I wanted to share this call for submissions from a cool organization in Massachusetts, Class Action. It’s a cross-class anthology of personal stories about class, money, privilege, oppression, and other things we love to talk about here a lot. The deadline is soon (February 28th) – but I know lots of y’all have great stories to share and you should!
A different kind of morning.
Is it just me, or have things been particularly rough recently? I got back from a winter vacation a couple weeks ago to news of attacks on Gaza, Oscar Grant being shot in an Oakland BART station, and a well-known activist from my hometown admitting to being an FBI informant. The economic crisis (and its devastating effect on communities) is ongoing, neoliberal fundamentalism is as out of control as ever, organizers are still being targeted, state-sponsored murder of people of color is happening everywhere.
Meanwhile, Obama was inaugurated yesterday, but that’s not what’s giving me hope. I’ve been thinking about the tirelessness of the organizers in my life, many of whom worked hard get Obama into office, and who are still organizing – in solidarity with Gaza, to stop police violence, against privatization, gentrification, war, homelessness – mostly organizers who are affected by these things so much more directly than I am, and are inspiring me endlessly with joy, art, camp, attitude, and resilience in the face of ongoing crises.
I thought Enough readers might appreciate this wonderful statement by the Audre Lorde Project: A Different Kind of Morning in America – so helpful in thinking about the interconnectedness of these crises and how to approach them in our work.
Enough.
A reader wrote in after I posted my giving plan, asking if I ever plan on having children or buying a house, and how those things affect my decisions about giving. These are questions I get a lot, so I thought I’d post part of my response here: Continue reading “Enough.”
A year of giving away money
Happy new year, folks! I wanted to post my giving plan for the past year, as promised: here it is, with some background info and some of the thinking that went into creating it. Â
Giving away all this money has been such a weird experience. One one hand, it’s been so great to have so much money to support organizations I know are doing amazing work. But also, it’s been really hard and frustrating to observe/participate in philanthropy culture and continue to learn more and more about how much philanthropy screws over social justice movements. Having lots of money to give away is such a palpable experience of how horrifyingly unjust wealth distribution, capitalism, and social justice funding are. But I’ve also gotten to have so many amazing conversations with friends, family, and other organizers in my community about all the things I love to talk about that we write about here all the time. I’m trying to get more comfortable with navigating those complicated spaces that exist when trying to act in just ways in totally unjust situations.
There are lots of things I could have spent a lot more time thinking about: whether to give a lot to a few places or less to more places, how much to give nationally vs. internationally, to give through activist-advised re-granting institutions or just give directly to organizations, to give all at once or to spread my giving out over a few years, etc. I never found satisfactory answers to any of these questions, and I tried to just move forward instead of getting caught up in doing things perfectly. I’m so excited for when every wealthy social justice activist is giving away their inheritance and talking about it openly with the whole movement, because then it will be so much easier to make these kinds of decisions. Actually, I’m so excited for when capitalism ends and we find ways to take care of ourselves that aren’t based on oppression and exploitation, and social justice organizations have all the resources they need without having to rely on the whims of a handful of lefty rich people.
What I Gave and Where I Gave It: 2008 Giving Plan
Tyrone Boucher
Where The Money Came From (and some history)
My dad set up a trust fund for me when I was young, with stock from a software company he started. The company ended up making lots of money, and my trust fund grew to about $400,000. When I turned 25 (last year), the option opened up for the trustees to begin transferring the money into my control.
Because of my involvement in economic justice organizing, I’d already had lots of conversations about class, inheritance, and giving with my father by the time I started to get the money. He agreed to arrange for $200,000 to be transferred into a brokerage account that I controlled. I used some of the money to pay him back for my expenses he’d paid for in the past (like school), and put most of the rest of it into my giving plan.
Dealing with this money has been an ongoing process of talking with my family, understanding kind-of-complicated financial and tax stuff, making compromises (mostly about moving more slowly than I’d like), and getting clear on my own motivations and vision. I’m planning to give away 50-60% of the money from my trust fund by 2010, and most of the rest of it later, as I get access to it.
I’ve been really glad to have this opportunity for honest conversations with my family and community about wealth, class, and giving. I try to share my giving plan as much as possible if people are interested, mostly to start community dialogue and get feedback and provide an example of giving money with a social justice framework. I always like hearing people’s thoughts and ideas and impressions. I hope this can be a tool to inspire people to create new and interesting ways to give money – there are so many different ways to do this and I sure don’t have it all figured out.
