Stop Waiting for an Apology and Start Building an Empire

Let me tell you about the apology that changed everything. In 1988, forty-three years after 120,000 Japanese Americans were forcibly removed from their homes, stripped of their businesses, and imprisoned in internment camps surrounded by barbed wire and armed guards, President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act. The Act acknowledged that the internment was “motivated largely by racial prejudice, wartime hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.” It authorized a payment of $20,000 to each surviving internee. It was, by any measure, a formal, governmental apology backed by financial restitution. And here is the part that matters: by the time that apology arrived, the Japanese American community had already rebuilt everything. They had not waited. They could not afford to wait. And the forty-three years between the injustice and the apology would have been forty-three years of paralysis if they had made their progress contingent on someone else’s remorse.

I begin with this story because it illustrates a principle so fundamental that it should be unnecessary to state, yet it has become the most controversial thing you can say to the Black community: your progress cannot be contingent on someone else’s apology. Not because the apology is undeserved. It is deserved. The crimes committed against Black Americans — slavery, Jim Crow, redlining, mass incarceration — are among the most extensively documented atrocities in human history. The debt is real. The question is not whether the debt exists. The question is whether you will spend your life waiting for payment or build a life that renders the payment irrelevant.

The Psychological Trap

There is a body of research in psychology that explains, with clinical precision, why waiting for an apology is not merely unproductive but actively destructive. It begins with the distinction between two types of motivation, identified by Edward Deci and Richard Ryan in their Self-Determination Theory: mastery motivation and justice/revenge motivation.

Mastery motivation is internally driven. It says: I will acquire skills, build resources, and create value because doing so serves my own development and my family’s future. Justice motivation is externally driven. It says: I will pursue acknowledgment, redress, and punishment because the wrong done to me must be recognized before I can move forward. Both motivations are psychologically legitimate. But their outcomes diverge dramatically.

People driven primarily by mastery motivation produce more, earn more, report greater life satisfaction, and demonstrate more resilience in the face of setbacks. People driven primarily by justice motivation — the need for external acknowledgment before internal progress can begin — demonstrate higher rates of depression, anxiety, and stagnation. This is not a moral judgment. It is a measurement. The brain that is oriented toward building is measurably more productive and healthier than the brain that is oriented toward waiting.

And the cruelest dimension of the trap is this: when your progress depends on someone else’s apology, you have given that person permanent power over your future. You have constructed a psychological architecture in which the oppressor holds the key to your advancement. You have ensured that the very people who harmed you retain the ability to harm you further — not through active oppression, but through the simple act of not apologizing. Their silence becomes your prison. Their indifference becomes your paralysis. And every year that passes without the acknowledgment you have demanded is another year that you have given them for free.

The Historical Evidence Is Unanimous

Name one oppressed group in human history that was liberated by the guilt of its oppressor. One. I will wait.

You cannot name one because none exists. The historical record is unanimous and unambiguous: every group that has risen from oppression has done so by building forward, not by waiting for the oppressor to look backward. The apologies, when they came at all, arrived decades after the building was already complete. They were footnotes, not foundations.

The Jewish people are perhaps the most instructive case. The Holocaust murdered six million Jews — a third of the world’s Jewish population. The survivors emerged from the camps with nothing: no homes, no businesses, no possessions, no country, and in many cases no living family members. Germany’s formal apology and reparations did not begin until 1952, with the Luxembourg Agreement, and they were bitterly controversial within the Jewish community. Many survivors refused to accept German money. Others saw it as a practical necessity. But here is the critical point: the State of Israel was declared in 1948, four years before any German reparation. The survivors did not wait. They built a nation in a desert, surrounded by hostile neighbors, with nothing but human capital and the refusal to let their destroyers determine their future.

The Irish arrived in America during the Famine years — 1845 to 1852 — and were met with signs that read “No Irish Need Apply.” They were caricatured in newspapers as subhuman, depicted with ape-like features, described as racially inferior. They built the railroads, dug the canals, manned the police forces and fire departments, and within two generations had produced mayors, governors, and a President of the United States. No one apologized to them. They did not wait for an apology. They built.

Chinese Americans were subjected to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 — the first law in American history to ban immigration based explicitly on race. They were barred from citizenship, barred from land ownership in many states, subjected to mob violence, and confined to Chinatowns that were simultaneously ghettos and self-sustaining economies. The formal congressional expression of regret did not come until 2011 — 129 years later. By then, Chinese Americans had the highest median household income of any racial group in the United States. They had not waited 129 years to begin.

Japanese Americans, as I began this article by documenting, rebuilt their economic lives within a single generation after internment. By the 1960s, Japanese American household income exceeded the national median. By the 1980s, before the 1988 apology and reparations, Japanese Americans had among the lowest poverty rates and highest educational attainment of any demographic in the country. The apology arrived after the building was done. It acknowledged the past. It did not create the future. The future had been created by people who refused to wait.

