Thoughts on Healing America As Black Owners of a Wellness Studio

This article was originally written in June 2020 as an email to Align Brooklyn studio members. We are still hoping for collective healing, the transformation of our society and true wellbeing for all.

As a Black owned business, we represent only 2% of the businesses in NYC, although Blacks represent 22% of the population. Of the 2% of Black owned businesses only 3% employ workers. We understand that we speak from a special and privileged position. This has weighed heavily on us over the last few weeks.

We live in a country where 1 out of every 1000 Black men will be murdered by the police. Will the next protest banner read with one of our nephew’s names?

Sadly, the murder of George Floyd will not be the last murder of this kind — no matter how many well-meaning people march and carry signs. The policing practices in this country simply cannot change without deep structural change.

The sad truth is that Black Americans are economically worse off than we were in 1968. At the end of the civil rights movement we held 9.4% of the wealth of whites, and today it is just 8.7%. The median household wealth for white Americans is 149K versus 13K for Blacks. When we were in school in the 1990s, the wealth divide was around 12 to 1, but today it is more than 21 to 1. For whites with advanced degrees the median wealth is 600K, versus 100K for Blacks. We have three advanced degrees between the two of us, yet we are well below the median. A middle class Black family works an additional 3 months out of the year, compared with a middle class white family. But no matter how hard we work, the playing field is so slanted that we cannot catch up.

The profound sense of sadness we have over our failure and the failure of our generation to make substantial progress cannot be overstated. Our fathers were born in the 1920s and were underestimated in every aspect of their lives. They could have been George Floyd. They could have been Michael Brown or Trayvon. Our fathers had the same dreams as any other men: to leave an economic legacy of security for their children. Yet due to policies like redlining and practices like restrictive covenants, they could only watch as their white counterparts built intergenerational wealth and ease for their families. Like all Black men and women, our fathers had a “knee on their necks.”

The civil rights movement gave generations of Black Americans a dream. But the numbers show us that in spite of enormous cultural change, that dream has not been realized.

The health crisis we are currently facing has highlighted the divide. Whereas only 12% of Americans are Black, 22% of all the Covid-19 related deaths in this country have been African Americans. And although we have been told that obesity is a factor, there is only a 7% higher obesity rate in Blacks than whites. Every one of the diseases that Blacks suffer in higher rates are diseases of stress and trauma. What we are seeing is that the actual disease Blacks are suffering from is racism.

The truth is that Black Lives Don’t Matter. Black Health Does Not Matter. Black Dreams Do Not Matter.

Even prior to the murder of George Floyd, we were acutely aware of the structural racism we would face in attempting to reopen Align Brooklyn. But now the unique circumstances we face have been laid bare.

The CARES Act was inadequate to serve the specific needs of the small number of Black business owners in this city. Many of our businesses have been completely shuttered for months and will not be fully operational for many more months to come. The Paycheck Protection Program was designed to cover only payroll costs for 2.5 months. Owner income was excluded. 95% of Black owned businesses did not receive any PPP funds. And the main business sustaining loan, the Economic Injury Disaster Loan, is essentially a traditional SBA loan. Only 3% of taxpayer backed SBA loans are offered to Black businesses. This is likely because they rely on assets, collateral and credit — all measurements of underlying wealth. As a result, 41% of Black owned businesses have already permanently closed with many more expected to follow.

Align Brooklyn is in the top 20% of similar yoga, fitness and wellness studios in this country. Prior to the pandemic, we were a profitable business, which is unlike the many “hobby” businesses that make up a large part of our industry. Yet, because the loan standards are based on wealth and not success, we are not able to access these resources. This is yet another example of how the system is set up to maintain the racial divide. We can feel the ”knee on our necks.”

And in fact only .0006% (you read it right) of Black female owned businesses receive the benefit of investment funds that allow many businesses to grow.