Values
1. The vast majority of my giving goes to social justice organizing (i.e. groups that organize communities to fight the root causes of injustice).
2. I give almost entirely to groups that are led by the communities they are organizing; specifically, folks who are most directly affected by oppression – people of color, poor/low-income people, queer and trans people, women, etc.
3. I give to organizations with a multi-issue analysis because I believe that all forms of oppression are connected, and that everyone’s liberation is bound up together.
4. I give without regard to 501c3 status or whether or not my donation will be tax-deductible.
5. I strive for accountability and transparency in my giving by sharing my giving plan freely and soliciting direct input from other activists, organizers, friends, and family.
6. I always give unrestricted donations rather than requiring that my gift be used for a specific purpose or project.
7. I make multi-year commitments as much as possible, and try to be clear with the recipients about how much I can give and for how long.
8. A percentage of my giving goes to social justice foundations with activist-advised funds, because I believe they do important work to support grassroots organizing and reshape philanthropy in positive ways, and that they are an important model for shifting the decision-making in social justice funding from individual donors (particularly folks with privilege)Â to community activists. I also know that the grant application and review processes that come with foundation funding can drain the time and energy of organizations – so, I chose to give the majority of my donations directly to orgs.
9. I make a point to give to individuals when I can, because I want to live in a world where people support each other and share resources within networks and communities.
10. When possible, I try to pair my giving with fundraising and donor organizing. I believe that donations can go farther when I use them as an opportunity to educate and engage with other donors about my choices, so I always give publicly rather than anonymously and try to use my giving to help get other people to give.
Process
I was intimidated by the idea of creating a giving plan, because I wondered how I would ever be able to choose between all of the amazing social justice organizations that I wanted to support. I had been giving smaller amounts somewhat haphazardly for a few years before I began gaining access to my inheritance, but I’d never created a clear plan.
When I finally sat down to do it, it wasn’t as hard as I thought. I made a list of all the organizations I’d given to in the past, and all the organizations I’d always meant to give to. I wanted to give consistent support to these groups, so I added them all to my new, multi-year giving plan.
I wanted my giving plan to reflect a wider range of organizations than the ones I was personally familiar with, so I informally approached several organizers in my extended community whose work I admired and asked them for input. They recommended organizations with whom they shared values and who they saw as allies in their work (I also specifically asked for organizations who had a hard time getting funding from traditional sources), and these organizations also went on my giving plan.
The process of trying to figure all this out has taught me that there are so many ways to give money, and most of them are both useful and challenging in their own ways. I try not to get too caught up in working towards perfection, because there is definitely no perfect or best way to create a giving plan. I think of giving money as one small facet of my social justice work that hopefully reflects my broader commitment to wealth redistribution, anti-oppression, and grassroots organizing.
Here’s how it worked out:
Anti-Incarceration
Safe Streets/Strong Communities $7000Â ($5,000 was for Expungement Day (partnered with Critical Resistance NOLA))
Families and Friends of Louisiana’s Incarcerated Children $2500
Critical Resistance $150 through monthly sustainer program + $600 for CR10
Critical Resistance New Orleans $2000
Anti-Violence/Transformative Jusitce
Communities Against Rape and Abuse $500
Generation 5 $360 (through monthly sustainer program)
Healthcare
New Orleans Women’s Health and Justice Initiative/INCITE! New Orleans $6000
Women With A Vision (New Orleans) $2000
Third Root Community Health Clinic $2000 (Half of this donation is a “loan” – to be paid forward to another community health project in 2009.)
Queer and Trans Justice
Southerners On New Ground $2300
Sylvia Rivera Law Project $3000
Arts and Culture
Esperanza Center $2500
IDA $3000 (one time gift to help them buy their land)
Sins Invalid $500
Anti-Poverty/Homelessness
POOR Magazine $2500
Welfare Rights Organization (New Orleans) $2000
Coalition on Homelessness $2500
Western Regional Advocacy Project $250
Social Justice Foundations
21st Century Foundation $2000 (Through Gulf South Allied Funders (gsaf.info))
Bread and Roses Community Fund $50
Immigrant Justice
New Orleans Workers Center for Racial Justice $3000
Madre Tierra $6000
Other
Resource Generation $1500
Catalyst Project $2080 (monthly sustainer plus one-time gift)
KINDRED $2000
ticket for NOLA activist to attend NPA conference $373
Misc urgent appeals $2000
TOTAL YEARLY GIVING $62,158
Letters and plans
Letter To My Dad About Giving Away Money
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101 ways to write about the same thing
Do I say the same things over and over again? Sometimes I feel like I can’t let go of these questions and so I keep analytically pounding on them from different angles searching for some new insight. After I wrote that last post, I realized that I wrote an essay about very similar things last year and forgot about it. IÂ wrote it after reading the book Outlaws of America by my new friend Dan Berger. Have you read it? I really recommend it – it’s a history of the Weather Underground that incorporates a lot of analysis and assessment about how their politics are relevant today. Here’s a cut-down version of my essay, basically just a slightly less humble take on the stuff I wrote about in my last post: Notes on Militancy, Privilege, and Guilt.