The Black Communities That Built Without Waiting

The most damning evidence against the waiting strategy is not foreign. It is domestic. It is Black. It is the documented history of Black communities that built empires without permission, without apology, and without a single white person’s guilt playing any role in the process.

Greenwood, Tulsa, Oklahoma. By 1921, the Greenwood District — thirty-five square blocks of Black-owned businesses, including banks, hotels, restaurants, movie theaters, a hospital, and a bus system — had generated so much wealth that it was known nationally as “Black Wall Street.” It was built by Black people who had migrated from the Deep South, many of them formerly enslaved, none of them waiting for an apology from anyone. O. W. Gurley arrived with a small amount of capital and a determination to build a self-sustaining Black economy. He purchased forty acres of land and sold lots exclusively to Black buyers. The community that grew was not a petition. It was a proof of concept. It was destroyed by a white mob in the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre — and the survivors began rebuilding immediately. Not because they had received an apology. Because they were builders.

Durham, North Carolina. Booker T. Washington called Durham “the city of Negro enterprise” after visiting in 1910. North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company, founded in 1898, became the largest Black-owned business in the United States. Mechanics and Farmers Bank, founded in 1907, financed Black homeownership and business creation for decades. The Parrish Street corridor was the financial center of Black America. None of this was built with an apology. It was built with capital, labor, discipline, and the refusal to let Jim Crow determine economic destiny.

Atlanta’s Sweet Auburn district. Auburn Avenue was called “the richest Negro street in the world” by Fortune magazine in 1956. Atlanta Life Insurance Company, Citizens Trust Bank, the Atlanta Daily World — all Black-owned, all built during the height of segregation, all proof that economic self-determination does not require the oppressor’s cooperation, much less his contrition.

“I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also much more than that. So is all of us.” — James Baldwin, “Notes for a Hypothetical Novel,” Nobody Knows My Name (1961)

These communities were not built in spite of the absence of an apology. They were built because the absence of an apology was irrelevant. The builders of Greenwood and Durham and Sweet Auburn understood something that the current generation of Black leadership has systematically unlearned: that the resources for Black advancement exist within the Black community itself, and that the decision to use them does not require anyone else’s permission, acknowledgment, or guilt.

The Current Opportunity

I am going to say something that will be controversial, and I am going to back it with data, and the data is not going to care whether it is controversial: Black Americans in 2026 have access to more resources for advancement than any generation of Black people in the history of the world.

Start with information. The internet has made available, for free, the entire curriculum of MIT, Harvard, Stanford, and dozens of other elite universities. Khan Academy provides K–12 education at no cost. YouTube contains more instructional content on every subject — from electrical wiring to corporate finance to software engineering — than every library in the history of civilization combined. The cost of acquiring knowledge has collapsed to zero. This has never happened before in human history.

Capital. Venture capital investment in Black-founded startups increased from approximately $1 billion in 2019 to over $6 billion in 2021 — a sixfold increase in two years, according to PitchBook data. The SBA’s Community Advantage program targets lending to underserved communities. CDFIs (Community Development Financial Institutions) provide capital specifically to Black entrepreneurs. Crowdfunding platforms allow business creation with no institutional gatekeepers. The capital pipeline is not equal — it never has been — but it is more open than at any point in American history.

Legal protection. The Civil Rights Act. The Fair Housing Act. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The Voting Rights Act (weakened, yes, but still extant). Title VII. Affirmative action in government contracting. Anti-discrimination law that, whatever its imperfections, provides legal recourse that did not exist for the builders of Greenwood. Those builders had none of these protections and built an empire anyway. We have all of them and are building less.

The tools are not the problem. The resources are not the problem. The legal framework is not the problem. The problem is a psychological orientation that has convinced a generation that progress requires permission — that the apology must come before the building begins. It does not. It never has. And the historical record, spanning every oppressed group that has ever climbed out of oppression, testifies with one voice: build first. The apology, if it comes, will find you standing.

The Cost of Grievance

I want to be precise about what I am not saying. I am not saying that the grievances are illegitimate. They are legitimate. Slavery happened. Jim Crow happened. Redlining happened. Mass incarceration is happening. The documented harms are real, ongoing, and measurable. I am not saying that acknowledgment does not matter. It matters. A nation that cannot acknowledge its crimes is a nation that will repeat them. I am not saying that reparations should not be discussed. They should be discussed — seriously, with data, with specificity, without the magical thinking that characterizes most of the conversation.

What I am saying is this: none of those things — acknowledgment, reparations, apology — can be the precondition for progress. Because if they are, and if they do not come — and the historical evidence suggests that they come slowly, partially, and belatedly if at all — then you have sentenced yourself and your children and your grandchildren to decades of waiting for a check that may never arrive. The Japanese Americans waited forty-three years and received $20,000 each — a fraction of what was taken from them. Is that the model? Wait half a century for a fraction of the debt?