We have seen so many statements from other businesses offering charity and stating that they will change their practices. Yet, Align Brooklyn has always had an exceptional and racially diverse staff. We have consistently given to charities that impact Blacks and people of color including Yoga Foster and the Women’s Prison Association. We have offered social justice trainings to our staff and our instructor training includes a set of principles to ensure the inclusivity of our space. Align Brooklyn has been a part of and supported the work of transforming our society by offering our space and community for the early development of the highly regarded Holistic Social Change transformational workshops.

We have always done this knowing the truth that the deep roots of the racial divide cannot be solved through charity. Charity is based on the idea that the more privileged give to benefit those less fortunate. This is not a bad thing, but at this point in our struggle for racial justice what we need is solidarity. Solidarity is rooted in the profound realization that we all lose by maintaining the interlocking systems that produce racial disparity — and that we need to dismantle these systems together.

So often the damage white people suffer from racism can be abstract. But in this case all of our extended Align Brooklyn family will be impacted, if we are unable to reopen the space so many in our community hold dear due to this country’s unrelenting history of Black oppression. Solidarity offers a path for non-Black people to deepen their understanding of how racism harms them too.

Although we still do hope to reopen the studio with each day this possibility fades a little more. The thought of losing our investment in our business and community due to the structural racism inherent in the manner in which emergency resources are being distributed is a profound thing to behold.

As so many studios like ours, we have set up an On Demand site and live stream classes in hope of continuing to generate revenue during this critical time. Over the upcoming weeks, we will be launching Align On Demand 2.0. We will save the details for future communications. Our hope is that we can generate the revenue we need to sustain the studio until the end of the pandemic through subscriptions to this site.

The beauty of the Align Brooklyn community has always been its openness, warmth and welcoming love shared with all. We have always believed that wellness is not just about what you eat or the exercise you do; true wellness is held in the relationships we have with each other. Our wish for our collective future is that we can eventually come together to build a new world based on shared wellness.

The Metastasis of Economic Hate

The official version of this article is published in the Fall 2013 edition of South Atlantic Quarterly here. I am posting a longer, but looser draft below, as there were some interesting points I had to cut out... Please reference published article for citations.

Years after Thomas Jefferson’s famous words "all men are created equal" began to ring as a call to conscience, he himself must have felt every bit of their hollowness. Polish Revolutionary War hero Thaddeus Kosciuszko bequeathed Jefferson enough money to free his slaves, as well as to set them off with land and farming equipment of their own, but Jefferson refused this gift.  Instead, he died with a debt hanging over Monticello – a kind of debt that he was the first to incur through monetizing his slaves for use as collateral for the loan to build his estate (Weincek 2012: 96). The slave families, who resided on Jefferson’s estate as intact families, were separated and sold to pay the outstanding debt such that the estate could be passed down to its rightful heir.  In spite of words we have no reason not to believe were heartfelt, and in spite of fathering six black children, Jefferson was not able to rise to the call of his words in the end, leaving as mixed a legacy as the American history that has followed. And in spite of generations of black descendants, no reparation has ever been paid to them; they remain a forgotten part of this legacy. As the story is most commonly told, there is only mention made to a legitimate debt paid with the bodies, blood and breath of Jefferson slaves, but no mention of any owing to them. Unfortunately, this telling of Jefferson’s story not only exposes the power dynamics of the past, but also discloses a fundamental understanding of the world that continues to rear its ugly head today.

During Jefferson’s life, Wall Street was already expanding on and experimenting with the monetization of human life through debt. In 1804, well before the battle for abolition was won here in America, but only after a bloody 13-year struggle, Haitian slaves liberated themselves by successfully defeating Napoleon.  President Jefferson was the first to refuse to recognize their independence from France. As a result, over twenty years later, the French reminded the Haitians that they, themselves, constituted a debt. The Haitians did the only thing they could to retain their physical freedom and borrowed the equivalent of $150 million dollars (almost double the cost of Louisiana) from Wall Street to pay “reparations” to the French. Of course, this original predatory debt reaped enormous rewards and in the end they paid the equivalent of $20 billion dollars for their freedom – something that never should have been for sale. And all the way up until 1947, 80% of Haiti’s economy went to pay off this debt to National City Bank – known today as Citibank. Of course, the price of freedom was unrelenting poverty, the permanent loss of opportunity to develop infrastructure, and the seemingly never-ending suffering in enslavement of another form.

