NINE
I MAKE MONEY MOVES
There’s no other way to put this: on a scale from “pitiful” to “killing it,” the state of Black wealth is firmly at “pitiful.” As it turns out, decades upon decades of slavery, Jim Crow, redlining, land theft, mass incarceration, predatory lending, education discrimination, gentrification, deindustrialization, and zero reparations really have done a number on how much we have to live on and pass down to our kids. A 2016 study from the Institute for Policy Studies and the Corporation for Economic Development found that it would take 228 years for the average Black family to amass the same level of wealth the average White family holds today. Even when we are born wealthy, this nation is designed to bring us down: A 2018 study* from researchers at the US Census Bureau, Stanford University, and Harvard University showed that Black boys raised in the nation’s wealthiest families are more likely than their White counterparts to live in poverty when they reach adulthood; the study points to racism as the reason.
And yet we keep pushing, using our considerable skills to crack open the door to collective prosperity with a heart. Black women are the fastest-growing group of entrepreneurs in the United States. We’re out here building our own tables, creating platforms where our art can thrive, using money to directly attack a system that uses poverty as an excuse to lock us away, and marshaling our resources to demolish a supposed representative democracy that works only for those who are able to grease the wheels with cash.
From the streaming service CEO, to the couple fund-raising for progressive Black political candidates, to the folks using technology to bail Black people out of jail, “I Make Money Moves” holds up the fam who are working hard to build Black income, wealth, and culture, for all our sakes.
DeShuna Spencer on Eradicating Black Unemployment One Stream at a Time
DeShuna Spencer is the founder and CEO of kweliTV, a video streaming service that curates independent films, documentaries, web series, and children’s programming from the entire African Diaspora. A master brand evangelist, she has secured six figures’ worth of funding via pitch and grant competitions alone, winning over judges from the National Black Chamber of Commerce and the Harvard Africa Business Club alike. In this interview, DeShuna, a native of Memphis, Tennessee, talks to Kenrya about the joys and pains of fund-raising while unapologetically Black, why truth reigns supreme in storytelling, and how streaming will set us free.
Tell me kweliTV’s origin story.
The idea came to me as I was watching television in 2012. Back then I had cable, and I was flipping, flipping, flipping, and couldn’t find anything that I wanted to see. So I cut cable and got Netflix, hoping that I would see more diverse content there. And while they had some, it was the same romantic comedies and throwback movies. I love the Black movies from the ’90s, but how many times can you watch Juice?
Meanwhile, I follow all these blogs, and they write about great independent films that screen at festivals, but I couldn’t find them. I realized that once these Black films finish the festival circuit, they have nowhere to go if they don’t have a big name behind them. I was crazy enough to say, “I’m going to create a place for them to go!”
How did you get started?
I entered a pitch competition, where they didn’t pick me because they weren’t sure about the future of streaming! But in 2014, I won $20,000 in the Unity Journalists for Diversity New U competition. We used that money to build our beta version of the service, which allowed us to do further testing to see if people actually cared about what we were doing and would pay to subscribe. Then it took two years to get out of beta. That’s a book within itself, the challenges of bootstrapping the company. I had no idea that Black women only get 0.2 percent of all venture capital investments until I was looking and saying, “Where’s the money?” and people were saying, “Good luck with that.” Technically, we’re still a startup company, we’re not fully funded. I’m doing this off blessings, holding it together with tears, bubble gum, and glue.
Why is kweliTV important?
It’s about owning our stories. It’s one thing to say, “Yeah, you know, we’re getting our foot in the door from mainstream spaces like HBO and Netflix.” But there’s also something to be said for something that we own personally, where we control our narrative and don’t have to dilute our voices, dilute our culture, for a mainstream, colloquial audience. kweliTV is unapologetically Black. I think that us being authentic is relevant for no matter who watches the content.
Another thing is the global aspect of it. When I tell people we’re focused on the Black global community, or the African Diaspora, most people tend to just think African Americans. They tend to forget that we’re basically everywhere—the Caribbean, Europe, Latin America. My goal is to show our stories from all over the world in a way that’s not monopolistic or stereotypical. I see kweliTV as an avenue to share the Black experience no matter where you are.
What does “kweli” mean?
Kweli means “truth” in Swahili. And our mission is to curate content that is a true representation of the Black experience. It doesn’t always have to be positive, it doesn’t have to be feel-good—just true. There are realities in our community that we may not necessarily like, but it’s okay to tell those stories here.
How does exposing that truth help us resist White supremacy’s pull?
By dispelling some of the myths we see in mainstream media. I remember when Trump ran for office, he was like, “What do you have to lose? You get shot when you walk outside.…” He was basically saying that we’re all poor, we’re all dumb, we’re all going to be killed. He assigned that narrative to all Black people in one swoop. And he’s not the only one. There was a study that came out about media and implicit bias, and it showed that Black people are swallowing the negative imagery we’re being fed. Will kweliTV solve White supremacy? Not totally, no. But there comes a point where we just cannot be afraid of being who we truly are. For those who are actually open to learning about Black culture without blinders and filters about what they think it is, we can definitely challenge stereotypes and help them get there so we can see our full selves.
