Shouldering a Different Weight: Gen Z and Millennials Are Choosing to Carry the Burden of Repair

For the past several years, I have worked with intergenerational organizers and community leaders on the mission to repair America. As co-director of the Repair America Collective, a reparations-based organization rooted in Boston, I have had the distinct opportunity to not only learn from older generations but to be part of the kind of intergenerational exchange that repair demands.

The question that animates everyone who organizes in this space is deceptively simple: where did we break? Who was hurt, and how? The pain is palpable, found in stories of police brutality, of discrimination at the bank, of the school segregation that persists in Boston today. And yet I find myself searching for something more foundational. As the United States celebrates its 250th anniversary, millennials and Gen Z, my generation, find themselves uniquely positioned to recognize that the break is structural, the harm is documented, and the repair is ours to demand.

We did not design the racial and economic fault lines that run beneath this country. But we have arrived at the crossroads, and the burden of repair—the overwhelming weight of fixing something you did not break—has been placed at our feet.

In my travels to Washington, D.C., I found myself in the halls of the Library of Congress, staring blankly at ornate ceiling murals of Greco-Roman figures until something clicked. The same iconography embedded in the founding architecture of this democracy are etched into the very granite and marble. Minerva. Atlas. Hercules. There is an old myth from this pantheon about a titan condemned to hold the weight of the world on his shoulders neither of his own free will nor virtue, but because he lost. And there is another about a hero who wandered for a decade, battered by gods and sea, before finally finding his way home. Both of these myths lend themselves to explain and inspire our own legend. Atlas, because the burden of a broken nation seeks the strength of the righteous and courageous to shoulder the weight often finding its symbiote in the wreckage of repair. Odysseus, because repair is never a straight line; it is a long, disorienting path back to something that should have been yours all along no matter how long the journey until the hero returns. The US has long looked to these myths to tell the story of its own ambitions and aspirations.

I want to use them to tell a different story: not one of conquest and oppression, but the story of what happens when the hero arrives at Atlas, shackled and straining under the weight of the world, and is asked to take that burden for themselves. Gen Z and millennials are that hero, bold, technologically savvy, and unwavering in their demand for something greater than what is given. We did not break these systems. We did not design the racial and economic fault lines that run beneath this country. But we have arrived at the crossroads, and the burden of repair, the overwhelming weight of fixing something you did not break, has been placed at our feet. Unlike previous generations, who were denied the language, the platform, or the political conditions to demand acknowledgment, we have all three. We have the tools to reckon with history, the will to name harm, and increasingly, the coalitions to hold power accountable.

The burden of repair was distributed across the room and at each juncture a hero was arriving steadfast and ready to shoulder that responsibility, whether they knew it or not.

Liberation Ventures offers a framework that I find clarifying: reckoning, acknowledgment, accountability, and redress. Reckoning asks us to understand the deep harm caused by chattel slavery and its legacies. Acknowledgment asks us to name it aloud, to validate what communities already know to be true. Accountability demands that we take ownership, not abstractly, but behaviorally, institutionally, with a commitment to non-recurrence. Redress is the concrete work: restitution, rehabilitation, and the embedding of racial justice into the systems that govern our lives. These are not sequential steps. They are a continuous, intergenerational practice. And they require participants from every generation.

In Boston, we are building that practice. At the African American Heritage Museum’s Juneteenth Parade, the Repair America Collective hosted Freedom Soul, an activation inviting participants to put their feelings about freedom onto canvas, to sit with both the celebration and the unfinished business of liberation. People wrote, painted, and named aloud the ways racism and mass incarceration still shape their daily lives. It was reckoning and acknowledgment made visceral. Inspired by the soul classics that defined an era of resistance and joy, our greatest expressions of freedom often are found in the celebration of dismantled systems of oppression. That same intergenerational spirit carried through our Heritage Hub activation, a multi-day event held in January that brought together healers, historians, artists, and young people for fireside chats, breathwork, community meals, and open mic. Children had their own dedicated corner. Elders held court. The burden of repair was distributed across the room and at each juncture a hero was arriving steadfast and ready to shoulder that responsibility, whether they knew it or not.

What my fellow community organizers and I put in motion was not simply a community event or performance. It is the testament to a generational shift to reject the old burden, the passive inheritance of a broken worldview, and shoulder something more difficult and more honest: the active work of repair. Gen Z and millennials are educating themselves.

We are opting out of ignorance and choosing accountability rooted in coalition. We are not waiting for older institutions to lead. We are building the power blocks and bearing witness to the weight of unrealized repair required to traverse this odyssey and like Odysseus, we know the journey itself is the transformation. The hero does not return the same. Neither will we.

The laws of nature tell us that energy cannot be created or destroyed, only transferred. The burden of repair does not disappear if we refuse to carry it. It accumulates. It compounds. What this generation is choosing, increasingly, is to pick it up, not alone, and not by collapsing under it, but by distributing that weight across communities, across generations, and across a nation finally being asked to reckon with what it owes.

Odysseus wandered so he could find his way home. Atlas held the world on his shoulders as punishment. We are choosing repair as our purpose. That is a different weight entirely and the beginning of a new mythology, one where the hero does not arrive alone, and the face of stoicism reflects the nation young and old.