Yet, when we talk about debt, mostly we talk about it as a thing - as the kind of thing that hangs from the body like a ball and chain or from our necks like an albatross. We talk a lot about how debt makes us feel:  atomized, isolated, alone. But, we don’t often talk about how the neoliberal construct of perpetual indebtedness to non-human financial entities has created a populous so focused on debts “owed” to Wall Street that we have no collective memory of any other kinds of debts. But, once we open Pandora’s box to take a look at the intersections of debt and race, we are forced to ask ourselves how it is that we have forgotten so much. Could it be that the alongside the rise of the neoliberal social order characterized by the isolation of the invisible chains of debt, a parallel practice of “colorblindness” arose that produces the invisibility of race? And if Malcolm X was correct that we “cannot have capitalism without racism,” we have to ask ourselves whether racism has really declined with colorblindness, or whether colorblindness might be neoliberalism’s corollary. It has been under a gray monotone cloud that a predatory debt system has been advanced, one that striped African-Americans of all economic gains subsequent to Civil Rights, and that spread throughout the rest of the economy, impacting generations to come.

There’s plenty of evidence of racism in spite of all the talk about post-racial America. Still, it comes as a big surprise that while we have been declaring race dead, structural racism has clearly increased.  In fact 50 years after Civil Rights, 150 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, and during the first black presidency, white Americans currently hold at least 19 times the wealth of African-Americans (Kochhar 2010: 3).  Put into perspective, in 1984 the ratio was 12 to 1, dipping to 7 to 1 in 1995, jumping to an astonishing 19 to 1 in 2009, and is probably even greater now. In practical terms this means that the average middle income black family has less wealth than the average white family with earnings below the poverty line (Shapiro 2004: 7). According to a 2010 Brandeis University study, in the last 23 years, the racial wealth gap increased by 75K from 20K to 95K (Shapiro 2010: 2). Even within the highest income African Americans, wealth has fallen from 25K to 18K, whereas the wealth of whites in a similar class surged to 240K (Shapiro 2010: 2). White families saw a dramatic growth of financial assets excluding home value from 22K to 100K, while African Americans saw very little increase at all (Shapiro 2010: 1). Because family wealth is the biggest predictor of personal wealth, and wealth is used to pay for education, this gap assures racial inequality for at least the next generation. Already 81% of African American students are graduating from college an average of 29K in the hole (Johnson, 2012: 21). And already the average middle income African American worker would have to spend an additional twelve weeks per year working to earn the same amount as a white worker (Shapiro 2004: 7). As a result, between 1984 and 2007 African Americans actually doubled their debt burden as measured by assets against liabilities. At the rate blacks have been falling behind since the mid 90s, black and white median wealth will never ever reach parity, and unless something is done, these paths will continue to diverge.

Yet, 61% of white Americans believe that blacks have already achieved equality, and an additional 22% believe that racial equality will be reached “soon” (Richomme, 2012: 8). In other words, 83% of whites believe that we are living in a post racial era. Only 17% of blacks believe that equality has been reached. If we understand the neoliberal debt system as increasing inequality by moving financial resources toward the top, this process would be visible if it were not for the invisibility of race and the ideologies of colorblindness that accomplish that invisibility. Bonilla-Silva proposes four central frameworks that colorblindness operates through: abstract liberalism, naturalization, cultural racism and minimization of racism. Vaguely liberal ideals of freedom manifest as the belief that opportunities should be equal, but not intentionally expanded, tying right into the idea that things are just the way they are. The “it is what it is” approach lends to beliefs that poverty is cultural, and if people changed their habits they would advance. And, of course, this goes hand in hand with the idea that blacks do not experience discrimination, a belief with which 83% of whites agree. According to Bonilla-Silva “together these frames form an impregnable yet elastic wall that barricades whites from the United States’ racial reality (Bonilla-Silva, 2010: 47).”