What has been your biggest unexpected challenge in running kweliTV?
When people ask about my exit strategy. When you have investors, they want to make a return within five years. Having an exit strategy essentially means selling your company to a Netflix or some other company that’s not Black-owned. And if we want to continue to be a Black-owned company, then we may not be able to take advantage of all the possible investment opportunities. I get emails from people saying, “Don’t become BET,” which means, “Don’t sell out.” But how do you reconcile that desire with the fact that one day you’re going to have to sell it? That’s something I’m still trying to figure out.
That’s real; I never thought about it that way. Meanwhile, you’ve been raising money by crushing pitch competitions. What’s your secret?
I think it’s passion. You want people to know that it’s something you would still do even if you made absolutely no money. Because if someone is going to give you money, you still have to be just as passionate at 2:00 a.m. as when you were up onstage asking for money. Another thing is that I know my numbers. If you’re fumbling during questioning, then even if you’re passionate, you’re not going to win. Also, I always pray before I pitch to make sure that people are positively impacted by what I’m about to say.
If you could snap your fingers, how would you make us free?
If kweliTV is in the place where I want it to be in, let’s say, the next fourteen years, I would try to eradicate Black unemployment. That would be my mission. I have this really lofty idea where, if you’re a Black person and you’re unemployed, I want to offer you a job paying a living wage, or resources to start a business and hire other Black people. The reality is that no matter how hard we work, no matter how many degrees we get, there will still be people who will deny us jobs and access because we’re Black. I’m not a separatist, but if we can hire each other, if we can help Black people create our own companies, then we can be self-sufficient and paid what we’re really worth. That’s my biggest dream.
I resist White supremacy by using data science to dismantle the myths that sustain its power and creating digital pathways for more people to participate in advancing systemic solutions.
—Samuel Sinyangwe, data scientist and policy analyst
Three Questions for Appolition’s Dr. Kortney Ryan Ziegler and Tiffany Mikell
In 2017, Dr. Kortney Ryan Ziegler (creative director) and Tiffany Mikell (managing director) created Appolition, an app that allows users to automatically round up purchases and donate their change to bail relief for Black people who are stuck behind bars simply because they can’t afford to pay their way out. Inspired by the National Bail Out—a campaign that works to reform the cash bail system and free people charged with misdemeanors—they created the cleverly named Appolition in just four months and were soon raising thousands in bail relief daily. “Why not play on that word by using technology that’s going to prevent, in some ways, the enslavement of Black folks in the United States?” Ziegler says.
Ziegler and Mikell chatted with Kenrya about the purpose and promise of using their role as technologists to bolster the lived experiences of Black people everywhere.
Why is Appolition an important project for you to pour your energy into?
KZ: Honestly, it’s something higher. It’s part of our journey and our fate. We’ve both been in technology for a long time, and we are also very radical and believe in the civil liberties and rights and humanities of Black folks. Being able to do something that can galvanize people on a global level is just—it’s part of our thinking, design, and fate.
TM: All of our work together over the last three and a half years started from a place of, “How do we use technology, design, and user experience, to make the world a better place for Black people?”
How does the app help dismantle the system of White supremacy?
TM: The beauty of Appolition is that all of the donations come from individuals. There are some bail relief programs that are completely funded by larger entities like foundations, and they’re oftentimes run by non-Black people who are not really connected to the issue. Here, we’re doing it on our own.
KZ: Right. Black Americans have tremendous spending power, so how can we leverage being consumers? We are rerouting that money and using it to help victims of the prison industrial complex.
TM: I think that because of White supremacy, a lot of times, when we talk about the buying power of Black people, it’s from a place of shaming. We’re shaming Black people for not being able to do certain things collectively in spite of the buying power that we have. But because we understand how White supremacy works, we understand the challenges that we face. It’s been really cool to see how we can leverage that buying power to actually free people while others work to secure policy changes. We’re showing that there are multiple ways to address the problem, and we can all bring our skills to the table and make a major impact.
What does freedom look like to you?
TM: I’m constantly asking myself, How can I bring my experience as a Black woman who grew up in Chicago to this role? I know there are a lot of Black people who feel like, in their professional roles, they have to leave all of who they are at the door. I think it’s a shame. A big part of my life’s work is creating organizations and safe spaces for brilliant Black people to come and bring their full selves and create the things that they feel like have to exist in the world, making sure that we embrace the Black community’s brilliant, nonconforming creators. That’s what freedom looks like to me.
KZ: It’s important to be who I am as a Black person in the world. My ideal of freedom for Black people is the ability to exist. Whatever that may mean, in whatever space and whatever context.
Attempts at Self-Care for a Corporate Black Girl
“MacKenzie Jones”
Hair Story I: A Presentation
I was natural in college and decided that in order to get a finance job, I needed to wear my hair a certain way. Now, I have coarse hair. There’s no slicking it back with just water and gel. So I thought it would be easier to perm it.
A few years in, after breaking up with a boyfriend who did not like natural hair, I cut off my straight hair. My mom was like, “Uh, MacKenzie, what do you plan to do with that?” I promptly went to an African braid shop and got Senegalese twists.