Or is the model what the Japanese Americans actually did: rebuild immediately, relentlessly, without reference to the apology, and let the apology arrive as confirmation of what they had already proven — that they did not need it?

The Grievance Industry

There is a reason the grievance orientation persists despite its documented failure to produce economic results, and the reason is not mysterious: grievance is an industry. It employs people. It funds organizations. It fills airtime. It sells books. It generates speaking fees. It provides careers for a professional advocacy class that has no incentive to solve the problems it describes, because solving the problems would eliminate the need for the advocacy class.

This is not cynicism. This is economics. If you run an organization whose funding depends on demonstrating that Black people are oppressed, you have a financial incentive to emphasize oppression and minimize progress. If you are a media personality whose audience tunes in for righteous anger, you have a financial incentive to produce anger and suppress nuance. If you are a politician whose base is mobilized by grievance, you have an electoral incentive to magnify the grievance and diminish the agency. The people in these positions are not evil. They are responding to incentives. But the incentives are misaligned with the community’s interests, and the cost of that misalignment is measured in decades of stagnation.

Booker T. Washington described this dynamic in 1911: “There is another class of coloured people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs.” That sentence is 115 years old. It is as accurate today as the day it was written. The industry has only grown.

What Building Looks Like

Building looks like the 2.6 million Black-owned businesses in the United States that generated over $206 billion in revenue in the most recent Census Bureau data. It looks like the Black homeownership rate, which, despite remaining shamefully lower than the white rate, has increased from 42 percent to over 45 percent in the last five years. It looks like the Black women who are the most educated demographic in America by enrollment — the fastest-growing group of college students and graduate students in the country. It looks like the Black men who are starting businesses at record rates, entering the skilled trades, building careers in technology, and creating wealth in ways that the evening news will never cover because it does not bleed.

Building looks like the decision — made every morning, in every household that makes it — to orient toward the future rather than the past. To ask not “what was done to us” but “what will we do next.” To channel the energy of righteous anger into productive action rather than performative outrage. To teach children that they are descended from people who built Greenwood and Durham and Sweet Auburn — people who created empires under conditions that make the current era look like a paradise of opportunity by comparison — and that the expectation is not merely survival but dominance.

Building looks like what every successful group in American history has done: turned inward, pooled resources, supported each other’s businesses, invested in each other’s children, and refused to let the majority population’s opinion of them determine their economic trajectory. The Korean community did this. The Nigerian immigrant community did this. The Indian immigrant community did this. The Jewish community did this. The mechanism is not culturally specific. It is universal. It works. And it does not require an apology from anyone.

“Know from whence you came. If you know whence you came, there are absolutely no limitations to where you can go.” — James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (1963)

The Empire

I chose the word “empire” deliberately. Not because I am interested in domination. Because I am interested in scale. The Black community in America represents $1.8 trillion in annual consumer spending — a figure that, if it were a national GDP, would make it the fifteenth largest economy in the world, ahead of Mexico, Indonesia, and the Netherlands. That is not the spending power of a victimized minority. That is the spending power of a nation. And a nation that spends $1.8 trillion without a proportional ownership stake in the businesses it patronizes, the banks it deposits in, the neighborhoods it rents in, and the institutions it relies on is not a nation being oppressed by outsiders. It is a nation bleeding wealth through its own choices.

An empire is what happens when that spending becomes investment. When the $1.8 trillion circulates within the community before it leaves. When the banks are Black-owned and the deposits fund Black mortgages. When the grocery stores are Black-owned and the revenue employs Black workers. When the schools are funded by Black taxpayers who own Black homes in Black neighborhoods where the property values rise because the community invests in itself. This is not a fantasy. This is what Greenwood was. This is what Durham was. This is what Korean Town in Los Angeles is, today, built by immigrants who arrived with nothing and asked no one’s permission.

The empire is available. The resources exist. The legal protections exist. The technology exists. The only thing that does not exist is the collective decision to stop waiting and start building. And that decision cannot come from a government program, a think-tank paper, a reparations check, or an apology. It can only come from within. It has to be made by millions of individual Black men and women who look at the historical record — at Greenwood, at Durham, at the Japanese Americans, at the Irish, at the Jewish people, at every group that climbed out of the pit without waiting for the people who dug it to say sorry — and decide: I will not wait. I will build. And the apology, if it ever comes, will find me standing on something I built with my own hands.

That is the only empire that has ever been built. Not the empire of the apologized-to. The empire of the builders. And the door is open. It has always been open. The only thing keeping anyone out is the belief that someone else holds the key.

Nobody holds the key. Walk through the door.