These frames are drawn upon synergistically and effortlessly such that it makes sense that inequalities exist, and that it also makes sense that nothing proactive can or should be done about it. Part of the way that these beliefs work effectively together is that they inhabit the invisible space that debt creates between us, presenting us as if we are not only disconnected from each other but from time, and thus history. As indebtedness to financial powers requires of us constant foresight, a constant seeking of a future beyond debt, we lose sight of the past. Colorblindness serves the invisible debt economy like a key in a lock. By rendering the debts that have created the structures of inequality invisible, we reinforce the social dynamics of neoliberalism’s formulation of debt. And while the dominant belief is that the debts we owe are generic and disconnected from the past, colorblind practices amount to a willful denial and lack of concern with the reality of worsening racial inequality. Worse yet, by assuming that the playing field is truly even, colorblindness tends toward blaming the victim. After all, if it were not simply inherent deficit, why else would blacks be lagging so far behind?

These ways of seeing manifest as increasing indebtedness and a predatory debt based economy for all, as wealth-extracting products are first tested on and then expanded out from black and other communities of color. When it comes to credit cards and real estate, we can see how these frames led to a domino effect to the detriment of not only blacks, but to white Americans as well. Beginning in the 1980s household debt began to rise significantly, increasing every single year from 1982 to 2007 with total household debt hitting 13.9 trillion in 2008 (Ruben 2009:1).  From 1989 to 2001 credit card debt literally tripled for the average American family who experienced a 53% increase in debt load (Draut 2003: 9). And since 2000 families began to increase debt at a pace four times faster than in the 1990s (Weller 2007: 54). But what is more shocking than this enormous increase is that lower income families had a 184% increase in debt (Draut 2003: 21). While debt levels have increased fastest for middle income families, low to moderate income families suffer more. As of 2004, 46% of very low income families earning less than 10K per year spent more than 40% of their income to pay off their debt (Ruben 2009: 9). Much of this increase in debt can be traced to the 1978 Marquette vs. First Omaha Service Corp Supreme Court case that had the practical effect of ending laws prohibiting usury. By allowing states to regulate interest rates and credit card issuers to set interest rates by the home state of their corporate operation, banks were able to avoid state caps on interest rates. As a result, banks were able to market high interest, high fee predatory credit products targeting lower and moderate income people who could not obtain credit easily before. Since over 25% of African Americans live below the poverty line, and since African Americans earn on average 62% of white Americans, blacks were disproportionately impacted by these predatory tactics. And because of the structural inequalities that have manifested as long term credit famine in communities of color, these products were viewed as lifelines. But these predatory products expanded rapidly. Credit card companies tested new ways to make greater profits through strategies like resetting interest rates due to missed payments and charging exorbitant late fees, and began to include these terms with less risky products.

