For decades, Black Americans have been looked at through a deficit lens — what’s missing, what’s broken, what needs fixing. But writer, community planner, and urban strategist Lauren Hood has long been tired of that narrative.
The lifelong Detroit resident has a different question: What if instead of focusing on what Black communities lack, we focus on what makes them thrive?
And so in 2021, she launched the Institute for AfroUrbanism — part urban planning think tank, part Afrofuturist experiment, all focused on reframing the narrative about Black people and Black life in America, and across the global African diaspora.
“My work is geared toward an elevated consciousness and elevated way of carrying ourselves,” Hood says.
IAU first sought out “thrivers” in Hood’s hometown to define what the meaning of Black thriving is. Some might assume that Black success equates to aspiring to Talented Tenth-esque trappings of the Black bourgeoisie: Jack and Jill and Greek-letter organization memberships, political pedigrees, and the “right” kind of upbringing.
But in Hood’s constellation of thrivers, there are agricultural stewards, artists, healers, food justice practitioners, writers, musicians, architects, and more. Now, through IAU’s inaugural fellowship, eight Detroit thrivers are spending the next year traveling to a different locale each month to meet with other Black thrivers and learn how they operate in their respective communities.
Three Core Principles
Hood believes thrivers root themselves in three core principles: audacity, agency, and abundance — all of which she saw while growing up in the Motor City during its peak as a Black middle-class stronghold. Hood’s part of a generation born and raised in a time when Detroit’s top elected officials were Black, Black residents held both white- and blue-collar automotive jobs, and home ownership was the norm and not the dream.
“We used to walk around the city when Coleman Young [Detroit’s first Black mayor] was here,” she says.
But as recession after recession decimated Detroit, the city became a population of renters facing high unemployment and little opportunity. Schools closed, and abandoned homes were torn down. With white developers seeing the economic downturn as an opportunity to snap up land, it wasn’t long until gentrification made its way to the city.
“I was driving on the highway and I saw the Detroit skyline, and I’m like, ‘wow, we actually have a really nice skyline.’ And I’m like, ‘wait a minute, none of this is ours.’ Why are we 80% of the population, but none of this is ours?” Hood says.
It’s both a national and global problem. In plenty of majority-Black neighborhoods, cities, and nations — think the British Commonwealth, or other colonized places — what happens is often dictated by white people with economic and political power.
“For me, the thing is to root ourselves in what has been the collective knowledge about how we transform our conditions globally,” Hood says. “So I think we need to marry that knowledge with the individual abundance narrative that I’m hearing more about.”
Everybody isn’t wealthy, but everybody moves a certain way in the world.
Lauren Hood
Indeed, Hood says thrivers need to know and demand their worth, and embrace individual abundance because it leads directly to healing and collective abundance. She notes that without that mindset shift, even high-achieving Black professionals can end up siloed into a lane of pocket-watching and self-doubt.
Hood and the IAU fellows recently met with thrivers in Atlanta and Los Angeles to learn how what they’re doing can become solutions for Black folks elsewhere — and they’re heading to Tulsa, Oklahoma, next.
“Everybody isn’t wealthy, but everybody moves a certain way in the world,” Hood says of the thrivers.
“They’re moving with a certain amount of big dreams, big aspirations,” she says. “So that’s the criteria.”
