For six weeks, in The Quiet Dismantling, we followed the machinery — the quiet, technical, deliberately boring ways the infrastructure of women's health is being pulled apart. The data systems that make our deaths countable. The drug shortages. The pharmacy backstop. Medicaid. The slow exodus of the workforce itself. None of it made a headline. That was the point.
These next six weeks are about the cost. We're calling the series The Economic Body, because money moves through this country the way blood moves through a body — and the question is always the same one: who feeds it, and who bleeds for it. We'll follow that money into the ACA subsidy cliff, into housing, into the cost of childcare, into the violence a woman cannot afford to leave.
But we begin here, in Week 1, with a story close to my heart — because in many ways it is a story about me. And about my family.
My mother is an immigrant from the Dominican Republic. My father is an immigrant from the West Indies who gave this country thirty years in its Navy and retired a Master Chief. They worked, and they sacrificed, and they did it so that their daughter could walk into MIT and Harvard.
And I did. Two undergraduate degrees — a double major in chemical engineering and biology — with a minor in biomedical engineering. Harvard Medical School — through HST, the Harvard–MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology, the joint medical track the two universities run together for doctors who are also engineers and scientists. A PhD in medical engineering and medical physics. A master's in public health from Harvard. And a residency in a Harvard teaching hospital along the way. Five degrees from the most elite institutions in America — six, if you count the minor.
And despite all of it, someone out there will look at me and say: it was DEI.
I earned five degrees from the most selective institutions in this country — because I was Black? Then I suppose it was my Blackness that sat for those exams. My Blackness that passed the boards. My Blackness that stayed awake through the thirty-hour shifts. My Blackness that built this company, and our research infrastructure, with no outside money and no one's help.
You could say the same thing to my husband — whose parents came here from Eritrea, and who holds a bachelor's, a master's, and a PhD in aerospace engineering, all three from MIT. A literal rocket scientist. But I suppose that was DEI too.
And now the two of us sit in rooms where power gets decided, and we comment on it, and we build our own systems to challenge it.
Which is where the real question finally comes into focus. It was never "was DEI unfair." Look at who is being removed, and how, and by whom — and you realize the question they cannot afford to ask out loud is the opposite one: did it work too well?
Go back and read the notices from the slave auctions. They do not describe the people on that block as inferior. They describe them in superlatives — strong, skilled, capable, ingenious, prime. The entire economy of it depended on the value of Black bodies and Black ability; they were pricing, in advance, the exact excellence they would then spend two centuries insisting did not exist. "Lazy" and "inferior" were never an honest assessment. They were a cover story — pulled out precisely when Black ingenuity became something they could no longer own.
So ask it plainly. Was any of this ever about inferiority? Or was it always about something else — about who is allowed to keep the value that Black capability creates?
That is the question The Economic Body, and the series running alongside it, are built to answer.
Because to understand why they are taking the ladder apart, you first have to understand how it was built — and my family is the blueprint.
The Black middle class was not built in the private sector; the private sector would not have it. It was built on federal jobs — the Post Office, the civil service, and the military my father gave thirty years to — because the federal government was the one door that could be pried open when the banks and the unions and the state governments of the South were built to keep us out. There is a reason so much Black power in this country sits at the federal level and not the state or local one: it is the direct inheritance of slavery and Jim Crow, which locked us out of every other room. And it is measurable. In the public sector, the Black pay penalty is about 7 percent; in the private sector, at the same level of education and experience, it is roughly 17. Federal work is the one place in this economy where a Black worker is treated something close to fairly.
Hold onto that, because it tells you exactly what the ladder is — and exactly what it means to kick it away.
And that is what is being done, right now, on purpose. The design is not hidden if you read what its architects write: white men's power restored and uncontested; women moved back into the home; and beneath both, a permanent underclass with no way up. Destroying the Black middle class is how you manufacture the third. Watch the method. The deepest cut is aimed at the federal workforce, where Black Americans are 18.6 percent of employees against 12.8 percent of the labor force — and where the agencies being gutted — HUD, Education, and the VA — are among the Blackest in government. Roughly 220,000 federal jobs vanished in 2025 alone, and the damage is not evenly spread: Black women's employment rate fell to 55.7 percent in 2025 — a one-year drop among the sharpest in a quarter century — and economists traced it largely to the public sector. When you cut "across the board" from a workforce where one group is doubly concentrated, you are not being neutral. You are aiming.
The military — my father's ladder — is the same move, only clearer. The research is unambiguous: Army service raises a Black servicemember's long-term earnings and significantly closes the Black–white wage gap, while for white servicemembers it changes almost nothing. It is one of the most reliable engines of Black mobility this country has ever built. So watch what is being done to it. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs — only the second Black officer ever to hold the post — was fired; no failure was cited, and the official statements even praised him. But the defense secretary had already demanded the chairman's firing over what he called "DEI woke" military leadership. The first woman to run the Navy was fired the same night. This spring, two Black and two female officers were struck personally from the promotion list. They are dismantling the one ladder that demonstrably works — the one my father climbed — and telling you why as they do it.
And the alibi for all of it is competence: that they are only clearing out people who never earned their place. My life is the rebuttal, and so is the data. When researchers mail identical résumés and change only the name, the white ones get called back fifty percent more often — and the gap grows wider, not narrower, the stronger the résumé gets. Across tens of thousands of NIH grant applications, Black scientists were ten points less likely to be funded after controlling for the entire résumé. And the federal workers being purged as "DEI hires" are more educated than Black workers nationally — 45.3 percent hold at least a bachelor's degree, against 26.2 percent of Black workers overall. We were raised on the phrase twice as hard for half as much. The data says we were not exaggerating. If anything, we undersold it.
Here is where it lands in my exam room. A system that arranges all of this does not stop at the paycheck; it reaches the body. The patient the textbook says is safe — the one with the degrees, the salaried job, the good insurance — is more likely to die having her baby, or to come close, than a white woman who never finished high school. That patient is me. It is my mother. Maternal death is the canary: the earliest, most honest reading we have of a whole population's health, going off first because it is built to go off first.
But the gas filling the shaft is a plan — and over the next six weeks, we are going to follow it all the way down. Who pays. And who bleeds.
My parents sacrificed everything so their daughter could earn a seat at the table. The people dismantling that table would like us to believe the seat was charity. It was not. It was full fare, paid twice over. And if we let them call it charity for me, we have agreed to let them call it charity for everyone standing behind me.
We can say that plainly. We have to.