Because the predominant underlying colorblind assumptions have been that a culture of financial illiteracy or class based lower credit rating, these products were allowed to take hold in ways they would not have been allowed to had racism been considered a possibility. A study conducted by Ethan Cohen-Cole of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston demonstrates that racial bias is a factor in the amount of credit offered even when other possible factors are eliminated. The study shows that the same individual in an 80% white area would receive about $7000 more dollars in credit than an individual living in an 80% black area (Cohen-Cole 2009: 14). And a 1% increase in the percentage of blacks in an area corresponds to a $117 dollar reduction in credit (Cohen-Cole 2009: 14).  Further, even high quality credit individuals receive less credit if they simply live near a payday lender. Because available credit corresponds to credit score, the reduction of available credit automatically means that credit scores are stratified racially. Therefore, it’s typical for African-American borrowers with equal credentials to have a lower credit scores simple by virtue of where they live. This impacts both the available credit products, insurance rates and also may impact employment, as 60% of employers now use credit score in hiring decisions. Of course, this also means that predatory credit products like payday and auto title loans are frequently the only available products for even higher quality borrowers. In essence, this is a combination strategy of first redlining to offer less credit and then reverse redlining to offer subprime and high risk products. Because colorblindness normalizes racial disparity as related to class or culture, and minimizes the possibility of racism, a cloak of invisibility hides the reality of the economic hate crime being committed. Rather than being polite and innocuous, colorblindness is really a dangerous new form of racism that grants neoliberalism’s wealth moving tactics momentum and power.

Of course, predatory creditors did not stop with credit cards. Between 1993 and 2000 mortgage companies specializing in subprime loans increased their share of mortgage originations from 1 percent to 13 percent. By 2001, prime loans were only 71% of refinance loans for blacks with income over 120% of their area median in predominantly black neighborhoods, whereas 83% of loans were prime for lower income white borrowers living in lower income white neighborhoods (Apgar 2005: 2). So, after communities became predominantly black through white flight, blockbusting and steering, and after starving communities of credit by which a racially stratified credit scoring system developed, banks then targeted previously redlined communities with predatory subprime loans. The targeting process included attracting black ministers to influence their parishioners with kickbacks, informing high credit score customers that they would be better off putting no money down, pushing through stated income paperwork although a W-2 was available, and saturating whole communities with mortgage brokers trained to target them with bad deals that generated the highest brokerage fees. By targeting communities of color with loans that were designed to fail, banks had discovered a new way of depleting financial resources from these communities. The President of the National Black Chamber of Commerce sites subprime as the largest hate crime in history and reports that it will take two generations for African-Americans to recover the lost wealth. Subprime represented an enormous change in the mortgage market with originations increasing from $35 billion in 1994 to $332 billion in 2003 (Apgar 2005: 8). A key aspect of this growth was that it was not only about nabbing first time borrowers, who may have qualified for prime loans, but also about preying on homeowners looking to improve their properties or withdraw equity from their homes by refinancing.

Much of the conversation around subprime lending has weighed whether race was really a factor, or whether it was just a culture of financial illiteracy related to socioeconomic class. In New York City only 24% of white borrowers earning 125-150K took out subprime compared to 52% of Hispanics and 63% of blacks. And for those earning even more the numbers really start to tell the story:  in the 150-250K income bracket, only 20% of whites, but 50% of Hispanic and 62% blacks took out subprime mortgages. In order to believe that race was not a factor in how these loans spread, ironically, one would have to believe that race was a factor in financial literacy. However, according to the Cohen-Cole study, there is simply no evidence that greater financial knowledge was a factor (Cohen-Cole 2009: 17). In other words, colorblindness just hides the bias lurking in its shadow, and in doing so, the only appropriate way of rectifying the impact of fraudulent lending practices on racial inequality is rejected. As early as 2003, an article in the Toledo Law Review looked to categorize the lending practices that led to this catastrophe as an “economic hate crime.” The paper argues that “racialized predatory lending” is a “distinct variety of abusive lending that is significantly different from other non-racialized financial exploitation (Hunt 2003: 2).” Furthermore, the “significance of this difference lies in the deep historical stain of racial subordination in America and the contemporary legacy of that history in creating and perpetuating both institutional and cognitive racialized barriers to accessing capital, credit and property (Hunt 2003: 2-3).” The paper argues that the legal tools to combat this particular form of predatory lending are not up to the job, because they dehistoricize the problem and consequences of “equity theft,” and simultaneously eradicate race as a consideration in contemporary lending practices. Unfortunately, the future looking cognitive status of the debtor society in combination with colorblindness makes a Janus-based approach impossible.

