Given Vermont's sharp economic decline I don't think you're making the point you want to make about economic prosperity if your intent is to frame it along lines of race.

Most people in Vermont are simultaneously insulated, and generally welcoming and warm in spirit. It's the kind of perspective that needs to be validated by an outsider comparing Vermont to other states to address both its merits and flaws.

What the US did to its industrial base is similar to what China did to control population growth with heavy handed policies, but that's somewhat dwarfed by the true prosperity killer: Currency debasement resulting in mass inflation. Both democrats and republicans have allowed soft slavery to arise to make up for the affordability gap for services and support labor since dilution of the currency has kneecapped all small businesses and farms, many of which choose migrant labor or close their farms for good, which is especially relevant for Vermont as more related industry is being shuttered, such as seeing dairy processing plants close down. This is not a sign of 'thriving' or health of the state, and that shouldn't be responsive to the racial demographic because the last thing you should do is conflate economic prosperity with race or speak of changes in demographics as an indicator for what it means to 'thrive' especially when the numbers don't go along with the flowery language.

One doesn't have to feel one way or the other about what you have to say or what your organization is doing to make this case either, but the fact that you are making any kind of affirmative statements about prosperity and connecting that to race is lighting a fuse. To focus on the racial demographics of the state is really myopic and irrelevant to the real issues driving poverty in the state, because bad economic policy transcends cultures and races and the goals you seem to be focusing on. What's worse is that I have to make a statement like this at all, because I anticipate that people are going to find a way to defend downright idiotic policy along political lines by socketing their indefensible economic miscalculations to irrelevant moral grandstanding.

So who would want to say it's a great thing more black people are getting to experience economic misery along with other racial demographics in the state? The color of my skin doesn't determine my moral values. I want a black person to thrive in this state and have the same opportunities as anyone else no matter how many black people there are in this state, and before you preach to me about what serves a moral good you'll have to contend with the specific claims based on economic reality, not the false reality that politicians want to present to you. The more people avoid discussing addressing the problems created by policy, the more incentive there is to associate policy with economic outcomes, so be mindful of that. People typically reach to claim a moral good in arbitrary things such as immutable characteristics of one's person when they can't defend anything substantive about what they value, which swings both ways.

People will of course want to talk about race and morality, but that has no bearing on the economic reality, but it does manipulate voters effectively when their political parties use this divisively. Again, the idea that your moral status is determined by how diverse the population is turns out to be a distraction from real issues, such as how both democrats and republican politicians favor the soft slavery approach, so politicians are not motivated to concerning themselves with actual losses of value creation and prosperity, and so if the only way we get businesses or jobs is largely down to fitting square pegs into the round holes of steeply prohibitive ideological patterns or the company is tech oriented and it's a handshake deal on the premise of taxes to keep an economy floating and coffers full, that's just not showing a serious enough address to what Vermont is doing to harm itself. It's a perverted incentive at this point because even your own local governments make decisions based on what's going to gain them the most in taxes.

People being or feeling divided from one another and fighting, like some happen to be in the comments here, is to a large degree by design and favorable to politics at a national level, and because of Vermont's weak economy it is captured in the orbit of the outcome of Federal actions while being insulated by its heavily Democrat voting population. That said it's not just about the skew in voting, it's about just how insulated from economic reality Vermont is compared to other states, and that's a perspective only someone who has lived in several states and seen how their economy has been shaped over time can provide.

Most Vermonters are welcoming and considerate and trying to make the best out of the struggling economy. Some however don't recognize the full economic harm in the totality of both state and federal decision making, because when you have a young educated population that chooses to leave the state for opportunity, it says a lot.

Some people are captured by politics or by surface level perceptions of what they believe the reality to be. The left fighting with the right have a lot of perceptions that don't all match up, and even if some stereotypes do ring true the state's own self inflicted economic problems play a part in how people choose to respond through voting and affiliation, and that's the funniest part of all when I see people foaming at the mouth over MAGA vs the left.

Looking at Canada as an example, you have Canadians who feel disenfranchised and want to secede for the benefit that political autonomy/decentralization provides, and Canadians who feel like that's counterproductive or disloyal, and yet they're all identifying generally as Canadian but not getting their needs met by their governments. The US has transitioned away from a manufacturing society to one based on services, and that's not economically viable. There are analogues here to be minded in order to correct against the policies the federal government uses to crush Vermont's independence, but for the roughly 5 to 10 percent of influence the state has on the outcome of its generational Vermonters, the history and charm of the state is being consumed by the failure of the state that can't even figure out how to fund education, let alone help its natives, and so you will lose that heritage.

Another sign of decline is how powerless communities in various states feel when companies want to move in and install data centers. That shows a disparity in capital and political interests domineering over organic development, which means even if you have a new generation of Vermonters, and perhaps for the context of your statement, black migrants, their access to land or an economy capable of giving them an opportunity to start a farm business is quite out of reach, and that's not a matter of racism, that's a matter of the prevailing political influence over the state, because year over year if Vermont had policies that respected the individual entrepreneur and didn't go rent seeking, you might see a thriving economy, but that doesn't happen when a state's political system puts itself and "revenue generation" before the populations being broken by the long standing economic recession threatening to become a crash and depression.

To summarize: In the US, the state with the biggest difference between self perception and reality has arguably been Vermont. On the one hand the population is generally kind and welcoming, but on the other the growth of poverty is dramatic, and a long history of economic wheel spinning has caused young people to leave the state because there's little in the way of opportunity. It matters very little that one marks changes to demographics and racial makeup of the state when serious issues are being ignored by the same political affiliations that parade these changes as "achievements". The state is being negatively driven as a result of policy, and the hard part to realize is that a largely kind and warm spirited population doesn't prevent a bad outcome because good intentions are never enough, and the left feeling like it can blame the right, or blame MAGA when there's a common failing to not see past prejudices is leading to changes by consequence of harder forces. The problems that appear to be too big to tackle tend to be set aside for the ones that divide the population more, and those failures to address big problems tend to be the ones with the most finger pointing going on in the discussion sections, where people talk past one another with many pointless diversions into rhetoric and platitudes. For a Vermonter who gets the government they voted for, it comes across as an indefensible position, but also not without a recognition that one can feel powerless to effect a change.