An argument for the reconstruction renaissance
by: MAeva Veillard PErry, MPH
Introduction
2026 marks the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States. But anniversaries are not only moments for celebration—they are opportunities for reckoning. The promises embedded in the words “We, the People” and “Liberty and Justice for All” were never extended to everyone. Indigenous peoples, women, enslaved people and their descendants, and non-white immigrants were deliberately excluded from the nation’s original vision. Two and a half centuries later, the consequences of those exclusions remain visible. The anniversary asks us not just to celebrate the nation’s endurance, but to confront what—and who—it was built to protect.
The data makes this exclusion unmistakable. Black women continue to experience maternal mortality rates nearly three to four times higher than white women. The racial wealth gap remains staggering: the median white household holds roughly 6–8 times the wealth of the median Black household, a disparity rooted not in personal failure but in generations of exclusion from asset-building opportunities. Black Americans represent approximately 13% of the U.S. population, yet nearly 40% of the incarcerated population. Indigenous communities experience some of the worst health outcomes in the country, including disproportionately high rates of diabetes, suicide, and lack of access to clean water. Immigrants—particularly undocumented immigrants—contribute billions annually in taxes while remaining excluded from many social protections and facing constant criminalization.
Two hundred and fifty years later, the United States has demonstrated remarkable consistency in preserving white, wealthy, patriarchal power. We express moral outrage at contemporary leaders exposed for relationships with convicted sex offenders, as if the nation’s founders themselves were not engaged in sexual violence, exploitation, and abuse. We recoil at the dehumanization of Black and Brown bodies as though the nation was not built through their exploitation and degradation. We ask, “Where is Congress?” as if Congress was ever designed to serve a multiracial democracy. From its inception, Congress was intended to represent propertied white men, and it largely remains dominated by them today.
No meaningful expansion of rights in this country has been granted out of benevolence. Every step toward democracy has been forced by resistance, organizing, and sacrifice. Voting rights, labor protections, civil rights, and bodily autonomy were secured through struggle, not generosity. Today, as many of those gains face erosion, the demand remains the same: the United States must be pressed to live up to its stated ideals of “Liberty and Justice for All.”
If inequities are to end, the country must adopt a framework that confronts systemic oppression and white supremacy at its roots across every sector of society. Every major American institution was built within social and racial hierarchies, and those foundations still shape outcomes today. The health-care system developed through the experimentation and exploitation of Black bodies to preserve white life; it is therefore unsurprising that Black and Brown patients today experience higher mortality, under-treatment of pain, and medical neglect. Policing evolved directly from slave patrols designed to capture and control enslaved people; it is therefore unsurprising that modern policing often prioritizes institutional loyalty over human dignity. The criminal legal system enforces laws born of racial hierarchy; when those laws are applied “as written,” the data predictably show disproportionate harm to already marginalized populations. The American system is not broken—it is functioning as designed. It was created to concentrate power among wealthy white elites and ensure its preservation.
Reform alone cannot address problems that are structural. What is required is Reconstruction: not as a historical footnote, but as an ongoing civic project.
Reconstruction
Following the Civil War, the nation briefly attempted to rebuild itself during a time known as “Reconstruction.” The abolition of slavery in 1865 eliminated free labor and destabilized racial hierarchy. Former overseers lost their roles, landowners lost free labor, and poor whites increasingly found themselves competing with newly freed Black people. Four million formerly enslaved people entered civic life, and Black Americans held public office, established schools, founded banks, and built mutual aid institutions across the South. Black Republicans played a central role in advancing the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, securing the abolition of slavery, birthright citizenship, voting rights, and equal protection under the law. These constitutional guarantees forced the nation to acknowledge Black humanity—and Black communities began to thrive. For the first time since the nation’s founding, white Americans were legally compelled to recognize Black people as fully human. They could no longer be bought, sold, bred, or exploited for labor and medical experimentation. For the first time, the nation was forced to attempt to live up to “Liberty and Justice for All.”
The emergence of Black Wall Street, along with the establishment of Historically Black Colleges and Universities, exposed what white elites feared most: Black excellence. Rapid progress contradicted the racist myth that Black people were incapable of self-governance or community sustainability. Prior to Reconstruction, whiteness functioned as a proxy for power—even among poor whites—who were enlisted to police slavery and protect elite interests. As long as the poorest white man could be convinced he was superior to any Black person, the system remained intact, and Reconstruction threatened that system. As Black political power expanded and class tensions sharpened, white elites moved swiftly to restore racial order that had sustained their dominance.