As a result, this hate crime spread rapidly with 58.5% of blacks receiving high cost loans, versus 15.9% white and 45.5% Hispanics according to the Department of Housing Preservation and Development (Fernandez 2007: 4). Unlike white Americans who benefited from housing expansion programs such as the New Deal and Veterans Administration Loans, African Americans had only begun to enter the housing market, as a result many of the early mortgages were just coming to term. Since a home is commonly viewed as a primary asset, blacks did not have many other assets. So, when housing losses are excluded, black and Hispanic families would have only suffered losses of $626 and $479 respectively during the crisis (Kochhar 2011: 15). Furthermore, if predatory home loans had been distributed equitably, whites would have sustained 45% greater losses, and blacks would have sustained 24% fewer loses (Rivera 2008:17). This is where the colorblind, level playing field myth really goes awry. In spite of pre-existing disparity, changes in tax policy that promoted wealth for those who needed it least, the stagnation of income that halted generational improvement, African Americans were striving and making economic progress until predatory housing debt wiped it all out. Predatory racist lending patterns literally stripped future generations of black Americans of inherited wealth. The combination of privilege and bias resulted in a disaster for African Americans, who are now locked in an economic bind that produces the need for more and more debt. But, in the end, the rapid depreciation of housing nationally due to predatory equity theft tactics impacted white Americans in far greater numbers. If it were not for a commitment to colorblindness, the debt practices that fueled the 2008 financial crisis could never have taken hold.  Legal remedies could have been sought that prevented and restored stolen equity, and banks would simply not have been able to expand their practices.  Colorblind ideologies naturalized racial inequality, allowed the process of predatory lending to be understood as class based, and made it acceptable to turn a blind eye to the economic attack on communities of color, while neoliberalism’s debt economy prospered.

The reparations movement ended in September of 2001, only days before 9/11.  By the end of the United Nations’ World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance in Durban, South Africa in 2001, the word “reparation” had been removed from the final declaration, and it had been decided that transatlantic slavery could not be referred to as a “crime against humanity.” This was the exchange that had to be made for European support of the New African Initiative plan, a primary pillar of which was debt relief. The same capitalist powers that determined the laws that allowed their nations prosper from slavery were the ones to determine the language of the 2001 declaration, language that closed the door on claims for reparations. Yet, when we talk about debt as a focal point for a political movement, it seems impossible to exclude a history that is at the root of current debt practices, and that has led to a global system of exploitation that undergirds strategies for shifting economic resources to the financial elite. As a debt resistance movement grows internationally, it will need to look at debt not just from the neoliberal perspective of debts we owe financial entities, but to broaden that perspective to a more historical analysis of how current inequalities are fueled by debts of other kinds. Without a critique of the intersections of race and debt, it seems unlikely that the solidarity needed for a global political movement could develop. And this is where, if colorblindness is neoliberalism’s corollary, it will have to be challenged with a demand to see.  Only after the cracks where debt hides are illuminated, will we be able to see what truly radical demands might be.

When Theory Meets Heart: The Rolling Jubilee and Lessons of Occupying Debt

Time can change pace quickly. Occupy Wall Street mobilized in a matter of weeks and demobilized over the course of nearly two years. In the summer of 2012, in the moment that an “after Occupy” finally had to be thought, a group of us formed Strike Debt, as an attempt to salvage what was left. And in the fall of 2012, still carried by the wave of momentum, we launched the Rolling Jubilee.[1] And now, about a year and a half later, we are left with the lessons. And in many ways, the Rolling Jubilee holds some of the most important lessons of Occupy—both good and bad.

