Personal finance and racial justice, part 3
The racist budget and anti-racist budget. Living in the Gift
This is the last of a three-part series based on the Personal Finance and Racial Justice course I taught last year. As I reprint this for public use, I’m reminded that we all want to think of racism “out there.” Racism, for all of us, is “in here.” (point to self).
“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” ― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago
It would be much easier if white supremacy were a problem of the evil Other (Republicans, Southerners, etc). White supremacy is a problem of us, you and me, perpetuating and sustaining by us, and our money.1
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In getting to week 3, I want to thank you for being on this journey with me. Talking about personal finance and racial justice isn’t comfortable for me and I’m guessing not for you, either. But being OK with the discomfort and how it may convict us is our work. Thank you for trusting me and trusting each other in our mistakes and in our learning.
Making Friends with Discomfort — Rev. angel Kyodo Williams
PART 1: The Anti-Racist Budget
The description “racist” is used as a slur in America, as one writer put it, almost on par with being described as a pedophile. We spend tremendous emotional energy defining ourselves as not racist because being racist is so impermissible, we instinctively push it away.
What would it be like to admit there is racism in us? By virtue of growing up and living in America, we have learned to be racist. That includes you. Does that make you uncomfortable?
There is no way to undo your racism without realizing your racism. If you don’t think you’re racist, well, hmmm.
Professor Ibram X. Kendi writes:
Denial is the heartbeat of racism, beating across ideologies, races and nations. It is beating within us. Many of us who strongly call out [President] Trump’s racist ideas will strongly deny our own. How often do we become reflexively defensive when someone calls something we’ve done or said racist? How many of us would agree with this statement: “‘Racist’ isn’t a descriptive word. It’s a pejorative word. It is the equivalent of saying, ‘I don’t like you.’” Those are actually the words of White supremacist Richard Spencer, who, like Trump, identifies as “not racist.” How many of us who despise the Trumps and White supremacists of the world share their self-definition of “not racist”?
What’s the problem with being “not racist”? It is a claim that signifies neutrality: “I am not a racist, but neither am I aggressively against racism.” But there is no neutrality in the racism struggle. The opposite of “racist” isn’t “not racist.” It is “antiracist.” What’s the difference? … One either allows racial inequities to persevere, as a racist, or confronts racial inequities, as an antiracist. - How to Be an Antiracist
Allowing for racial inequities in money is racism. Confronting racial inequities in money is antiracism. Your money.
If Ibram X. Kendi is right, there’s no such thing as a non-racist budget; there is only a racist budget and an anti-racist budget. Have you been operating a racist budget? I have.
What’s an anti-racist budget?
PART 2: The More Beautiful World We Know In Our Hearts is Possible
The title of this section is the title of a book from Charles Eisenstein about social activism, the myth of separation, interbeing, despair, hope, pain, pleasure, and our consciousness. In another one of his books, Sacred Economics, Eisenstein describes how humans used to live in “gift economies” and have moved to “market economies.”
A gift economy is living in the moment, taking care of others at times while being taken care of in other times. It is living in abundant simplicity, cherishing what you have and not wanting more. It is living in community, being more of a role and less of an individual.
A market economy is planning for the future, taking care of yourself. In FF1, we talk about how our emotional scripts about money control how we use it. We have money vigilance (me), money worship, money avoidance, and money status scripts. But the meta script that we have all learned is scarcity. We believe that there is not enough to go around, which leads to a lifelong competition for resources.
The key to a gift economy is identity. Think about family: when you were a child, your parents did not charge you for their emotional care, the food on the table, the shelter they provided for you. They did it out of love, because they identified you as theirs. You belonged to them. Families are the fundamental gift economy.
The key to a market economy is that you are an individual. This sense of separateness is a spiritual one. It’s also the same Enlightenment sense of separateness that allows us individual rights, freedom of speech, and any sense of intellectual independence. When Audre Lorde says, “Without community, there is no liberation,” it’s a much deeper, complex thought than we want it to be. Are we willing to give up our individual liberty to identify with the larger whole, a whole we as individuals may disagree with?
Are people dependent or interdependent? In the West, we are most aware of our individuality; our freedom and initiative are more important than our bonds. We see ourselves making our own ways through life, and what happens to us will be largely from our own choices. This is part of the separation.
The economy, whether gift or market, is a circle of interdependence. The gift economy shares. The market economy grabs.