The undoing of Reconstruction came in 1877, when President Rutherford B. Hayes agreed to withdraw federal troops from the South in exchange for the presidency. This decision abandoned Black Americans to nearly a century of racial terror, known as “The Jim Crow era,” which functioned as an American apartheid system, enforced through Black Codes, voter suppression, economic exclusion, and widespread violence. White supremacist terror organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan lynched thousands and policed racial boundaries through fear.
The formal end of Jim Crow did not arrive until the Civil Rights Movement, culminating in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Once again, America was forced—through struggle and sacrifice—to confront its contradictions. Notably, the passage of these laws did not eradicate racial hierarchy or white supremacy present in American institutions. what is still required is a framework that dismantles all forms of oppression, including white supremacy at the root.
The Reconstruction Framework
Academic, political, legal, medical, and financial institutions continue to reproduce injustice today. These institutions were never designed to serve the most marginalized, and the passage of civil rights legislation did not erase centuries of harm. They are structured to protect elite interests.
Institutions often claim to work “for the people” while offering solutions that are fundamentally unattainable. Health insurance, health care, rent, and groceries are not affordable or accessible if the poorest Americans cannot obtain them. Employment is useless if wages cannot secure housing, food, and utilities. Institutions fail because they refuse to center human dignity, ignore intersectional realities, and maintain practices rooted in white supremacy culture—characterized by exclusion, perfectionism, hoarding of power, and dehumanization.
Systemic oppression operates through interlocking policies, norms, and practices that advantage some while marginalizing others. White supremacy culture, as articulated by Tema Okun, describes the normalization of values and behaviors—such as individualism, urgency, paternalism, defensiveness, and power hoarding—that uphold racial hierarchy even in the absence of overt racism. The five faces of oppression—exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness, cultural domination, and violence—demonstrate that oppression requires both institutional power and social consent to persist. Oppression persists because it is embedded structurally, not simply because of individual prejudice.
The Reconstruction Framework seeks to dismantle these systems by naming harm, grounding policy in data, and centering those most impacted. It integrates intersectionality, a term coined by Dr. Kimberlé Crenshaw, which describes how overlapping identities—such as race, gender, class, and immigration status—compound vulnerability and shape lived experience. Policies that ignore this complexity inevitably fail.
Key elements of the Reconstruction Framework include:
Critical education on systemic oppression and white supremacy culture
Acknowledgment of historical harm and material repair
Shared power and democratic governance structures
Integration of social determinants of health
Trauma-informed practice
Application of intersectionality in policy design
The Reconstruction Framework offers a roadmap for laws, programs, and institutions that serve the collective good rather than elite preservation. Eventually, the creation of the Reconstruction Registry will serve as the place for individuals to identify institutions that have done the work of dismantling oppressive practices.
Reform vs. Reconstruction
Reform seeks incremental change within a rigged system. Reconstruction demands transformation of the system itself. Reconstruction confronts institutions that maintain harm, calls power by its name, and insists that institutions recognize their humanity—and the humanity of those they serve.
Trauma-informed practice is essential to this work. Most American institutions are not trauma-informed; as a result, harm is perpetuated by individuals who believe they are “doing good” while reinforcing injustice. Power structures reward compliance, silence dissent, and elevate those most invested in preserving the status quo. Evangelicalism offers one illustrative example.
American evangelicalism was shaped in part by leaders such as Reverend Basil Manly, who explicitly defended slavery as divinely ordained. This theology sanctified oppression and embedded it into religious and political life. Today, evangelical institutions continue to influence policy in ways that restrict bodily autonomy, voting access, and social welfare, while promising spiritual salvation in exchange for earthly suffering.
Reconstruction asks: Who benefits when Black evangelicals are discouraged from voting with their lived reality in mind? Who benefits when Black women—who face maternal mortality rates three to four times higher than white women—are told race should not influence how they vote? Who benefits from spiritualized unpaid labor when “good works” is not valid currency in a capitalist economy where survival requires wages?
Paul Farmer warned that “The choices of the powerful impact the lives and deaths of the poor.” Climate policy, immigration law, and global conflict confirm this truth daily. The greatest contributors to environmental destruction are the least affected, while those displaced are criminalized. Children in Haiti, Gaza, Sudan, Yemen, and the United States are dying not because resources do not exist, but because we have chosen not to protect them.
A perfect world doesn’t exist, but access to safe drinking water does.
A perfect world doesn’t exist, but going a whole day without experiencing physical, emotional, spiritual, and verbal abuse does.
A perfect world doesn’t exist, but buying everything you need off the shelf does.
