This is the first lesson in the Personal Finance and Racial Justice course, starting on July 13. To sign up, register here. The course will involve weekly Monday Zoom calls, with reading essays beforehand and writing and responding to personal essays after. The weekly process is described here.

Week 1: What Is Owed? The Case for Reparations.

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. Until we discuss the systemic advantages whites have and how these may have benefited you, are we talking about anything? Is giving all that up really in the cards for you?

“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

PRE-WORK:

1. Reading 1: 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. Before class, build a timeline of the events that Coates talks about, from 1619 to today. Where does your family enter the stream of anti-Black capitalism and how have you benefitted financially?

2. Reading 2: Study: Black families have 1 cent for every dollar a white family has (full study here).

In a capitalist economy, 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. It showed up in your housing, the quality of your schooling, the chances you were charged for a crime for exactly the same activity, or the odds you would get a job with someone else with the same qualifications. You get superior health care because the medical field doesn’t believe Black people experience pain. You cannot have racial justice without economic justice. In a country so focused on material wealth, the distribution of wealth is an overarching issue that affects every individual issue of racial justice. 

What does one penny for Black families and a dollar for white families mean? But until we talk about money and racialized comfort of our wealth, are we talking about anything?

• 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. 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? What are your feelings around it?

Talking about this is hard and personal. Take a look at this list of feelings and the deeper needs they express. 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? What place are you not feeling? What part of you are you rejecting? What truth are you not willing to accept?

Personal essays due Thursday by midnight. These are personal essays for self-examination. Try not abstract the problem to “society” or to what “they” (the wealthy 1%, for example) should do. The question is our own participation in the system. If you are willing, include your Case for Reparations timeline.

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.