Personal Finance and Racial Justice, part 2
Who belongs to me? My budget, "my self”, and loving actual people
“The only time most people think about injustice is when it happens to them.” - Charles Bukowski
I felt compelled to publish these three essays because it’s been two years since George Floyd and most people aren’t thinking about racial justice anymore. What seemed of critical importance two years ago has faded from most of our consciousness. But lack of attention isn’t a sign of its lack of importance.1 After all, our lack of action is how racism is perpetuated into the future.
To put it another way, we did not create it, but it’s our responsibility to address it, or it continues.
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Before you read anything I write, start with: A COLLECTION OF THOUGHTS FROM BLACK INTELLECTUALS ABOUT LOVE.
PART 1: What if? The Beloved Community
What if you acted as if the change you wanted to see in the world was already true and all you had to do was live in it?
Wonderfully, that was the premise of the 1960s civil rights movement in America: the Beloved Community. In an On Being podcast interview, civil rights hero John Lewis describes how he and the movement acted as “if the beloved community were already a reality, the true reality, and he simply had to embody it until everyone else could see.” (bonus: Martin Luther King’s Beloved Community).
If John Lewis is right that all we have to do is embody a reality to make it so, my obvious question is: what are we embodying right now? How does how we act reinforce white supremacy?
PART 2: We live in a system that is profoundly de-moralizing
“The profound crisis of human identity brought on by living within a lie… appears… as a deep moral crisis in society. A person who has been seduced by the consumer value system… who has no roots in the order of being, no sense of responsibility for anything higher than his or her own personal survival, is a demoralized person. The system depends on this demoralization.” - Nobel Peace Prize winner Vaclav Havel
Market economies are part of a larger culture founded on Enlightenment rationalism and Radical Individualism, so different than anything else before, or outside of it.2 Our wealth is driven by an achievement culture that fosters a constant state of insecurity. The insecurity is not only economic but even deeper: emotional. The core wound of modernity is that we are separate individuals and because of that we don’t we belong, to ourselves and to others. We say that we see ourselves as interconnected but feel increasing sense of scarcity and incompleteness.
Where do we get this insecurity? In market economy cultures, we chronically mistake prestige, pleasure, popularity as fulfillment. Our worldly desires for achievement, success, status are expressions of our own unlovedness. In capitalism, the pursuit of happiness means whatever you want will always be a little bit out of reach.
We’ve become addicted to our scarcity, busyness, and stress. The consumeristic culture keeps us distracted and stressed, obsessed with accumulating things and having experiences. We lack voluntary simplicity because we are what Buddhists call “hungry ghosts”, the ones who can never have enough. There’s no room to orient to the spaciousness of encounter with the marginalized.
We don’t understand material sufficiency. We never have enough.
We don’t understand emotional or spiritual sufficiency. We are never enough.
I believe that the vast majority of our stress-related anxiety and depression is because we don’t feel sufficient. The primary driver of capitalism is the lack of belonging. Our own emotional insufficiency and racial injustice stem from the same root: society’s maintenance of the belief that we’re separate. We’ve been doing separation in America since 1619.
When I teach about money, the primary issue people are trying to solve is not feeling like they belong. Ironically, wealth is the barrier that keeps us separate from each other.
We no longer feel enmeshed in a web of intimate, mutual relationships, no longer participate in life around us. We now belong, in our separate cages surrounded by our own possessions, to capitalism. What does it mean to describe our possessions as “belongings”? THAT is demoralization.
In contrast, people throughout history and today in most non-industrialized places identify themselves less as individuals and are less caught up in “self-identity.” They see themselves more in a collective identity than people in market economy cultures.
2 examples:
The Lakota don’t have possessive pronouns. Inherent in their language is the inability to own things. “The knife beside me” instead of “my knife.” What would it mean to not use “possessive” pronouns for a week? My car. My money. My house.
“We live in a society that places great importance upon external signs of success and importance. We have to assure ourselves and others that we are valuable and important (and that they are too). I see us in contrast to the Pueblo Indians that we Franciscans work with in New Mexico. They actually downplay status or any external sign of superiority…. This is the way they maintain community and avoid comparison and competition. It is no surprise that the Spanish invaders named them the “pueblo” or community Indians. We, however, place great importance on the distinctiveness of our cars, clothes and dwellings. We tend to be preoccupied with being ‘one up’ on others. We have great difficulty finding our value from within. In a materialistic society we have projected our sense of worth almost exclusively on things. That is why it’s hard to rediscover our souls in ourselves.” - Richard Rohr
Our fears that we are alone and not enough, that we don’t belong, that there’s constant scarcity, are inextricably tied to our sense of Radical Individualism. We are the subject and everything and everyone else is an object. What’s this person’s “utility” to me? What can I get from being in relationship to them? THAT is demoralization.
From a societal point of view, economic elites and whiteness become more separate from everyone else. We live in economically segregated neighborhoods, send our kids to economically segregated schools, and spend almost all of our time with people with similar incomes in economic segregation (do you spend a lot of time with people much richer or much poorer than you?). Same with racially segregated neighborhoods, schools and leisure time (do you hang out with a lot of Black people?). Beverly D’angelo says, “the impulse to individualize is in itself a white trait.” The myth of separation is literally separating us, keeping us from the Beloved Community.
Whiteness and racism are a chase to become privileged and separate.
And in pursuing our outer happiness, we sacrifice inner contentment. Go to any religion and you’ll find at its core the message, “you belong.” Any spiritual life involves letting go of ego, loving unconditionally, growing in universal compassion, acting in wisdom, co-creating a world of justice, peace, and love, finding the wellsprings of joy in being human.