Notes on Militancy, Privilege, and Guilt
by Tyrone Boucher
July 2007
I read Dan Berger’s book Outlaws of America: The Weather Underground and the Politics of Solidarity in the midst of organizing a conference called Making Money Make Change and thinking constantly about what it means to work with other wealthy/privileged people to support and strengthen social justice movements. I was totally enthralled by the book, I think because it directly addresses some of the questions I’ve been thinking about so much lately in terms of how I approach my activism, and how to work with other privileged people to support and participate in broad-based movements. In the book’s conclusion, Berger asks: “What does it mean to be a white person opposing racism and imperialism? What does it mean to be born of privilege in a world defined by oppression? How can those with such unearned social benefits work in a way to undermine and ultimately dismantle systems of injustice?” (272).
In the course of my work organizing other class privileged folks to fight capitalism, classism, and wealth inequality, I’ve sometimes been encouraged by fellow organizers to take my political intensity down a notch because it can alienate people. It’s important for me to hear this, because it reminds me how important it is to meet people where they’re at, be compassionate and humble in my relationships with other radical or progressive folks who share my privilege, and work in my own communities to help build a strong multiracial, cross-class movement. I appreciate being challenged about this stuff, and it often serves as a much-needed check on my tendency towards stubborn indignation.Â
But this conversation touches on something that I ponder a lot, something about militancy and ideology and the balance between being gentle enough to be accessible and having a political critique that is strong and uncompromising. I thought about it a lot while reading Outlaws of America – the Weather Underground had an extremely strong critique, and they critiqued from a position of privilege, challenging the racist and imperialist institutions that “benefited” them and their families. Especially in their early days, it seems like they often fell into the trap that wise fellow organizers frequently warn me against – being so angry, uncompromising, and critical that they mistook potential allies for enemies and alienated many people who could have worked with them to fight racism and imperialism.
I do think, though, that there are some important lessons to take from Weather’s militancy and revolutionary politics. I keep returning to the issue of perspective, and how perspective (so heavily influenced by our position in relation to racist and imperial power) informs the way we interpret different political struggles. The WUO has a reputation, even in the Left, as being overly reactionary, violent, and angry; Outlaws of America explored – in greater depth than is usually given to accounts of the WUO – what the intention was behind Weather’s rhetoric and tactics and why their analysis was important in the context of the state repression, imperial violence, and Third World revolutionary struggle that characterized the times.Â
The WUO invented itself as the “white fighting force” of the grassroots, people-of-color-led revolutionary movement. They saw that in the Global South (as well as in the U.S.), people of color were being targeted by U.S. imperialist violence; and, in order to resist this violence, repressed communities were turning to armed struggle and guerrilla warfare as their only recourse. Weather leaders argued in favor of “bringing the war home” – as the NLF in Vietnam, the Black Panthers in the U.S., and other national liberation movements took up arms to protect their rights to freedom and self-determination, the WUO also committed to “revolutionary violence” as a form of solidarity.Â
Weather’s strategy of violence was a direct response to a feeling that a people’s revolution was not only possible, but directly imminent. Given this climate, members of the WUO made the choice to commit themselves to bringing about the revolution by means they believed to be the most expedient, even if it meant facing significant possibility of injury, death, or lifelong incarceration.
Some of the critiques of the WUO (critiques that I, Berger, and many former WUO members share) are based on the organization’s tendency towards sectarianism, aggression, and overblown propagandistic rhetoric. But in their more considered, less reactionary moments, the WUO’s strength seemed to lie with its uncompromising alliance with the most repressed communities, its repudiation of privilege based on oppression, and its commitment to throwing down and participating in dangerous, urgent, and militant revolutionary struggles. WUO members saw themselves as directly accountable and responsive to radical groups of color like the Panthers, AIM, the Young Lords, and others; so when these groups called for outright war against the state, the Weather people were ready to rob banks and plant bombs in the service of the revolution.