At work, I knew it would be a big to-do. So I grabbed my coffee and my ham-egg-and-cheese sandwich (don’t judge me) and got to work extra early so I could avoid walking past a bunch of White coworkers on the floor and in the hallway who would ask me about my hair.
It still happened, though. I went to a meeting that morning where I was, as usual, the only Black person, the only woman, and the youngest person in the room. I was giving a presentation when the most senior person in the room asked, “How long did it take to do that?” I knew he meant my hair, but I wanted him to say it directly. “How long did it take to prepare my presentation?” I asked, playing dumb. And he was like, “No, your hair.”
This opened up the floodgates. Because the boss asked me about my hair, the topic was fair game.
One guy goes, “When I was in Jamaica, I was thinking about getting some braids,” and laughed. After a while, my direct supervisor interrupted and said, “MacKenzie, you changed your hair. It looks nice. Can we move on?” Only then could I go on with the presentation.
Hair Story II: Preferences
Once I had to pull aside one of my peers after I got braids for an upcoming vacation because she said, “I really do prefer your hair that way.”
I said, “Well, it really doesn’t matter how you prefer it,” and went back to talking about work.
But then she goes, “Oh, did we wake up on the wrong side of the bed?”
I laughed it off, but addressed it later that day. Her response? “I hope you didn’t think what I said was off-putting. I was just giving you a compliment.” The next time I changed my hair she mumbled that it was nice and kept it moving. That was a victory. My hair should never be a discussion at work. White people here change their hair all the time—they color it, cut it, straighten it, get extensions. Disrupting a meeting or work discussion is about people gawking at you and feeling ownership of you.
Smiling
I have heard so many comments about how my tone of voice and my face are aggressive. It’s like, “MacKenzie, you’re not smiling enough,” and I’m like, I’m trying to calculate a fucking standard deviation ratio and you want me to smile? I’ve had to put a lot of time into figuring out what to say in these situations. I’ve landed on: “I appreciate the feedback. I’d like to take a moment to think about it, and then schedule a follow-up, because I want us to have a fruitful conversation.” They never follow up.
Other People of Color
I’ve seen coworkers of color born in America say that recent immigrants are too hard to understand. And then they imitate them. I want to ask them, “What’s wrong with you?” Instead, I say, “Actually, I understand him. You just need to listen a little closer.”
Stereotypes
For most of my childhood, I would say my family was poor. Around high school, my mother went back to school, so we became lower-middle-class. I think this plays a role in how I see things. I want so badly to not be a stereotype of a Black woman that I don’t ask for the help that I need. A lot of success in my field is about connections and the story of your life. So what do you do when you’re in an environment where you’re trying to defy the stereotype, but you were the stereotype?
Wu-Tang Who?
Sometimes when White coworkers try to connect with me, they want to discuss rap. I just play dumb. I remember one time I acted like I didn’t know who the Wu-Tang Clan was.
Plans
I tell my mentees, “Corporate America is cool, but you’ve got to have a plan for what’s next.” I wish I’d had a plan for not staying in it too long. But it is what it is, is it not?
“MacKenzie Jones” is the pseudonym of a thirty-something marketing executive at a major financial firm in New York City.
Bakari Kitwana on What Activism Is Worth
Bakari Kitwana is a writer, editor, and activist. Early in his career at Chicago’s Third World Press, he edited titles like Frances Cress Welsing’s The Isis Papers. He went on to become a political editor at The Source, and his 2002 book, The Hip-Hop Generation, led to the formation of the National Hip-Hop Political Convention, which attracted some four thousand mostly Black and Brown young adults in 2004. Kitwana went on to found Rap Sessions, a youth-centered discussion tour led by a panel of artists, scholars, activists, and journalists as varied as Rhymefest, Tamika Mallory, Sybrina Fulton, Marc Lamont Hill, Joan Morgan, Rashad Robinson, and Michael Eric Dyson. In this Q+A, Akiba talks to Bakari about the value we place on activism.
A major role that you play in Black organizing is that of a connector. You’re always plugging someone into funding and speaking engagements, talking up someone’s work, or helping people who aren’t locked into elite institutions figure out how to format and promote what they’re doing. Is this a natural tendency?
I think it’s natural to a degree. But I also think that it’s rooted in activism. Part of fighting White supremacy is fighting capitalism. Connecting people is an anti-individualistic approach. And on a spiritual level, nobody can stand in the way of what is for you; helping other people isn’t interfering with you getting to where you have to go. I help people because people have always helped me. None of us have gotten anywhere on our own, even if we tell ourselves that mythology.
As my boss in the late ’90s at The Source, you were the first person to say—out loud and with no shame—that people should be paid livable wages for activist work. Back then, we didn’t have Beyoncé saying, “F you, pay me.” We had to “do it for the culture.”
You know, one of the big rifts in our history, particularly in the late ’60s and the early ’70s, was between Marxists and cultural nationalists. Cultural nationalism is often demonized among radicals, but one of the things they had right was that we have to instill a sense of values into our people if we’re going to win. In a capitalist economy, one of those values has to be about economics. If we value the output of political knowledge, we have to engrain that into the culture of our people.