“If we go down into ourselves, we find that we possess exactly what we desire.” —Simone Weil
PART 3: Moving from a theology of insecurity to a theology of kinship
And our sense of belonging stems from meritocracy and deservedness. The belief is that you do not matter “unless.” The conditional is what we all suffer from.
White culture promotes low-level narcissism. Read the 9 traits of narcissism and see how capitalism and white supremacy promote mental illness.3
We have to move to a theology of kinship. We have to believe that we belong to each other. This is what all the Black writers above are talking about: love.
There is nothing more essential, vital, and important than love, practiced in the present moment. By keeping it close, just right now, we are reminded to choose connection over alienation, kinship over self-absorption. - Father Greg Boyle
Unless we love, and I mean love actual people, we cannot have kinship. Otherwise, love stays in the head. You can’t read or tweet away racism. It’s embodied in us and flesh in blood. How many Black friends people do you share your life with? Until you have real-life connection with Black people, anti-racism is clinical, an intellectual exercise. Solidarity is not empathizing with the Other, having the right opinions, but standing with others, in the right place.
PART 4: Integrity, money is an expression of love and identity
Money is an expression of love and identity. We spend money on those we love and we “identify” with. That’s why I believe people with privilege will not be willing to give up their houses, international vacations, and “experiences” to pay off the “white debt.” Our self-concern trumps our desire for racial justice.
When we talk about a theology of kinship, it means taking it out into the real world. Who are the people you share a life with economically? If you looked at your budget, whom do you love? Who belongs to you and who is excluded? If money were an expression of love and identity, how many Black people do you love and identify with? How many Black people do you belong with? Now we see the roots of why wealth is so racialized in America. And how you and I perpetuate it.
REV ANGEL KYODO WILLIAMS: Here is a space. Here is an opportunity for you to meet your discomfort instead of continuing to bypass it, to drug it, to distract from it or to Facebook it. We’re always… anesthetizing ourselves… We are all heavily anesthetized by the various ways we’re distracted from our own suffering. Mine is maybe online shopping, but we all have some version of it and just because we’re not actually using hard drugs or hard alcohol doesn’t mean that we’re not distracting ourselves from the pain.
LAMA ROD: We’re distracted… because we prioritize and value trying to fit in, trying to belong, instead of actually privileging our deepest desires of equality, equanimity, community. And I think that for us who and what they are at whatever cost that comes.
REV ANGEL KYODO WILLIAMS: Do you have examples?
LAMA ROD: Anyone who we see as a hero. I think we are drawn to their choice that they have made for themselves. There are all kinds of examples. [For me, one is] Ericka Higgins. When did she choose to privilege her deepest desires to create change? If you know her and know of her story, as one of the leaders of the Black Panthers in the 60s, it cost her a lot. Regardless of what she lost, she was always coming back to help people. And ultimately, I think for me that’s truly the bottom line. What am I doing to benefit myself and others?
I think that choice I had to make was that I had to value and choose integrity. Doing what I needed to do to support the benefit of my students and those around me over whatever financial benefit there was. And I think that when we choose other things over integrity, that’s when the violence starts in our communities and our relationships.’
Integrity not only means truth, it means simple, whole, and complete. What would it mean for you to stop distracting and anesthetizing yourself with consumerism and live in integrity with others?
Our spiritual drive is our desire to belong to a collective story, to give of ourselves to others, to move from estrangement to union. We have to move from maintaining the subject-object separation to identifying with and becoming subjects together. And that’s the problem when we talk about the need to redistribute wealth. When we talk about giving up what’s “mine” so “you” can have it, I don’t think we’re going to do it. The idea simply reinforces the separation we already feel. I think we need to stop talking about redistributing wealth to sharing it. I share because I belong to you and you belong to me. We need to move from “me/not-me” to “we.” This is not service for or philanthropy. This is solidarity with.
This is kinship. This is the Beloved Community. This is love.
No kinship, no peace. No kinship, no justice. No kinship, no equality… It is true enough that we could make the world more just, equal, and peaceful, but something holds us back, in all our complicated fear and human hesitation. It’s sometimes just plain hard to locate the will to be in kinshp even though it’s our deepest longing. So no matter how singularly focused we may be on our worthy goals of peace, justice, and equality, they can’t happen without an undergirding sense that we belong to each other. - Father Greg Boyle
“Love is the movement within life that carries us, that enables us, that causes us to break out of what Alan Watts calls the “skin-encapsulated ego.” Without love, we are self-centered, but love enables us to move the center of our lives outside our ego. Therefore it expands our lives and, needless to say, enriches it. Any human being would give anything to love or be loved. When it really happens, it is like heaven on earth.” -Huston Smith
DISCUSSION:
What if? John Lewis calls us to act like the beloved community were already a reality, the true reality, and we simply had to embody it until everyone else could see. How do we start doing that with our money?
Do you feel a scarcity of belonging, that you have to “earn” love and worth? Discuss how capitalism reinforces insufficiency of not only material wealth (our “belongings”) but insufficiency of being.
Money is an expression of love and identity. Who are the people you share a life with economically? If you looked at your budget, whom do you love? Who belongs to you and who is excluded?
Integrity doesn’t only mean truth, it also means simple, whole, and complete. What would it mean to live in integrity with others? What would it look like if your budget didn’t Other?
(This essay is not a call for you to rush out to find, as one comedian put it, “your second Black friend” but to realize if you live in financial, residential, emotional segregation and to figure out what to do about it.)
BONUS READINGS:
The cost to others of our not-belonging is the opportunity hoarding so that you can get as much as you can.
Applies to your finances as well.
The cost to ourselves of our not-belonging is chronic stress: hyperarousal and hypoarousal: Capitalism exploits the body’s reaction to traumatic stress. If you have taken FF1, you’ve already read this.