The crazy thing about the metascript of scarcity is that we have enough for everyone everywhere to have a healthy and productive life. We’ve reached a point in history (with the help of capitalism!) where we have enough water, land, food, shelter for everyone. Everyone, everywhere. Let that sink in. Once you see it, it’s a core, radical, surprising truth.
And the reason why that isn’t reality is because as individuals we are hoarding. Economic gaps are empathy gaps. And empathy gaps are economic gaps (you can replace either word with racial as well, and then you see the problem). We don’t belong to each other.
What is enough? What is too much? Do you have too much? How is that related to your sense of scarcity? Stinginess only happens in capitalism. (I convict myself.)
Professor Ibram X. Kendi describes living as an antiracist as “fighting an addiction, being an antiracist requires persistent self-awareness, constant self-criticism, and regular self-examination.”
That means white wealth is an addiction too. In the language of addiction, we rely and become accustomed to white wealth and take it for granted (tolerance) and react badly when privilege is withdrawn (dependence). Our only relief from the ache is to find a higher dose.
PART 3: Happiness
Last week, we talked about moving from me/not-me to we. In that “we” world, all of us have enough food, enough water, enough land, enough housing, enough of the fundamental things for each one of us to live a fulfilling and productive life. But if we desire that, we have to stop desiring what we currently desire.
“The problem is not desire. It’s that your desires are too small.” - Sri Nisargadatta
The great secret in market capitalism is that people continually struggle for what they think will make them happy. But when they have everything they thought would make them happy, they’re still not happy.
The word that the Buddha used for suffering, dukkha, actually has the more subtle meaning of “pervasive unsatisfactoriness.” Capitalism relies on this pervasive unsatisfactoriness. Because the capitalist ideology of more relies on the personal ideology of not enough. We can never relax because we have no sense of where the finish line is.
This may be dangerous to say, but often you’ll find that people in poor countries have more contentment than we have with all our affluence. This point isn’t to say that there aren’t real material needs in poor countries, but rather that for all our wealth, we live in spiritual poverty. Capitalism is a place where nobody feels whole and nobody feels like they truly belong.
An unconscious, unexamined belief that there’s not enough to go around. Scarcity overlays life in consumer culture. Not enough money, time, love. We have to have more. The mentality is not more but not enough. And the myth of “that’s the way it is.”
As someone in class put it, “it’s the good person in me vs, the scared person in me.” But it’s much harder to give up the security and privilege you have without feeling emotional abundance. In this system, is it possible to move from scarcity to abundance? I think it’s very hard to really give to economic justice if (1) we’re taught to believe in economic scarcity and (2) it’s the reality. It’s very hard to live a life of the gift economy when the world around you is living in a market economy.
“The world we look forward to will not be another tower. It will be a well-trodden path from house to house.” - Raimundo Panikkar
And because you don’t have enough, you are not enough, and you don’t belong, there is always something more that you need to get or be in order to be successful, happy, and worthy of respect and love. And the worst part is that you’ve heard it so many times now, you believe it’s true. It’s the belief that there isn’t enough that prevents you from sharing. Racism is only one of the symptoms.
Concern for ourselves sabotages our love for others. That’s the difference between the gift economy and the market economy.
What if we’ve never been loved? Or what if we don’t know what real love is? That’s real for people. At least that was real for me in my practice early on. Because the way I was taught to love is by reproducing oppression and violence. I can’t love you unless I’m getting something in return, or I’m going to cut you off unless you’re doing something that I need. And that’s the kind of love we’re praticing consciously and unconsciously.
In Teravadan Buddhism, there are two kinds of sukha, or happiness, our outer happiness and our inner happiness. Outer happiness is related to the external world, to our stuff, to situations, to things that give us joy, like Netflix and Hulu. This is Brooklyn, I guess, so maybe composting, dogs, and babies. … Local handcrafted beers and stuff. That gives us joy. That outer stuff. Our cars. Our houses. Our status. And that’s where we’re stuck. That’s just superficial happiness. We’re cycling through that. I call that samsara. That’s ignorance until we being to see what it really is. Then we can start moving into that inner happiness, which is the recognition of the natural state of being, the natural state of mind. We have to see this first-level happiness isn’t ultimate happiness. That comes with a lot of discomfort. - Lama Rod Owens
PART 4: A Transpersonal Budget?
Transpersonal psychology proposes that there are developmental stages beyond the adult ego, where you let go of being an “individual” or even a “person” and find your yourself merging into the highest human qualities, like altruism, creativity, and intuitive wisdom. Transpersonal psychology suggests that we go through stages of maturation from the pre-personal (before ego-formation, an infant), to the personal (the functioning ego, adolescence and early adulthood), and finally the transpersonal (ego remains available but is superseded by higher development, wise elderhood).