A lot of how I think about this is influenced by how I was nurtured as an activist and thinker. At Third World Press, I sat in conversations with Nathan Hare, Gil Scott-Heron, Amiri Baraka, and Gwendolyn Brooks. These folks were real people who were serious about the future of Black people. They wanted to get paid and have their art and political ideas valued, but they struck a balance. Gwendolyn Brooks used to say to me, “Some stuff we’re just going to do for the people. But then we got to get out here and make money so that we can still do those things for the people.”
Talk about how you involve local organizers in Rap Sessions, given that speaking gigs are episodic.
We rarely go to a place where we haven’t been in ongoing conversation with people who are organizing on the ground. This is an idea I gleaned from Amiri Baraka. One of the things he said we needed to fight White supremacy and capitalism was to create spaces around the country. His emphasis was on cities where there’s a large Black population. So if we’ve got an artist, poet, or author who’s speaking to our truth, we can take them to at least ten cities around the country, and they can be in conversation with Black people. Even though we’ve evolved out of that time, the value of that is still important.
Liberation Playlist
Jay Smooth
“I resist White supremacy by loving my people, thinking about systems, and telling the truth.”—Jay Smooth
“Backlash Blues,” Nina Simone
“What Can I Do for You,” Labelle
“Wear Clean Draws,” The Coup
“In Time,” The Jungle Brothers
“In Time,” Sly and the Family Stone
“Original Faubus Fables,” Charles Mingus
“1,000 Deaths,” D’Angelo and The Vanguard
“Soldier,” Erykah Badu
“When Will We B Paid,” Prince
“ShapeShifters,” Invincible
“Bring the Noise,” Public Enemy
“Keep on Pushing,” The Impressions
Jay Smooth is the host of New York City’s longest-running hip-hop radio show, WBAI’s Underground Railroad, and the acclaimed cultural commentator on the Ill Doctrine video blog, where his dissections of race and politics have become teaching tools in schools around the country.
Clocked in Still Starving (annotated)
Tongo Eisen-Martin
Bullet casings in the comb
I learned their language immediately‡
I watched an animal explode into hundreds of flags
The government has counted me in*
Originally from San Francisco, Tongo Eisen-Martin is a movement worker and educator who has organized against mass incarceration and extrajudicial killing of Black people throughout the United States. His latest curriculum, We Charge Genocide Again, is used as an educational and organizing tool. His book of poems Someone’s Dead Already earned him the California Book Award. His most recent collection of poetry is Heaven Is All Goodbyes, which won the 2018 American Book Award and the 2018 California Book Award for Poetry.
Stefanie Brown James and Quentin James Want You to Put Your Money Where Your Votes Are
Quentin James (executive director) and Stefanie Brown James (senior advisor) launched The Collective in August 2016 with the goal of building Black political power. The four-pronged organization—it includes a political action committee (PAC) for collecting grassroots-level donations, a super-PAC for soliciting the big bucks, a 501(c)(4) social welfare arm that allows them to directly fund campaigns, and a nonprofit education fund—is working overtime to increase the number of progressive Black elected officials at the local, state, and federal levels. Both are veterans of major political campaigns: Stefanie ran the national Black vote program for Barack Obama, while Quentin did the same for Hillary Clinton. Kenrya talked to the wife-and-husband team about why simply voting for your favorite candidate isn’t good enough.
How did The Collective come to be?
QJ: In the summer of 2016, we saw an explosion of a lot of different issues, including Trump’s campaign—which was obviously extremely racist—in combination with more Black people being killed by cops and the subsequent cases that were not being decided in favor of justice. A lot of people rightfully directed their energy toward protesting. But at the same time, there wasn’t an analysis around power and the individuals who hold it, whether they be elected sheriffs or prosecutors or mayors who hire police chiefs. We wanted to turn the focus of that outrage to people actually putting their money into the political system.
I think Black people have been told the biggest lie in American political history, which is that if we just vote everything will be okay. And what we saw in 2012, with Stefanie’s leadership on the Obama campaign, is that Black people voted at a historic high. But between 2012 and 2016, we saw tremendous inequitable administration of the law when it came to criminal justice reform. So obviously it’s not just about our votes. It’s also about our money, and the fact that if you ask any Black politician in this country right now, “Are the majority of your donors Black people in your community?” the answer will be “no” 99 percent of the time.
We don’t have a stake in the game when it comes to our money, and these things keep happening even though our community is voting. People of color make up 40 percent of this country’s population, but we have this huge underrepresentation. It can’t just be the same thing over and over: register Black voters, get Black voters out to the polls. We need Black prosecutors and state’s attorneys.
How do you reconcile asking folks to contribute financially with the economic situation of Black people in this country?
QJ: The reality is, our situation is that Black buying power is at $1.3 trillion per year, and we spend our money on what we value. The people we elect control the biggest pot of money in the world—the United States budget. And it comes from our tax dollars. They decide if we spend our money on wars or schools, prisons or jobs. So that is power that we can yield with a little investment. I’m not asking people to take a pay cut or give us 10 percent of their salary. But what we could do with just a portion of that $1.3 trillion would be amazing.
