Rest as reparations: reimagining how we invest in Black women entrepreneurs

Trying to outwork a broken system nearly broke me. 

By age 30, I had done exactly what I set out to do: scale the economic ladder from my lower-middle class upbringing to a high-earning, coveted tenure track position at an Ivy League university. The salary alone was enough to cover my student loan debt, provide resources for my aging parents, and lay a foundation for future generational wealth. It seemed my troubles were over — until, that is, the unhealthy habits I’d built to maintain my pace of work fomented a cycle of burnout, shame, and above all, exhaustion. Would I ever have the time to slow down and just be?

Because tenure and retirement were too far away to meet my urgent need for rest, I joined the growing ranks of Black women pivoting to self-employment in search of freedom, autonomy, and sustainability. Businesses owned by Black women increased by nearly 20% between 2017 and 2020, far surpassing the growth of women- and Black-owned businesses overall, according to the Brookings Institution.

But despite the possibilities entrepreneurship presents for generational wealth-building, I quickly learned that the path also means more labor and less rest — especially for Black founders, who are likelier to bootstrap their business because they are unable to borrow capital investment from family and friends. 

It’s time we reimagine Black women entrepreneurship as a model for rest as reparations for centuries of enslavement that drain so many lives to this day, and as a roadmap to a radical new future where work is recognized as a human need, and a right. 

Seeding models of radical rest

Our cultural understanding of rest as something to be earned, often through exploitive labor, is shaped by capitalism and white supremacy. Hundreds of years of forced enslavement and laboring to reproduce enslaved people, followed by decades of segregation in poorly paid, dehumanizing work have had lasting ramifications for Black people’s access to rest: today, we’re overrepresented in low-wage shift work that carries a higher risk for cardiovascular disease due to sleep disruptions. Our earnings have stagnated, leading many of us to work well past the typical retirement age to meet basic needs. 

Working from a place of rest has the power to build more creative and sustainable businesses, and Black women are looking for opportunities to be well while achieving success. Lifestyle entrepreneurs, for example, work to afford themselves life-sustaining luxuries like slow mornings, four working days (or fewer) per week, time in community and with loved ones, or other reimagined systems and worlds for us to inhabit.

Although we can and should invest more capital and support into Black-owned businesses, we must also imagine what other forms of investment might look like from a holistic reparations model that includes financial and health repairs. 

The Highland Project takes a revolutionary approach to investing in Black women’s dream capital by building community around their rest. Their four-point investment model focuses on scaling multi-generational visions for the future and prioritizes rest as a personal sustainability strategy. Because traditional investment strategies are “retroactively funding solutions of the past,” according to THP founder Gabrielle Wyatt, the organization provides $100,000 in unrestricted dream capital and community for a cohort of Black women founders during an 18-month fellowship; over the past five years, they’ve invested in 61 leaders. 

Scaling models of radical rest

Building intentional investment for Black women to actualize their ambitions over a longer timeframe recalibrates our inherent beliefs around Black women’s work and rest. Scaling a reparations model for Black women entrepreneurs means doing more than sharing some of the financial wealth that Black people helped to create; it also means banding across sectors of society to reimagine this wealth-building pathway altogether. 

We might, for example, redesign entrepreneurial “accelerators” as spaces for marginalized founders to slowly and deliberately build their businesses while “accelerating” access to capital (rather than merely hoping it will materialize one day). Government agencies could pass legislation to ensure descendants of enslaved and colonized Black people have access to capital to build wealth — a prospect already under consideration in several U.S. cities — and private-sector companies could freely share resources along with seed funding for Black people to start and grow their own businesses. 

Even more radical: holistic reparations could direct wellness and financial resources to Black people for simply existing. Local governments could provide wages that allow one (or more) days off from working, stabilize rent and cover down payments for homes, and provide physical spaces for leisure and rest without needing Black people to work for it first. Likewise, companies in the private sector could sponsor rest for Black women entrepreneurs by freely providing technical assistance and covering the costs of starting businesses, such as web design and certification processes to establish their work as Black women–owned enterprises.

Though many people are waking up to today’s labor injustices, what’s still being slept on is the possibility for a more expansive future. One where pathways to generational wealth, including entrepreneurship, are fuel for wellness, rather than burnout, and where rest, not production, is the core of reparations. Who’s ready for some visionary redesign?