Observers such as Richard Rohr and Victor Frankl have suggested that American is very much an adolescent culture: focused on ourselves, grasping for pleasure, and avoiding pain. Adolescence isn’t bad; it’s natural and necessary. However, at some point, once a healthy ego has been developed, we have to develop past it. Permanent adolescence is never pretty, in humans or in humanity.
PART 5: The Transition
Is there a just and safe transition for you from market economy finances to gift economy finances? How do we move our personal finances towards an expanded kinship with others that allows us to live in the Gift?
Two years ago there was been a surge of heightened consciousness and willingness to learn about anti-racism. Was there in you? What was the result of the awareness in yourself about anti-racism? Did you change anything about yourself? About your money?
“Theories are patterns without value. What counts is action.” - Constantin Brancusi
For anyone interested in doing this anti-racism work, we have a mix of motives: a wish for easy affirmation and a moral hunger for an answer that eases our discomfort and puts us back into being a “good person.” But the rubber hits the road when it comes to doing something. Martin Luther King Jr. once wrote that the greatest block to black liberation wasn’t the KKK but the white liberal, that the “shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.”
What he’s talking about is people who know the right thing internally and aren’t willing to live it out. In other words, people without integrity. I include myself in that. Do you? Or is lukewarm acceptance the limits of your empathy?
“The duty of privilege is absolute integrity.” ― John O’Donohue
FINAL PROMPT
This course is personal finance and racial justice. Black families have 10 cents to every dollar a white family has. Black families with children have one penny for every dollar a white family with children have. Within that context: There’s no such thing as a non-racist budget. What’s your anti-racist budget? What are you willing to commit yourself to?
Is there enough for everyone? The only way it happens is a deep recognition of enough. Do you have enough? What is more than enough?
Do you have too much?
Thoughts for you and your essay:
In FF1, we create budgets based on NEEDS (housing, food), WANTS (travel entertainment), and BULLSHIT (joyless consumption). Is racial equity and transferring wealth to Black folx a NEED or a WANT for you? How much are you willing to budget for it?
Has COVID changed your conception of what your NEEDS, WANTS and BULLSHIT are?
If you are relatively well off, this NYTimes article might be interesting to you. Remember that the economy is an interdependent system: your spending is my income and my income is your spending. Middle income and high income people cut their spending during COVID, which means layoffs for the poor. (Yes, there is a deep paradox here). What if the middle class and wealth simply transferred their bullshit spending to direct payments to the struggling? The economy would both recover and be more equitable. How you could contribute to that?
What’s your limit? What are you comfortable with? What are you not comfortable with, but want to be? What would it feel like to increase by 2% and invite that feeling? Invite that feeling in and exhale. Now think of increasing it another 2%. Invite and exhale. I know that I had a vision for how much I want to give (and I haven’t gotten there yet), and I have gradually increased my commitment to that goal.
Have a hard time making a commitment? I know that it’s hard in a world of both actual and perceived scarcity. But as John Lewis said, it’s about living in the world as if it were already there. Can you transition to the more beautiful world you know in your heart is possible gradually? You don’t have to do it all at once. What does moving slowly into the Beloved Community mean to you? Personal finance blogger Paula Pant and her idea of the the 1% Challenge may help.
Want concrete places to put your money? That may require research. Here’s one resource: places to invest for black economic liberation, including black banks, black investment vehicles and a black business directory.
Your intention doesn’t matter as much as environment. The groups you associate with often determine the type of person you become. In other words, if you want to change your relationship to privilege/entitlement/happiness, it’ll take some change in your environment. We’re talking about kinship, belonging and exclusion again. If you remain in white segregation, with only white friends and in all-white communities, I have a hard time imagining you moving to antiracism.
It’s hard to sustain this change with an attitude of white debt. Reparations for white debt may be true, but a move from love, kinship, gratitude and thanksgiving is more sustainable. White entitlement makes you see what you have as “earned,” but if you see your current “belongings” as living in Gift, does it make it easier to share?
Father Greg Boyle views success as not achieving the results, it’s doing the right thing instead. What’s the right thing to do? As someone in class put it, “How committed am I to being a moral being?”
And as anyone who has taken FF1 knows, so is global warming or any other environmental problem we blame corporations, the government or whoever for. No consumerism, no corporate profits. Only you (along with everyone else) can stop climate change