How do you decide which candidates to support?
QJ: First, candidates come to us and go, “Hey, I’m interested in your endorsement.” Then we give them a candidate questionnaire. We ask them everything from where they stand on criminal justice, civil rights, health care, education, the economy—it’s pretty detailed. Once they pass that questionnaire—and we define passing as scoring 90 percent or above—then we assess their viability. Can they win the race? Then we take a vote; any donor who has given us $1 to $5,000 gets an equal say on who we endorse via a simple majority.
SBJ: Candidates have to truly fit what we’re looking for, as it relates to focusing on progressive candidates who can make substantial changes through their position.
What does “progressive” mean to you?
QJ: I think people want a candidate to be perfect, to be 100 percent of where they want them to be on all the issues. So we said 90 percent, right? It’s a lot of questions, but there are some pretty simple, progressive questions that we think people should be able to answer. “Where do you stand on a woman’s right to choose? Do you believe that climate change is real? Are you willing to stand up to corporate interests? Do you want to raise the minimum wage? Do you believe we should outlaw ‘stand your ground’ laws?” We think if you get nine out of ten questions right, you’re with us, you’re progressive.
How does The Collective help Black people resist White supremacy?
QJ: I think one of the first ways is that we promote ownership of our leaders. If we support them, not just with our votes but with our money, they are very much beholden to their constituents. And people often think “constituents” only means voters, but it also means donors. So if the developers, if the corporate interests, are supporting all the Black candidates’ campaigns, they’re also going to have an ear. It is White supremacist to use money as a weapon, and until we realize that our money can be used to resist White supremacy, we’re going to be in trouble.
SBJ: Having the option of an entity like The Collective gives people the opportunity to be engaged in something that can make substantial changes on the ground. Lack of access and the inability to channel your beliefs into an institution that can create change stop progress. The Collective gives people a tangible way to support Black candidates and in turn fight White supremacy, which is working to continue to keep us subservient and beholden. Our donors know this organization is theirs; they can see the victories and the change we are bringing about collectively.
QJ: I would just add that the fact that White people are overrepresented in our political system is a form of White supremacy. So by trying to equal things out and get more Black people represented, we are literally resisting White supremacy through the democratic process.
I fight White supremacy by supporting authors, journalists, writers, podcasters, entrepreneurs, and community leaders of color.
—Tina Perez, project manager
QUESTION, ANSWERED
It’s no surprise that money is a fraught topic—it touches every part of our lives, for better and for worse. Here we tackle the question: what’s your relationship with money?
Kenrya
“How about you spend less time modeling self-sacrifice, and more time modeling self-care?”
My therapist is dragging me again.
We’re talking about my relationship with money. I just confessed that while I essentially work a part-time job to send my daughter to a private school because the local joints are, shall we say, lacking, I have been lovingly, longingly looking at the Sonicare electric toothbrush that I abandoned in my Amazon cart six months ago because I feel guilty spending $40 on myself when I could use it for her violin lessons or this coding game I know she would love. Meanwhile, I bought her a more expensive version of the toothbrush, plus two packs of replacement heads. Hence the dragging, already in progress.
Pattern. A reliable sample of traits, acts, tendencies, or other observable characteristics of a person, group, or institution.*
I’ve never felt richer than I did on book delivery day as a kid. The homie Google tells me that it’s all online now, but way back in elementary school, I’d get hype when the teacher walked across the front of the classroom, handing the kid at the head of each row a batch of four-page, full-color newsletters that detailed all the books we could order from Scholastic that month. I’d take mine from the hand of the person in front of me, grab a pencil, and circle everything that looked mildly interesting, then spend the evening curating the list, striking the things that seemed boring on second read, and making sure I was properly advancing my collection of “The Baby-Sitters Club” titles.
Then I’d tell my daddy it was book time, and he would hand me a signed blank check. I’d total my books, make out the check, and hand it to my teacher with the order form the next day. Two weeks later, I’d feel flush. Most folks would get a book here or there, but I’d always have an entire box of treasure to carry on the bus and dive into when I got home. The way that I felt on book delivery days—loved and seen and cared for and lucky—still sticks with me. My daddy might not have been able to buy me every toy I begged for, but he spared no expense when it came to my favorite companions.
We didn’t have a dining room in my childhood home. Why? ’Cause the previous owners of our three-bedroom ranch-style house thought it would be dope to have a stage instead.
It stood about five inches higher than the floor in the rest of the house and was covered with the same deep brown carpet as the living room, which it faced. One wall sported a window that looked out on the street, while the other was covered in mirrors, floor to ceiling, in the shape of square tiles, with smaller diamond-shaped mirrors that accented the corners where they met. In the center of it all was an airbrushed picture of a mama koala bear with a baby on its back. My little sister and I always said that was us, me carrying her on my back while we feasted on bamboo. Our marsupial selves were a captive audience as we sang into an old school microphone, hand-danced with Daddy, and practiced twirling routines on that weird little stage.