Weather’s tactics often involved calling upon and leveraging privilege; members’ white skin and (often) class and educational privilege shielded them from the most violent forms of state repression, allowing them greater ability to carry out dangerous and illegal actions. Even during the time when WUO members occupied many of the spots on the FBI’s Most Wanted list, COINTELPRO surveillance and police violence never neared the level faced by radical groups of color. Members’ class privilege and access to personal and family resources increased Weather’s capacity as well. Although their approach to sexism and queer liberation was inadequate at best, they had a strong analysis of white privilege (and, more sporadically, class privilege) that informed the direction of their work; Berger writes, “privilege was [Weather’s] raison d’etre – the group set out to use its privilege in the service of revolutionary change” (156).Â
So again, what does it mean for privileged people to be radical, to be “revolutionary,” and also have a deep commitment to confronting, analyzing, and “leveraging” privilege? What are the limits, for privileged people, of “organizing in our own communities” when the majority of people who have privilege will never choose to truly challenge that privilege or work to destroy the oppressive systems that create it? I’d like to stay mindful of the dangers of becoming overly self-righteous (“I’m a better white person/rich person/straight person/man”), but I want to find a balance that allows privileged radicals to relate in an accessible way to other privileged people (with the hope of moving them towards increased politicization) without compromising a radical analysis. I do believe, for example, that being rich is wrong. I don’t necessarily think it is strategic to say it in a beginner’s workshop for wealthy people on Class Privilege 101, but I do think it’s strategic to say it. I think it’s powerful and important for wealthy people in solidarity with poor people to renounce and redistribute our wealth, and to be outspoken about why we make that choice.
This line of thinking often leads me into conversations about guilt. Guilt is a really touchy issue when talking about privilege, and people seem constantly afraid of “coming from a place of guilt” when doing solidarity work. I think this is important to be aware of, as guilt often works to keep us stagnated and immobilized, or prompts us to lash out at allies or be defensive or just generally make bad decisions. But I also think that the concept of guilt sometimes gets used in a counterproductive way, as an accusation against privileged people making militant or radical choices. For example, many of the people who a) caution me not to give my entire trust fund away because I need some of it for “security” and b) insist that if I do give it all away I must be acting from a place of guilt – are also people with class privilege. And I understand how in this increasingly privatized, class-stratified society, money often does mean security.Â
But I also think it’s worth calling attention to the ways that class conditioning, privilege, capitalism, and other factors influence how we view “security” and what we believe is necessary for security – as well as what we think is a reasonable personal response to the gross inequality and oppression that gives wealthy (and white) people certain kinds of security at the expense of poor people of color.
I would like to argue for an alternate interpretation of, for example, making the choice to give away all inherited wealth. (Obviously this means different things for different people, but I’m particularly addressing white people in the U.S) Rather than seeing such a move as a symptom of guilt, an attempt to disassociate from privilege, or problematic “downward mobility,” I’d like to make a pitch for it as a step in the direction of alliance with the majority of the world, to whom any financial safety net is totally unavailable – and an acknowledgement of the fact that in the zero-sum game of our capitalist economy, rich people are able to accumulate wealth because other people are poor.
I want to avoid placing inordinate emphasis on the personal, individual choices we make about how to deal with privilege in our own lives – I think that type of micro-focus can become self-serving, and detract from potential to do broader movement building. But I do think our personal choices are worth looking squarely at because of the relationship they have to the way we live our politics. Although I share a lot of the criticisms of the Weather Underground, I was inspired by reading about the commitment of a small group of privileged folks putting everything on the line to fight for justice. Although I doubt many U.S. activists today would identify with the feeling (that imperialism was in its last throes and revolution was imminent) that drove a lot of Weather’s urgency, I think there are important lessons to be learned from that type of uncompromising commitment to social change and the roles that privileged folks can play in bringing it about.
Ranting doesn’t always help
I keep meaning to write about Making Money Make Change, which I’ve been massively processing since I returned from the Bay Area. There are a million things to say about this conference, and I’ve written a little about it here. One of our Enough correspondents who was in attendance is compiling notes from MMMC for us to post, so look for a more detailed description soon. But meanwhile, I wanted to share a little piece of what I’ve been thinking about.