The Rolling Jubilee sought to crowd-fund $50,000 to buy $1 million of defaulted debt on the secondary market and forgive it—as a political act of “striking debt.”[2] For many of us involved in Occupy’s rise and fall, the struggle against inequality, precariousness, and monetization had become the struggle against debt—as neoliberal capitalism’s hallmark and as our only real source of economic power. But in November 2012, there was no way anyone could have ever predicted the spark the Rolling Jubilee campaign touched off. Even now it is hard to believe that in the midst of major corporate-backed charity drives to alleviate the devastation of Hurricane Sandy, our small little project, organized by about ten people, captured national attention and raised half a million dollars in the blink of an eye.

How We Got Here, There, and Why

The Rolling Jubilee’s roots were in the Occupy Student Debt Campaign. And in many ways the Rolling Jubilee was the result of what we learned from those mistakes. When Occupy started, student debt was already on the table; but a group of us proposed something different. Whereas campaigns that were not a part of the Occupy working-group structure proposed appealing for relief to various levels of government, we proposed refusing to pay. Debts are representative of morality. Education is a right. Why should we pay an immoral debt? Rather than asking if it is moral not to pay, the better question, from my perspective at least, was is it moral to pay? Paying into the system perpetuates it. The only way to stop it is to stop.

We met diligently, and often for hours. We talked to each other about debt—often for the first time. Someone confessed to having accrued over $300,000 in student debt. Someone else shared that she put groceries on a credit card whenever she was too hungry to skip the meal; she had to pay off private student loans taken out only because she did not know to exhaust more lenient public options first. Others confessed to using credit cards to pay for medical expenses and even rent. Still others confessed to the fear and guilt of being “house poor.” Debt crossed generations and genders; educational, economic, and racial lines. At the end of the day, everyone had one thing in common: to pay for debt, the only choice was to go into more debt. Many of us were highly educated: theorists, artists, and media makers, credited with master’s degrees and doctorates. Yet we were all living in a vicious circle of debt with no end in sight.

Just as money is fungible, so is debt. We quickly discovered that the problem wasn’t really just student debt: it was our state of indebtedness. The morality of betting on and sacrificing the future for education or medical attention in the present was not just perverse—for us it was the hallmark of an immoral system. Could we really be held to promises that we were coerced to make? Wasn’t the problem, not about our bad promises, but rather about a bad system that exploits students to generate profits? And so we proposed a new form of solidarity—a solidarity of the indebted—a solidarity that could organically cross all lines of the 99 percent, a solidarity that could throw a wrench into the system at a critical juncture in the production of inequality.[3]

In The Bonds of Debt, Richard Dienst puts it this way:

[I]t is clear that a politics of the crisis that seeks to construct solidarity out of indebtedness will look very different from reforms that invoke the principles of equality and freedom alone.… Only a politics of the indebted can carry through the transformative possibilities of the crisis, locating sources of solidarity in the midst of the terrible collective punishments inflicted by precipitous collapse and desperate restoration of the prevailing regime of indebtedness.[4]

And so in the fall of 2011, just a few days after we lost Zuccotti Park, we boldly proposed a “Pledge of Refusal.”[5] The pledge stated that public education should be free; that if student loans exist, they should be interest free; that since private colleges are funded through public debt, they should open their books so we know what we are paying for; and that the current student debt load should be written off. One million signatories would trigger a debt strike, in which student debtors refused to pay. Can’t pay, won’t pay!

Looking back, it’s hard to imagine our naïveté. One million student debtors hiding in the shadows would step forward—ready and willing to commit to refuse to pay their student loans—as long as 999,999 others did the same. To our credit, at least we understood the size of the problem. When we started there were already five million student debt defaulters; and a year later, there were six million. So why didn’t they sign our pledge?

