July 17, 2026
Narrative isn’t separate from economics.
By Constance Harper and Shantell Hinton
When we talk about Black wealth, we almost always talk about money. We measure homeownership, business ownership, wages, investment portfolios, and the racial wealth gap. Those conversations matter. Financial capital has always been essential to our collective freedom.
But I believe we’ve overlooked another form of capital that quietly determines whether financial capital can flourish at all: narrative.
Before investors place bets, they believe a story. Before neighborhoods are revitalized, someone imagines possibility. Before policies change, public imagination shifts.
Before markets move, narratives move. Capital follows belief. And belief is built through story. For generations, Black communities have produced extraordinary wealth—not simply in dollars, but in creativity, innovation, mutual aid, cultural production, entrepreneurship, spiritual wisdom, and radical imagination. Yet the stories most often told about us continue to emphasize scarcity over abundance, pathology over possibility, and crisis over creativity.
Those stories are not benign. They shape where investment flows. They influence whose businesses receive funding. They determine whose neighborhoods are considered “up-and-coming” and whose are deemed disposable. They influence hiring decisions, philanthropic priorities, public policy, and even what our own children come to believe is possible for themselves.
Narrative isn’t separate from economics. Narrative creates economic conditions. Which means narrative itself is a form of capital. And perhaps one of the most undervalued assets Black America possesses.
As our nation continues to celebrate its 250th birthday, I find myself asking a different question than many institutions are asking. Not simply: How do we tell a more inclusive American story? But rather: What stories are we investing in today that will become the inheritance of Black communities seven generations from now?
The Black Radical Tradition has always understood that liberation begins long before laws change. Our ancestors imagined freedom before they experienced it. They sang it before they could vote it. They preached it before they could legislate it. They painted it, quilted it, danced it, organized it, and whispered it into existence long before the world recognized its possibility.
Black futures have always been built through radical imagination. That imagination deserves investment. Not as charity. Not as branding—as infrastructure.
This conviction shaped the work we are building through the Deaconess Foundation‘s Narrative Network. Rather than treating storytelling as a communications strategy or a marketing campaign, we asked a different question: What if we invested in the relationships, creative ecosystems, and cultural archives capable of sustaining Black imagination long after any individual grant has ended?
The answer became a nine-month Narrative Lab bringing together artists, organizers, filmmakers, writers, cultural strategists, and trusted community leaders to create something larger than content. We are cultivating narrative infrastructure. That infrastructure looks like filmmaker Cami Thomas and the My Friends and I cohort producing The Solution is Beautiful, a documentary that reframes Black wealth not as accumulation, but as “love through action.” Instead of reducing communities like Kinloch, North St. Louis, and the East Side to stories of disinvestment, the film explores the food, memory, rituals, relationships, and cultural inheritance that have sustained generations despite structural inequity. Wealth, in this telling, is measured as much by what communities preserve as by what they possess.
It looks like Trevor Smith, Yoni Blumberg, Kristian Blackmon, and the BLIS Collective producing the Abundance Zine—a polyvocal publication that challenges the myth that scarcity is inevitable. The project argues that Black communities already possess extraordinary assets: creativity, relationships, knowledge, and collective wisdom. Scarcity, they remind us, is often a political design rather than a natural condition.
It looks like Stevie Selby, Rosa Parks, and the Warm Cookies of the Revolution cohort creating This Is Our City, a living archive documenting the emotional interior of a city through poetry, photography, visual art, and community storytelling. Rather than preserving buildings or institutions, they are preserving belonging itself—the relationships, acts of care, and collective imagination that make a place worth fighting for. Each project stands on its own.
Together, however, they reveal something much larger. They are creating cultural assets. Archives. Artifacts. Evidence.
Not simply documenting where Black communities have been, but preserving how we imagined ourselves free while we were still building that future. This, to me, is where philanthropy—and all institutions concerned with Black economic prosperity—must evolve.
For decades we have invested in programs, services, and systems. Those investments remain essential. But if we want Black wealth to compound across generations, we must also invest in the infrastructure that sustains imagination itself. Who preserves our stories?
Who documents our innovations? Who records our neighborhood wisdom before it disappears? Who archives the futures we are dreaming today?
Because if we fail to invest in those questions, someone else will answer them for us. Too often our communities become historical only after tragedy. Our archives begin with oppression. Our stories become valuable only once they are safely in the past. I reject that premise. I believe Black communities deserve living archives. Living memory. Living imagination.
The cultural wealth we create today should not wait for historians to discover it decades from now. It should be stewarded now. Protected now. Expanded now. This is what I mean by narrative capital. Narrative capital is every story that expands what our children believe is possible. Every film that humanizes rather than stereotypes. Every publication that refuses the logic of scarcity. Every archive that preserves Black brilliance before it is forgotten. Every relationship that strengthens the ecosystem from which new stories emerge. Like financial capital, narrative capital compounds. Its dividends may not always appear on quarterly earnings reports. But they appear in public imagination. In policy. In investment. In entrepreneurship. In belonging. And ultimately, in freedom.
As we commemorate America’s 250th birthday, perhaps the most important question isn’t what story this nation tells about itself. Perhaps it is whether we are willing to invest in the stories that future generations of Black children will inherit about themselves because financial wealth alone cannot sustain Black futures.
Those futures also require narrative wealth—the radical imagination, cultural memory, creative ecosystems, and collective stories that teach each generation not only what we survived, but what we dared to build. The most undervalued asset in Black America isn’t money. It’s stories that make new economies, new communities, and new futures imaginable.
Shantell Hinton is a Narrative Strategist. Constance Harper is the Vice President of Strategic Impact & Innovation at Deaconess Foundation.
