Yes, But...

I applaud PAW for shining a spotlight on the social justice work of Kate Poole ’09 and other white female millennials, beneficiaries of inherited wealth, who are determined to make our world a better place by rethinking their relationship to American history and their own familial history.

Although the word “white” only shows up once in the article, each of the half-dozen young women seems to be wrestling, some more painfully than others, with ideas about privilege in which white racial identity and money are intermingled in a way that produces racial guilt — guilt towards those understood to be Other, disprivileged, in need of reparative justice.  That guilt demands not just good works, but expiation and a kind of purgation: the giving away of so much money, in the case of Megan Prier ’11, that she ends up having to “[borrow] friends’ cars when needed.”

In America’s Atonement:  Racial Pain, Recovery Rhetoric, and the Pedagogy of Healing (2004), the African American educational theorist Aaron David Gresson III explores the way in which “racial pain,” as he terms it, is produced in individuals by the “voluntary or forced association with a ‘spoiled racial identity.’”  Blacks have carried that burden for most of American history, he argues, but in our own era whites, including whites who volunteer for the assignment, are beginning to share in it. Even as I admire the desire of Poole, Prier, and their peers to make the world a better place, I see traces of that dynamic at work here — a desire, born out of white racial pain, for some form of restored white racial innocence, something that compensates for what is felt to be a spoiled racial identity.  And that worries me.

In How It Feels To Be Colored Me (1928), Zora Neale Hurston shrugged off the pain that some might have presumed would attach to her own identity as an African American woman in that earlier era.  “Someone is always at my elbow reminding me that I am the grand-daughter of slaves.  It fails to register depression with me.  Slavery is sixty years in the past.  The operation was successful and the patient is doing well, thank you.”  She contrasted her own insouciance with that of her “white neighbor,” whose own anxious subject position, one unnerved by black achievement and haunted by white guilt, she argued prophetically, “is much more difficult.  No brown specter pulls up a chair beside me when I sit down to eat.  No dark ghost thrusts its leg against mine in bed.  The game of keeping what one has is never so exciting as the game of getting.”

I understand, and commend, the desire to make America a better place, one that lives up, in Dr. King’s words, to the true meaning of its creed.  Thoughtful, enlightened investments are surely a part of that, as are other sorts of work that help bring beloved community into being.  But the idea that “wealth and racism are inextricably linked,” an idea credited to Resource Generation — “part support group, part financial adviser” — and embraced to a greater or lesser extent by all the white female millennials profiled in PAW, is intellectual overreach: a progressive ideology that leans out beyond the tensed particulars of actual American lives within the deeply troubled horizons of American history, transforming itself into a theology that offers the possibility of racial redemption to those who hunger for that.

There’s certainly no need to keep all one has, in Hurston’s terms. (I give to causes deserving of support, including the Innocence Project and the Jazz Foundation of America.). But the game of getting, too, is exciting, and should be the province of all.  As for giving “all the money away,” as Prier has in the case of her own trust fund:  That seems crazy to me.  She justifies it by arguing that she has records of her ancestors “stealing land from Indigenous peoples on the East Coast during the early days of colonization.” But other of her ancestors, the story notes, “fought against oppression,” helping slaves escape on the Underground Railroad and helping end the discriminatory practice of redlining.  Good on them!

Vows of poverty have a long and noble history as a spiritual practice, of course.  But that’s precisely my point:  What is being engaged in by Prier is a kind of religious scourging, not — at least in my view — a just adjudication of one young woman’s actual relationship with the totality of her ancestry.

Poole’s Jewish great-great-great-great grandfather was an immigrant from Europe; although driven by an entrepreneurial hunger as a would-be straw hat manufacturer, he and his children also faced a panoply of exclusions, oppressions, and potential humiliations as he sought to climb the ladder.  Poole is surely aware of these; if she’s not, I’d urge her to read Richard E. Fraenkel’s article  “‘No Jews, Dogs, or Consumptives:  Comparing Anti-Jewish Discrimination in Late Nineteenth-Century Germany and the United States.”

To judge not just from the article but from her Chordata Capital website, Poole is doing great work. Inspired work, in fact.  But I think she, like Prier, is overinvested in the drama of compensating for the perceived sins of her ancestors.  A little more forgiveness there — or even perhaps no forgiveness required, just simple gratitude for her ancestors’ achievements and bequests in the face of such discrimination — would go a long way toward delivering the peace and self-acceptance that are the predicate, I believe, for any effective movement for social justice.