The day that I let myself in from school and found my father—home hours earlier than usual—sitting on the edge of the stage, glasses on the floor beside him, long legs blocking the path to the rest of the house, I immediately knew that something was wrong.
He had worked at a computer company for as long as I’d been alive, but on that day he was laid off. And as he was raising us alone, our sole income was gone.
We had always struggled to keep up in our suburban neighborhood. As Daddy once explained when I asked why I couldn’t do something or other, one income just didn’t go as far as the dual joints my suburban friends enjoyed. They went on vacations and college tours and were presented at cotillions on the weekends. I spent Saturday and Sunday at Granddaddy’s house, playing drive-by with my cousins.
(Bare feet black with dirt from jumping over the extra-long phone cord that passed as a rope, my cousins, my little sister, and I would scope the street, looking left and then looking right past the long row of parallel parked vehicles, waiting for a car to come barreling toward us. When we’d see one in the distance, we’d abandon the hot asphalt, dash past the scraggly tree lawn and the strip of sidewalk, and hide behind the row of short bushes that rimmed my granddaddy’s yard, as if they could stop the bullets we imagined the drivers were spraying at us.)
But we ate well, and our gas was usually on, if not our lights. My father stretched himself to root us in a neighborhood with excellent public schools because he knew that while there is no such thing as a great equalizer, education is the closest thing we have.
To make that happen, he sacrificed himself, carving off small pieces of his well-being and offering them up to my sister and me, his creditors, and the many people—from blood relatives to a family that was experiencing homelessness—who slept on our couches for months at a time. He’d skip lunch to make sure we had enough to buy those cardboard-ass pizza squares in the cafeteria. He’d wear the same pair of high tops until they were mushy and gray, barely recognizable as shoes. He’d wait to get haircuts until he was barely recognizable.
The pieces just got larger after he was “downsized”; he eventually landed as a subcontractor servicing one of his former clients, dropping from a steady salary to hourly pay that squeezed us tighter. But he persisted, constantly working and somehow finding a way to pay for most of the things we needed, if not always the things we wanted.
These days, as I offer up my can’t-see hours to finance my daughter’s education and social calendar, I understand the method behind his madness. But having insight into his motivation doesn’t mean that it isn’t mad.
Pattern. An original or model considered for or deserving of imitation.*
In my willingness to do anything for my Saa-Saa—she of the soft brown skin, bright eyes, quick mind, and awful jokes—I thought I was making her feel loved and cared for, like I felt on book delivery days. And maybe I am, in the short term. But subjecting her to my marathon work sessions, my exhausted and distracted mind, and my old school–brushed teeth is really just teaching her the same lesson that I got from my father: You should find pleasure in taking care of the people around you and feel guilty about taking care of yourself.
Over the years this belief led me to a bank account that was depleted from spending to meet the wants and needs of others, lopsided relationships where I was more caretaker and secretary than equal partner, and a therapist who forced me to read a book about codependency.
And it doesn’t stop at being a martyr in my personal relationships. Black women in the United States are paid 67.7 cents for every dollar paid to White men.† I’ve been taught both at home and in these White supremacist streets (which are really the same thing, thanks to the toxic sea of racism and sexism we’re swimming in, thanks) that it’s not cool to demand what I’m worth. I’m expected to accept what I’m offered, or what will enable me to just get by, and use a fear of scarcity as my excuse for not wringing the joy out of each moment.
I do not want that for my child.
Pattern. Consistent and recurring characteristic or trait that helps in the identification of a phenomenon or problem and serves as an indicator or model for predicting its future behavior.*
It’s time for something new, for both of our sakes. I’m taking my therapist’s advice and fashioning a new pattern that involves making space for myself financially, even as the world tells me that is selfish and shortsighted.
Recently, Saa and I tied our tennis shoes and headed out for a walk to the neighborhood studio where she takes a drop-in West African dance class with a Senegalese instructor. The breeze was a bit biting, but the sun was bright, and I tipped my face toward it as we strolled.
Each time my mind alerted me that I was supposed to be writing this essay or that I had a spring wardrobe of big kid clothes sitting in my Target app cart waiting for me to make the money to buy them, I deflected the thoughts, sending them hurtling into the distance as I reminded myself that joy, like what I felt strolling in the sun with Saa, is more precious than guilt—lighter too.
When we made it home hours later, I ordered Thai food because I was too exhausted to cook. Full and satisfied, I put away my phone so I wouldn’t be distracted, then camped out on the floor with the little one for rounds of Uno and whatever the Ikea version of Jenga is called. Then I dozed while she lay on me and sketched a fabulous tiered dress that she dubbed “Sherbet.” Just before putting her to bed, I found my phone, popped open the Amazon app, and bought that fucking toothbrush. Here’s to living in our abundance.
Akiba
I’ve always admired people who are proactive and intentional with money. I like the idea of having a savings account at like age five, buying a home, buying rental properties, having enough cash to work with a financial planner, having a college fund for your kids, saving six months’ worth of operating funds in case you get laid off, using coupons, eating the lunch you made at home, having perfect credit, paying every single bill on time, and turning off all of the gottdamn lights because are you going to pay this electric bill?