A perfect world doesn’t exist, but feeling loved does.
A perfect world doesn’t exist, but deep belly laughs do.
A perfect world doesn’t exist, but a hug from exactly who you needed it from does.
A perfect world doesn’t exist, but accessing and eating a plate of nutritious food does.
A perfect world doesn’t exist, but being able to love who you want without shame does.
A perfect world doesn’t exist, but access to health care when you need it does.
A perfect world doesn’t exist, but worker protections do.
A perfect world doesn’t exist, but access to mental health services without stigma does.
A perfect world doesn’t exist, but the ability to choose your career and school does.
A perfect world doesn’t exist, but housing, heat, and electricity do.
A perfect world doesn’t exist, but safety does.
A perfect world doesn’t exist, but the materials necessary for everyone to survive and thrive do.
Reconstruction asks why suffering is treated as inevitable when abundance exists. Medical debt should not exist in a nation where health care generates trillions every year. The labor of a corporate executive is not inherently more valuable than that of a driver, caregiver, or farmworker—these hierarchies are choices and Reconstruction demands we confront these choices.
The Reconstruction Renaissance
We have already seen what happens when a society is organized around protecting power and preserving the interests of wealthy elites: Inequality deepens, trust erodes, and everyday people are left fighting one another while decisions are made without transparency or accountability. A Reconstruction Renaissance demands something different. It calls for a society that protects the most vulnerable, distributes power more equitably, and empowers people to shape the systems that govern their lives. At the center of this work is an unavoidable truth: Black and Indigenous people in the United States and across the diaspora are owed reparations for centuries of extraction, dispossession, and state-sanctioned harm.
A just society cannot be built without collective reckoning. Truth-telling about historical and ongoing inequities is not symbolic—it is a structural first step for repair. Without confronting the origins of present disparities, policy responses remain superficial and injustice is reproduced. Liberation is not a zero-sum project. The material and social repair required to address harms against Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities expands democratic access and economic security for others. Historical examples illustrate this dynamic: policies designed to redress racial exclusion, like Affirmative Action, have often generated broader social benefits for others— primarily, white women. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed discrimination on the basis of race, sex, religion, color, or national origin protects millions of Americans today; and the constitutional basis that led to the Supreme Court ruling legalizing same-sex marriage, was in part due to the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. These examples demonstrate when we center the needs and protections of the most vulnerable, our entire social fabric strengthens.
A Reconstruction Renaissance requires an intentional commitment to dismantling systems that reproduce hierarchy, exclusion, and harm. Meaningful change demands engagement with real frameworks for repair and a willingness to reject the idea that suffering is inevitable. Reconstruction insists that human dignity—not elite preservation—defines our priorities.
The promise of “We, the People” remains unfinished until institutions are restructured to serve the collective good. Reconstruction is an ongoing civic responsibility. By centering truth, repair, and shared power, a Reconstruction Renaissance seeks to align American systems with the democratic ideals they profess, creating conditions in which freedom and security are not privileges, but guarantees.
Conclusion
America can live up to its name if we are willing to confront who the nation was built to serve and commit to transforming it. “We, the People” was always aspirational. It is now our responsibility to make it real—not through reform that preserves inequity, but through Reconstruction that affirms life, dignity, and justice for all.
Footnotes & References
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Racial and Ethnic Disparities Continue in Pregnancy-Related Deaths. CDC Vital Statistics Reports, most recent editions.
Federal Reserve Board. Survey of Consumer Finances. Data consistently show median white household wealth 6–8 times that of median Black households.
Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS). Prisoners in the United States. Black Americans comprise ~13% of the population and ~38–40% of the incarcerated population.
Indian Health Service (IHS). Disparities. Documented higher rates of diabetes, suicide, and reduced access to clean water and healthcare among Indigenous populations.
Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP). Undocumented Immigrants’ State & Local Tax Contributions.
National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Unequal Treatment: Confronting Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health Care.
Equal Justice Initiative. From Slavery to Mass Incarceration.
Foner, Eric. Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877. Harper & Row.
Du Bois, W.E.B. Black Reconstruction in America. Harcourt, Brace & Company.
Okun, Tema. White Supremacy Culture. Dismantling Racism Works.
Young, Iris Marion. Five Faces of Oppression. Justice and the Politics of Difference.
Crenshaw, Kimberlé. Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color.
Farmer, Paul. Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor.
U.S. Congress. Civil Rights Act of 1964; Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Southern Poverty Law Center. History of the Ku Klux Klan.
National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities (NIMHD). Social Determinants of Health.
World Health Organization (WHO). Social Determinants of Health Framework.