“Am I a Sucker?”
A White friend asks me in exasperation. She received an email from a former teacher at the school at which my friend was Principal for many years. A Black woman was making a direct ask of some White folks with whom she has been in community over the years to support her financially. In the email, she names the spiritual, intellectual and financial costs of working in a racist education system as a Black woman and names the recipients’ Whiteness as implicated in that cost. She is asking for reparations. And my friend is having feelings about it.
I have received very similar direct asks from Black folks in my networks over the last couple of weeks and I know other White folks in my circle have too. Whether or not we decide to say yes to these asks, we need to be honest and talk about the White feelings we are having about it.
The visceral reaction my friend had to this email - sick to her stomach, cheeks hot with defensiveness, chest tight with exasperation - are clues that her espoused values were coming in conflict with narratives held deep in her body about the way things work. After all, my friend gives money to Black-led organizations all the time and her body never responds this way.
Why does this feel so different?
I want to propose that my friend was having a collective body reaction. In this case it is our collective White body telling her that the way things work is that money is earned. Giving money to people who have not earned it, who don’t deserve it, who reject being indebted to the person, institution, or government who gave it to them, well, that makes you a sucker. And we’ll be damned if anybody is gonna make us feel like a sucker.
And, perhaps, deeper into the trauma stored in our blood and bones is our collective White body telling us that the way things work is through exploitation, dispossession and scarcity. Those of us racialized as White in the United States swallowed a lie a long time ago that if those who looked like us were no longer in power, we would become the exploited ones, the dispossessed ones, we would never again have enough. But, our thinking mind has forgotten that those who look like us did not begin their exploitation, dispossession and scarcity myth with our Indigenous, Black and Brown human siblings. Our bodies remember. The bodies we carry from the land now called the United States also carry soil from the land now called Europe. A soil stained with the trauma of torture chambers, flogging posts, plagues, crusades, extermination and empire. Our fear that Indigenous, Black and Brown peoples, if given the opportunity, will ravage our bodies in the same way we have ravaged theirs belies the truth: that there is no safety in Whiteness and there never has been. We continue to invest in a culture of conquest - violence, expropriation, destruction, and dehumanization - out of our trauma response and belief that there will never be or could ever be anything else.
Okay, but what does all that have to do with Black people asking me for money?
When a Black person in our network asks us for money and frames it in the context of White supremacy rather than as charity - we cannot help but feel implicated. And deep in our trauma response, we project well-worn fears onto the Black body rather than face the mirror of truth. Black body as lazy, Black body as looter, Black body as thief, Black body as dangerous. These projections are really how we fear our own bodies are seen. Deep down we know the truth of our history and our present. We know what our people are capable of and it scares the shit out of us.
Fine, say I accept this argument. How else am I supposed to feel? And I gave the money - isn’t that the most important thing?
I would never attempt to tell anyone how they are supposed to feel. And no, giving the money is not the most important thing. Acting in solidarity out of guilt or an expectation of gratitude or repayment fuels resentment and burnout. You won’t last in this fight and it will be bad for you and the folks of color you encounter down the road.
What I would like to offer is first, to notice. Who taught you that giving people money when they haven’t “earned it” makes you a sucker? How did you come to have the money you have? Where in your body do you believe there is not or will not be enough? How will you know how much is enough? If scarcity is a myth, then what truth lies in abundance? What might an abundance framework guide you to feel and do?
Next, we must sit and struggle against our deeply embedded and collective belief that we are entitled to control Black bodies, Black resources and Black lives. It is precisely how we are being asked and the fact that the ask is coming from a friend or acquaintance that is the entire point. We are being asked in such a way that challenges our meritocratic belief that we have earned all that we have, that hard work yields prosperity, and that we should be able to decide what is done with our money. In donating to an organization or a depersonalized entity, we can feel confident that the “system” will mediate how the funds are used; keep it accountable to the existing power structure. We can feel good about our tax deduction and the fundamental power dynamic between us (the generous donor) and they (the mission driven org) is still firmly in place. Don’t get me wrong, please redistribute your resources to all the Black-led organizations out there - but don’t confuse that with the hard part.
The hard part is reckoning with what happens when the general becomes specific and lands in our bodies. When our friends, colleagues and acquaintances say, “I’m coming to collect. I won’t owe you anything afterwards because it never belonged to you in the first place.” Will we dig deep and (re)member that there could be a third way? A space between sucker and supremacist? A space of collective accountability, shared resources and mutual care? Will we summon the courage to live into the specific what we espouse in the general?