to capital into three commitments, each answering to what the Index makes visible. Redistribution moves resources toward those from whom wealth was extracted. Recognition names the specific harms and the institutions responsible, rather than offering generalized acknowledgment. Representation and repair redirect ongoing capital flows intentionally through Black communities and Black hands, so that investment no longer reproduces the old extraction. Together, they describe what I think of as investing with memory: capital allocated not as if history were irrelevant, but precisely because it is not. As the economist James Tobin observed in his influential paper on “The New Economics” half a century ago, the stewards of any endowed institution are “guardians of the future against the claims of the present.” I would add that they cannot guard a future built on an unrepaired past.
Memory, in this sense, is not sentiment. It is fiduciary discipline.
While reparations are frequently dismissed as an unthinkable break with your national identity, the historical and legal archives reveal a more complex and compelling narrative. You have, when moved by political will, repeatedly conceded your obligation to provide material redress to harmed communities. Consider the precedent of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, which delivered formal repair to Japanese Americans for the state-sanctioned theft of their liberty and property during World War II. Your legal system already operates on the assumption that state negligence requires compensation. The mechanism of repair is not a foreign intrusion upon your jurisprudence; it is an existing, albeit selectively applied, thread in your national tapestry. What remains absent is not the procedural machinery of repair, but the will to name and heal the wound.
So, I return to the question this anniversary poses: If we survive, will you rebuild on the same assumptions, or will you use this moment to ground our future in the dignity of every person and our shared responsibility to one another?
With friends and colleagues, I have been imagining what this moment might make possible. We have talked about putting environmental stewardship at the center and treating planetary degradation as the existential threat it is—not to the earth, which will endure, but to human life. We talked about recognizing shelter, health, and community as fundamental rights. We have talked about directing capital at scale toward collective wellbeing, with accountability grounded in both truth-telling and reparative investment for those harmed by the old financial model. We have also imagined what abundance, love, and genuine human flourishing could look like.
As you mark your 250th year, this is a call for shared prosperity and mutual care—a society in which hoarding wealth is no longer admired, generosity earns respect, and those with extraordinary wealth see themselves as stewards of the common good. It is a vision in which capital no longer outranks our shared humanity, and no one is treated as more deserving than anyone else.
A nation founded on the ideal that all people are created equal and endowed with inalienable rights could choose to measure success differently. You could draw on wellbeing indices, like the Black Happiness Index, grounded in the social determinants of health rather than relying on GDP or the number of billionaires as markers of national health. From shared trauma, a more reflective humility might emerge—and with it, a renewed commitment to the well-being of all.
A new America at 250 is possible. But it will require the courage to place human well-being at the center of our economy. I write this to you as a Black woman, a mother, an immigrant, and someone who has chosen you, America, even when you have not fully chosen me.
As James Baldwin wrote in Notes of a Native Son, “I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.” I feel the same, and I insist that naming your failures is an act of fidelity, not abandonment. You are still capable of becoming what you promised on paper, even though you have pursued that promise imperfectly so far.
With love,
Enith
