Personal finance and racial justice Part 1
What we don't want to talk about in polite company: the racist origins of our wealth
This is the first lesson in the Personal Finance and Racial Justice course, which I taught in the summer of 2020, after the George Floyd murder. Lessons 2 and 3 will come in the following weeks. You don’t have to do the assignment at the bottom! If you want to though, feel free to send it to me. Always the teacher haha.
In our first session, we talk about how the exploitation of Black bodies for wealth has been part of the American project. Understand our anti-Black history and its implications for racialized wealth today. We’ll all interested in racial justice. We all want it. But until we discuss the systemic advantages of white supremacy and how these may have benefited us economically,1 are we talking about anything?
“I believe that there will ultimately be a clash between the oppressed and those that do the oppressing. I believe that there will be a clash between those who want freedom, justice, and equality for everyone and those who want to continue the systems of exploitation… It is incorrect to classify the revolt of the Negro as simply a racial conflict of black against white, or as a purely American problem. Rather, we are today seeing a global rebellion of the oppressed against the oppressor, the exploited against the exploiter.” - Malcolm X
OPTIONAL IN DEPTH: The Case for Reparations, by Ta-Nehisi Coates. The result of the last 400 years is that Black families have 10 cents of wealth for every dollar a white family has.2 Where does your family enter the timeline of anti-Black capitalism and how have you benefitted financially?
Another study says Black families have 1 cent for every dollar a white family has.3 Any sort of racial justice means redistributing wealth from white families to Black families. I don’t mean from a notional white or Black family. I mean the wealth in your family. Our national wealth is anti-Black. This country has either aided or prevented you from creating wealth, depending on the color of your skin. Aside from the history that Ta-Nehisi Coates painstakingly documents, it continues currently, to this day. It shows up in your housing, the quality of your schooling, the chances you are charged for a crime for exactly the same activity, or the odds you get a job compared to someone else with the same qualifications. You get superior health care because the medical field doesn’t believe Black people experience pain. If you are white, these things are given to you If you are Black, these things are taken away from you. Again, not history, current-day everyday normalized racism that underlies the job you have, the neighborhood you live in, and the number next to the dollar sign in your bank account.
We cannot have racial justice without economic justice based on race. In a country so focused on material wealth, the racial distribution of wealth is an overarching issue that affects every other issue of racial justice.
What does one penny for Black families and a dollar for white families mean? It means that until we talk about money and racialized comfort of our wealth, we aren’t talking about anything. We need to talk a number of things that no one really wants to talk about:
We need to talk about white families’ 401(k)s, their segregated homes, and their segregated job opportunities.
We need to talk about white families’ ability to build financial wealth through inheritance and social connections.
We need to talk about white children’s superior education and opportunity hoarding.
These are conversations people in polite company don’t want to have. It feels good to be privileged. It feels good to be more educated, more wealthy, more powerful. To travel to warm places in the winter and to other cultures, where incidentally our dollar is so much more powerful because of colonialism. And we want to believe we’ve “earned” the right to all of this, through our hard work, our innate abilities, and our ability to get along with others. Our belief in our own worth, our place in this “meritocracy,” is a large part of our living in racialized comfort.
The heart of racism is denial. The heart of anti-racism is confession. - Ibram X. Kendi
ASSIGNMENT
Reflect on this quote and the two questions below and write a personal essay:
I sit on a man’s back choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am sorry for him and wish to lighten his load by all means possible...except by getting off his back.
― Leo Tolstoy, What Then Must We Do?
How does your financial security rely on/perpetuate white supremacy? Do you wish to wish to end racism by all means possible… except for losing what you have?
Talking about this is hard and personal, much harder than putting up a Black Lives Matter sign or voting for the "right" candidate. When you contemplate how you have benefitted from white supremacy, your desire for racial justice, and what you might have to do to contribute to it, what feelings and needs come up?4 What place are you not feeling? What part of you are you rejecting? What truth are you not willing to accept? Try not abstract the problem to “society” or to what “they” (the wealthiest 1%, for example) should do. The question is our own participation in the system.
And what we’re willing to do about it.
BONUS: Malcolm X said, “You can’t have capitalism without racism.” What does he mean by that? “Whiteness” was an idea invented to justify the exploitation of non-Europeans. Episodes 2 and 3 of the Seeing White podcast describe how capitalism has always been the underlying motivation of modern racism.
For non-Black people. This essay was written for a non-Black audience.
Note that this essay focuses on wealth, not income. As a teacher of personal finance, I want to emphasize that wealth, i.e. the assets you own, is a more important indicator of economic power and security than income, the money you make from labor, etc. Income creates wealth if you save and invest, but I just want to be clear, wealth is the point. But if you wanted to look at income, as of 2020, black families have a median household income of just over $41,000, whereas white families have a median household income of more than $70,000.
I was so happy to have found your past articles, but you just lost me here as a reader... Given that I am from Europe, I don't pretend to understand these issues in detail, but "capitalism as a form of theft"?!? In my opinion, how we act and what we do is much more important than any past events (that's the only thing we can influence anyway), even if it helps to look into past events and try to understand them. Wealth and equality is built on a very individual level. Being a woman in an international, predominantly male corporation, I had my fair share to deal with issues that could be understood as "oppression" or exploitation - or just as issues everybody has to deal with in order to become successful, where I had to make my own choices how to react. I have the impression that this guilt culture (let it be white supremacy or the Holocaust) is becoming quite popular, but actually helping nobody. Does it encourage people to take responsibility for their own life if they feel oppressed by a "system", or not rather by taking action themselves in any single situations, and making the best of it? Blaming others is, in my opinion, the worst thing anybody can do in hopes to improve their lives and overcome difficulties... Same goes for putting everybody on a lower level in order to "equalize" society ;-) Did not work in the past, will not help in the future.