When I left my marriage in 2010, I wanted nothing to do with our marital assets. Even though I knew in my bones that half of it belonged to me, I still felt it carried a ton of karma that I didn’t want to be responsible for managing. Most of the disagreements in our married life stemmed from money: He felt we needed more, and I felt that the price of accruing wealth was not worth it, to put it mildly.
My ex-husband and I met at Columbia University, in the early 1980s. He had just graduated and I had just started at Barnard College. The Columbia University Glee Club brought us together. It was much more than a choir; it was, and probably still is, an entire social ecosystem. Lots of alum hung out with us, attending rehearsals and drinking afterwards. Technically a men’s choir, they recruited women to sing first tenor, since it’s a range accessible to altos, and difficult to fill with men alone.
For me at that stage of my life, I enjoyed all the male energy. In retrospect, this era represented the apex of my white supremacist patriarchal heteronormative colonial era. Our family had left Hawai`i 6 years earlier, and I was still busily trying to assimilate to white culture. My first semester of college, I signed up for “Lit Hum,” a class in literary classics, which at that time was 100% European. I also signed up for Calculus, having internalized the pressure to potentially follow a pre-med track.
I had a great time, singing Mozart and Bach as well as the standard rah-rah college repertoire and drinking songs. I felt uncomfortable with the Korean students, who felt too nerdy for me. Having grown up in Asian-dominant Hawai`i, all the mainland Asians I had met seemed awkward and uncool to me. At the same time, I was being tokenized and exoticized in white culture, without having the language to conceptualize it or name it.
All of this to say, when I married my husband at the sweet young age of 22, in 1985, I had no idea how my future self might evolve. Several times my higher self sent red flags, and I attempted to break off the engagement, only to return to what felt like my destiny. My hesitation at the time had mostly to do with gender roles, and my deeply held belief that I was never meant to be a wife, that I was not wife material, and that I needed more space. Mostly that revolved around my art, which at that time was poetry and creative writing, which I believed required full-time devotion and autonomy.
We had one child, then another, then another. My body blossomed into motherhood over and over, and would have kept on going if we did not exercise great care. My partner and I were equally committed to our children, and neither one of us would have accepted separation from them.
When my ex-husband and I first got together, he was considering law school, to become a labor lawyer. He was the grandson of working class immigrants from Poland and Italy, and first generation college. He still identified strongly with the working class and wanted to defend it. However, over the years, upper class white society welcomed him with open arms, plus he had major law school loans to pay off. After some years of practicing corporate law, even after loans were paid off, he felt compelled to stay, make partner, get bonuses, and embrace all the rest of the golden shackles.
All this while, scales fell from my eyes. I became more and more politically aware. After 9/11, no holds were barred. I began getting involved with electoral politics, which evolved into anti-war activism, then further into anti-racism work. The web of oppression became obvious to me, and I could see all the tentacles of the capitalist heteronormative white supremacist patriarchy, which became increasingly intolerable. I questioned our wealth, while acknowledging how I and our children had benefited from it. The children got to go to private school and the colleges of their choice, and I attended grad school and got my MFA in poetry and fiction. I held part-time jobs for my own fulfillment, but our household did not require my income, and I had time to pursue writing, dance, and offer many hours of unpaid community work.
But I could see that my husband suffered. He experienced physical and emotional wear and tear, including depression and chest pains, and many other symptoms. I wracked my brain to come up with creative solutions to alleviate his stress, including options for me to generate more income for the family, and to radically pare down our living expenses. Nevertheless, he felt obliged to persist in his chosen path. He deeply and truly believed it was absolutely necessary and nonnegotiable.
Over the years we increasingly drifted apart emotionally, intellectually, and socially. People who met us separately did not realize we were a couple—we were so different from each other.
After all our children left for college, I suggested to my husband that we turn our 5 bedroom house into a cooperative project. I had a friend in grad school who sought housing, and it felt only right to share our resources. I also suggested that we sell our house in our racist, white neighborhood, and move to an area with more people of color. I felt the blood on our hands, having “succeeded” in white supremacist racist patriarchy, and I yearned to make reparations for the wealth we had built.
All my suggestions were rebuffed. My soul cried out for liberation. I had to leave, but I did not want to leave with the tainted, blood-soaked money. I decided to move to Detroit, to learn at the feet of Grace Lee Boggs and others, to build intentional community there. I needed a chance to walk the talk, to go beyond the books I’d been reading, the discussions I’d been having, to really figure out how to live a just, equitable, anti-racist, anti-capitalist life.
