So grateful for the 20 FFers that came to talk about a difficult topic: the intersection of racial justice and their personal finances. Some quick thoughts afterwards, from what I heard and from the notes of the session.
Selected notes from the discussion (thank you note-takers!)
What is our individual responsibility for a systemic issue?
Getting enough so that you can help others in some way, with time or money
FF is a personal hack at getting out of a systemic issue. But it’s still an individual journey. Your personal liberation doesn’t tend to the systemic issues. FF has been an individual enterprise, and we need to own that. Values-neutral is not value neutral: it silences things. To do a full accounting of our money, its sources, and its effects complicates the math of it. Values were put to the side to let the math take their place. Formulas don’t have racial justice in the FIRE equation.
There are different kinds of wealth in addition to the bottom line. Value of acting now with your wealth rather than waiting for $ down the line. It is a form of investment that can accumulate and compound. Not just quarterly balancing. (Vicki Robin’s money = time means that the value of your time contribution also compounds!)
Nonprofits have a saying: “no margin, no mission.” You have to have financial stability before you can reach out to others. So financial security is essential before reaching out.
Effective altruism is a group maximizing their income to give it away. (Engineers at Google who donate 90% of their incomes.) But is how you make the money important as well?
Austin brought up the idea that people being able to “take care of ourselves” is baked into white supremacy. This is a cultural value in the United States where we care more about ourselves than about other people, in terms of amassing wealth. We as a culture are obsessed about not being reliant on others, but other places in the world are more willing to be reliant on each other. If we want to form a better community, we need to start supporting each other.
Why do we feel so anxious and cling to the money we have? It creates a false sense of safety. However, community can also be a huge safety net and is probably actually more reliable in some circumstances.
My thoughts after the call
Going back to the first very FF lesson, our emotional scripts about money control how we use it. Yes, we have money vigilance (me!), money worship, money avoidance, and money status scripts. But the meta script that we have all learned is scarcity. Our money comes from a monetary system where money is only created through debt. It’s an enormously complex topic, but do your own research and you’ll see it’s true. This means the system as a whole always has a little more debt than money, which causes the fundamental anxiety we all experience in capitalism.
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.
I love Austin’s point that “taking care of ourselves” is a cultural value of white supremacy. In the book Sacred Economics (free online!) Charles Eisenstein talks about market economies, where you are rationally trying to maximize for yourself, and gift economies, where you give freely when you can and assume you will taken care of when you can’t.
“You can’t talk about solving the economic problem of the Negro without talking about billions of dollars….You’re really tampering and getting on dangerous ground because you are messing with folk then. You are messing with captains of industry. Now this means that we are treading in difficult water, because it really means that we are saying that something is wrong with capitalism.” - Martin Luther King Jr.
“You can’t have capitalism without racism.” - Malcolm X. Can capitalism be redeemed, i.e. decoupled, from white supremacy?
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 ultimate gift economy.
The key to a market economy: 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.
So when Audre Lorde says, “Without community, there is no liberation,” I believe 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?
Is the “School of Financial Freedom” right anymore? Is freedom something worthy if it’s part of this ideology of separateness?
Back to the gift economy, there’s a lot of talk right now about white debt and reparations. But I wonder if accounting is the wrong way to value Black lives.
I notice my own resistance to the call for economic equity. “I’m an immigrant; what responsibility do I have for white supremacy compared to others?” But again, is accounting for “responsibility” and “debt” the way forward?
Will accounts be “square” if we gave reparations and paid off the “white debt”?
I don’t think people with privilege, white or not, will be willing to give up their houses, international flights, and “experiences” to pay off the “debt.” I just don’t.
My thought in my head is, the only way we can move forward is when we see that money is an expression of the love we have for one another. It is not debt that will cause us to work for racial justice, but love.
The fundamental brokenness of American society is our lack of kinship, particularly with Black Americans. Kinship is, as with family, a sense of “you are mine and I am yours.” If we had kinship with all, would there be inequality in criminal justice system, educational systems, job markets, and housing markets? Would we allow our kin to suffer so? It’s our sense of separation that needs to be rooted out.
“Mother Teresa diagnosed the world’s ills in this way: we’ve just ‘forgotten that we belong to each other.’ Kinship is what happens to us when we refuse to let that happen.” - Father Greg Boyle
On a practical level, what does money look like as an expression of love? I don’t have answers, but who do you share your money with? Who is in your “family” where no accounts are taken? Who do you identify as your own? Any Black people?
In a consumerist individualistic society, so much of our money is spent on goods and services for ourselves: food, housing, entertainment. How many Black people receive the money you spend? How can you spend money so it goes into Black pockets, giving them wealth?
Cornell West said that justice is love made public. Love is nothing other than kinship. Who belongs as yours? By dint of segregation (separateness, spiritual isolation), we have no kinship. Until we have kinship, will we ever have justice? So in the end, how you do end your separateness?
Thank you again for participating in the call. These thoughts will go to build the Defunding White Supremacy course in July. I’ll put a link to it here when it’s ready.
Also: Donate to black-led racial justice efforts and SOFF will match it.