For the most part I’ve been lucky. I am a single, childless writer and editor in expensive-ass New York City, but I know that if crisis comes calling, I can move back home to Philly to the two-parent, paid-in-full house where I was raised.
Both of my parents are college-educated and retired from full-time jobs with savings. From day one they made it clear that my sister and I were going away to college on scholarship. (“Mom, do we have a college fund?” “Yeah. Your brains.”)
After an early foray into entrepreneurship—selling shiny rocks, making comics, peddling Kwanzaa cookies as one half of the “Ujamaa Bakers”—I started working at fourteen. It was a summer job at CoreStates Bank, filing canceled checks next to adults who had the Gucci, Louis Vuitton, and MCM bags I envied.
Compared to my Black peers with single moms, we did pretty well. Politically speaking, we were not supposed to even care about that. All of our clothes came from Jomar’s, House of Bargains, Artie’s, and Marshalls. One time, during the designer jean craze of the ’80s, my mom snagged me a pair of Pierre Cardins at an outlet. I went around the house chanting, “Pierre Car-DIN!” in what I believed was a French accent. My mother scratched out the labels.
Lesson learned.
But things changed when, after several school strikes and denied applications to our local magnet school, my parents shipped my sister and me off to a predominantly White, all-girls prep school in the Philadelphia suburbs. We were Black superstar geniuses benefiting from the affirmative action that our ancestors sacrificed for and that we certainly deserved. The people at that school were White and rich. They had “au pairs” and summer homes. They had multiple bathrooms and swimming pools. Their jackets had those crumpled-up zipper tags that one gets during a ski trip. Everybody lived in the suburbs and some would ask dumb questions like, “Do you see pools of blood on your street?”
One night my mom hit the Lotto and called what seemed like all of her girlfriends screaming, “I WON FIFTY DOLLARS IN THE LOTTERYYY!” I bragged about this at school the next day. But when I disclosed that it was a $50 come-up, I got peculiar looks and silence. These third-graders carried $20 bills in their LeSportsacs.
These early experiences created a class-consciousness that I will charitably call “multilayered.”
We went to private school, summer camp, music and art class, gymnastics, ballet, African dance, screen-printing, and a bunch of other activities. Occasionally our only living grandparent, Mamie Nichols, would take the whole family out to Seafood Shanty, where we’d ball out on shrimp cocktail and Shirley Temples. Our clothes were not hot, but we wore uniforms anyway. My sister and I were able to circumvent most of the ’hood entry points into conspicuous consumption due to my parents’ politics and the fact that the rich White girls at school couldn’t make a distinction between us and any other Blacks.
At White girl school, Asali and I were “poor.” When we first got there, me in the third and my sister in the fourth grade, White girls we had never met invited us to their homes for dinner. I still wonder if they thought we were Feed the Children recipients.
Then there was a bizarre, Negro-on-Black incident in which some of the parents whose kids went to ours and other area prep schools invited Asali and me to join Jack and Jill, then revoked the invitation because we “lived in the city.”
By far the most confusing and damaging class-related trauma I faced came at the hands of one of the few Black girls in my class. She lived in the city like me, and we bonded over freestyle battles and the nightly countdown on Power 99. This girl’s dad owned a market, but there was not much on the shelves and everything was dusty. She was “light-brown-skinned” with “good” hair, which, by non-crunchy, non–Black nationalist standards, was supposed to mean that she was better than me. One time this frenemy and her mother popped up at our home uninvited. They just didn’t believe that our dark-skinned asses could have a house when they lived in an apartment.
And there were a few violent incidents between us. After trying unsuccessfully to humiliate me in front of the White girls with poorly drawn diagrams of the African art at our house, she lunged at me. Ultimately, I came very close to throwing her out a window. Another time, during a rare out-of-uniform day, she ripped my flannel, big-shirt-over-leggings situation wide open to expose my puny nibblets wrapped in a white bra. Shoving and slapping ensued.
But this girl’s attempt to be better based on internalized White supremacy (that was not her fault, I should note) backfired in the Blackest of ways. At slumber parties we were pity-invited to, she would bring like eighty pairs of pajamas. These White girls didn’t even shower in the morning. “She’s an obnoxious show-off,” one such girl told me as she brushed her long hair in one of the four bathrooms in the house.
What I learned from this amalgam of experiences is that being rich and White meant being proudly oblivious to what you had, laughing at lower-income people of color who tried to look rich like you, calling Italians and other ethnic White folks “mall-chicks,” and screaming, “My dad works at the stock exchange!” in a pinch.
Whiplash!
Here lies the suspect benevolence of rich White girls I didn’t know; some mean-spirited classism from suburban Black adults; a frenemy whose good hair didn’t do anything for her family’s bottom line; and a deep shame about knowing any of this.