I didn’t want to come in as a philanthropist— fuck that capitalist shit. My husband and I had already been giving 10-20% of our income away every year to causes we both supported. But I wanted to participate more fully as a comrade, as a member of the community. I wanted to be with the people, not “serve” from the refuge of a comfortable house in a white neighborhood. Doing that would only perpetuate the very systems I recognized as violent and oppressive.
At the time I could not fathom a way to keep my wealth, maintain my ethics, and be a member of the community. Since then I’ve learned about spend-down foundations, and Resource Generation, which embrace ways of using wealth for social good while ending intergenerational hoarding.
If I had to do it all over again, I might have kept my 50%, formed a spend-down foundation, and made a plan to dissolve the funds in 10 years, while supporting certain individuals and groups. But I remain torn about the decisions I made. If I had moved to Detroit with access to hundreds of thousands of dollars, wouldn’t I have felt obliged to buy a house for the intentional community we were intently forming? Wouldn’t I feel obliged to finance the repairs to the house? How would I feel holding back? Would I have kept my wealth a secret (ie “Anonymous donor”)? If so, how would that sit in my body? I met so many people and projects in Detroit deserving financial support. How and why would I hold back? How would I live with that?
This is why wealth remains concentrated in exclusive neighborhoods and social circles: so that we don’t have to make such decisions. So we don’t have to look our friends and neighbors in the eye, when we choose to hold back, or lie.
Of course, these are ego decisions. Basically I’m kicking the can down the road. My ex-husband and my children will have to figure out what to do with the money. One could certainly argue that all money is tainted, that it is all blood money, built on oppression of other living beings, including the earth. Many assert that money is only energy, and we choose how we direct the energy. That argument feels specious and abstract to me. We are, after all, embodied beings living in the prakrti (matter) of the physical world. As sovereign beings, we choose how energy is generated and distributed.
The money weighs on me whether or not I hold it. Because I carry no wealth, I depend on the state. I receive SNAP benefits and Medicaid. I pay for my poverty with my health. For instance I cannot afford regular sessions of acupuncture and bodywork. I long ago stopped buying exclusively organic foods, and I rarely eat out. My gifts to family and friends are almost always homemade. My living choices are humble and limited, and I depend on the generosity and prosperity of other individuals and organizations for housing.
One could argue I’m slumming. Pretending to be poor when I’m rich. I remain absolutely privileged in terms of class, education, and other resources, that I cannot dismantle even if I tried.
In retrospect, I think I could have managed my wealth in an ethical way if I had had the inner clarity and conviction. At the time I did not have any examples or role models. Everyone in my circles fell into one of these economic categories:
- generationally impoverished due to racism, ableism, and the ravages of capitalism and limited access to education and opportunities
- temporarily low-income as recent college graduates
- voluntarily low-income as artists/activists etc
- middle class and barely making ends meet
- coming from generational wealth but without full access
- upper-middle or upper class, and living in a secure, comfortable bubble
Now I would add the category:
- access to wealth and on an active path of redistribution and reparation
To my comrades in this new category, I’m wondering:
- Who holds the pursestrings to your wealth?
- Is there a time you foresee when the wealth has been fully redistributed? What are the criteria for defining this moment in the future?
- How do you plan to financially support yourself and/or your loved ones when this time comes?
- How do you build solidarity with your community when there are extreme imbalances of financial capacity?
- What do you experience in your body as you walk your money path?
I believe that in 2010-2012, while I was deciding on my financial future, that any plan to keep the money would have made me physically ill. We have a family history of auto-immune conditions. My auto-immunity shows up as allergies, asthma, and in the past, eczema, digestive issues, and weight loss. In retrospect, my body instructed me to walk away from the money. I definitely think I would not have been able to hoard the money while living in Detroit. Had I skipped my Detroit years and come straight to Hawai`i, I could have spent half of it on a condo unit and given half of it away, and receive lots of ego strokes and support for being smart and generous with my money. But I would not have skipped my Detroit years for anything. My 9 years in Detroit will always shine as some of the most formative, challenging, enriching years of my entire life. If I had the money today, I’d still give it away to my people in Detroit. I owe everything to them, and always will.
Detroit taught me to live with the contradictions. I wrestle constantly with my hypocrisies. If only I believed in ethical capitalism, but I don’t and never will. Sacrificing my wealth may mean my life is shortened by 5, 10 years or more. I accept this, and I hope my loved ones also accept this. I don’t claim to be correct or righteous. Lots of people have told me I’m stupid or short-sighted, or irresponsible, for my financial decisions. I walk the path I have chosen and created, for better or worse, rightly or wrongly, selfishly or unselfishly, what do I know? Like a bird on a wire, sings Leonard Cohen, like a drunk in a midnight choir, I have tried in my way, to be free.