What kind of child of Black nationalists gains intimate knowledge of class politics across race, immigration status, and ethnicity from a suburban prep school ? To me, not a proper one. I took simplifying matters very seriously. I bought the biggest gold earrings I could afford, lots of Reeboks, and multiple Liz Claiborne bags with my job money. I entertained a certified nut-jawn drug peddler from Richard Allen Projects in hopes that he would catch me up on what I’d missed. I wore seven different permed hairstyles at one time while my family looked on with concern and then annoyance. I gave boys on the el the wrong name but the right number, because I was scared to be too bougie with, “No.” I dreamed of being another iteration of the Malcolm X that Public Enemy and everybody else exalted.
Then my baba from down the way busted me with the realest things ever said to my confused self. Some things like, “You are not Malcolm X. The Klan didn’t kill me, and your mother is alive. You were never separated from your sister. You were never hungry. You’re not a pimp, a number runner, or going to jail. You’re not getting a process that you have to wash out in the toilet. You’re not a minister in the Nation of Islam. You’re not getting murdered for the people. Be yourself, please.”
This lesson settled in at Howard University, home of Black folks who had actual generational wealth. Some were ridiculous, and many were cool, even as lifetime members of the Links or Jack and Jill. I met AKAs, Deltas, Alphas, Kappas, and study-abroad students. I met artists from all over the country. I met historians and engineering students. Some had nice cars and went to cotillions but did not act a damn fool about it.
In adulthood, I have come to understand that if you are not poor, you have choices for yourself and your family, have uncontaminated drinking water, have nephews living charmed lives, have uncontested citizenship rights, are cisgender and straight, have a college education, have not been incarcerated for being poor and possessing two joints, have not been financially or physically abused by a sadistic man, have never had police or a vigilante kill or maim you or a loved one, have a family that is still alive for the most part and can afford to take care of you when you get very sick, have a sister with a PhD and an MFA, have a place that pays you to write, edit, and think, have the freedom to say “White supremacy” with few overt consequences so far—your story is a funny-at-times tale of Black working- to middle-class girl angst.
I make enough to eat out rather than cook (poorly). After many, many years of freelancing, I have benefits, taxed income, and paid vacation days. I get to pretend that I don’t care if a suitor has enough money for us to be on equal footing when I’m too working-class for that to be true.
I still occasionally look around my rent-stabilized apartment and wonder what I might peddle in case this whole thing goes off the rails. But I know, thanks to my family, education, and early job experience, how to hustle up legal cash. When I’m able to retire at eighty-six, I’m going to take my nephews to a Seafood Shanty–type establishment every once in a while. And if anyone ever again asks me about my relationship with money and how that is connected to resisting White supremacy, I will be able to say without an ounce of glibness: “It’s complicated.”
* Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren, Maggie R. Jones, and Sonya R. Porter, “Race and Economic Opportunity in the United States: An Intergenerational Perspective,” Equality of Opportunity Project, March 2018, http://www.equality-of-opportunity.org/assets/documents/race_paper.pdf (accessed June 6, 2018).
* I think that the United States itself is the invention of Whiteness and that Whiteness has two expressions. The most primary expression is organized violence. This line is about Whiteness as a deputization that exists to keep enslaved Africans in check.
† I’m speaking to class versus race here. There’s the class analysis that says that the principal contradiction in society is rich versus poor, ruling class versus the oppressed. And you have schools of radical thought that say it’s not class, it’s Black versus White. I think it’s more of a complicated hybrid of the two, where both realities are at play with, reinforce, and sometimes contradict each other.
‡ This line is not to say that all we need is armed resistance, but to say that any solution or any resistance to White supremacy that doesn’t come to terms with the fact that it is completely tied to an organization of violence—a monopoly of violence—is not going to get us to the Promised Land. Money can express some things, but money will not save us. And then the extension of it is this: If you cannot get resistance out of a dollar, then what is that dollar really doing? That dollar to me is really evidence of our surrender. What you’re really saying is, “We give up. We don’t really want any problems. And you can continue to brutalize whoever you want to brutalize here and abroad, kill whatever you want to kill, and enforce and really enforce an insane mode of production.”
* This just means that to resist White supremacy is to accept that there will be state or state-sanctioned violence against you.
† What are some of the units or atoms or molecules of a monopoly of violence? One of them is giving the White vigilante, the White police officer, absolute rein and power to do whatever they want. I mean, it was law in some places that when insurrection appeared to be afoot, White people had to patrol African people. It was like, literally, “You are drafted.” You could kill anybody as long as the person who so-called owned the African felt compensated fairly enough or thought you did them a favor by killing a possible seed of rebellion. That’s the way a vigilante, the way that a soldier of Whiteness, is programmed—to not see a human being and to only be trying to enforce one thing: their absolute power.
* “Pattern,” Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/pattern (accessed April 22, 2018).
* “Pattern,” Dictionary.com, http://www.dictionary.com/browse/pattern (accessed April 22, 2018).
† Ariane Hegewisch and Emma Williams-Baron, “The Gender Wage Gap: 2017 Earnings Differences by Race and Ethnicity,” Institute for Women’s Policy Research, https://iwpr.org/publications/gender-wage-gap-2017-race-ethnicity/ (accessed April 22, 2018).
* “Pattern,” Business Dictionary, http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/pattern.html (accessed April 22, 2018).