We knew from the start that there were problems with our plan. For one thing, we didn’t really want student debtors to have to strike—at least not anytime soon. We also understood the reality that even if a strike withheld $27 billion from the system, it would be a drop in the bucket in national economic terms.[6] And we even understood that withholding payment was ultimately an impossibility for student debtors due to the erosion of consumer protection laws, which uniquely allow student debt to follow one to the grave—and beyond if parents were cosigners. Although we optimistically believed that we would get one million signatories to our pledge eventually, we also knew that we would have to lay a lot of groundwork and construct a lot of safety nets so that strikers didn’t slip through the cracks and fall into even greater financial peril.

Alongside marketing problems that included a do-it-yourself, low-security website, as well as all the apprehension over how to propose the possibility of a strike without tipping our hand that we hoped we would never come to one, and alongside the factual reality that we were a small group with virtually no resources working in the aftermath of Occupy (though we did not realize that at the time), we faced the reality that debtors did not want to step forward; they were busy trying to hide. They did not want some digital trace of their existence on some list anywhere—many were even afraid to visit our website.

Nevertheless, student debt was about to cross the $1 trillion mark. We had to do something. And so we launched a national day of action, 1T Day. At least maybe if people knew the magnitude of the problem, they would find the courage to act—to collectivize and to refuse.[7]

In Declaration Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri write:

The will not to pay debts means not only seeking what we don’t have, what has been lost, but also and more importantly affirming and developing what we desire, what is better and more beautiful: the sociality and fullness of social relationships. The refusal of debt, therefore, does not mean breaking social ties and legal relationships to create an empty, individualized, fragmented terrain. We flee those bonds and those debts in order to give new meaning to the terms bond and debt, and to discover new social relationships.[8]

But as we tried to apply theory to our actions, we could not quite figure out how to get people to see the other side—the beauty and bonds that would come about from the collective will not to pay. And, in the end, more than a year later, only about four thousand debtors ever signed the pledge.

As it turned out, most people do not question the morality of our construction of debt ­generally—even if they find their personal debt unfair in one way or another. Most often people accept the creditor’s framing of debt as a way of life and do not question how or why debt, itself, became a necessity. Even when they find their debt somewhat unfair and maybe even somewhat arbitrary, they do not point the finger at their creditor or creditors in general—much less the system of credit itself. Rather, they pass the moral judgment of the creditor on to themselves and hold themselves accountable emotionally even when they cannot be accountable financially. They do not ask whether it is “moral to pay,” but rather, they live inside the bubble of their ­promises—morality or immorality matters less than continuing onward on the treadmill toward an ever more distant horizon of freedom.

The emotional state of disconnectedness that this leads to has been well theorized. In The Making of the Indebted Man, Maurizio Lazzarato explains that “the force of capitalism lies in its ability to link ‘economics’ (and communication, consumption, the Welfare State, etc.) and the production of subjectivity in different ways.”[9] Furthermore, this interweaving of the economic realm with our deep perceptions of our identity necessarily leads to particular kinds of ethics. Debt “exploits the ethical action constitutive of the individual and the community by mobilizing forces that are at the basis of ‘man’s moral existence, man’s social existence.’”[10] For Lazzarato this ability to mobilize our inner lives is the power of capitalism: “capitalism’s force is not only negative; it lies in its ability to redirect passions, desires, and action to its own advantage.”[11] As Lazzarato points out, “credit anticipates a future action whose results cannot be guaranteed in advance.”[12]

Authentic ethical existence for humans is interceded by capitalism’s arsenal of communicative, economic, political, and social forces. Not the least of these is the control debt exerts over our affective realm that ties us to others intuitively. We feel solidarity. Inside the precariousness of leveraged, uncertain futures, debt directs our “passions, desires and action” toward repayment—and not to present connections with others.[13]

But how to get people to see this? How to get people to actively break old solidarities and form new ones? How to get people to redirect their affective realms? Despite our failures, we doggedly continued to stumble forward, imagining and reimagining a world of authenticity—a world of liberation—now not only from our personal debt but from debt itself.

Strike Debt, Crack Capitalism—Let’s Just Break It Somehow, Anyhow … Maybe Someday

Through a variety of twists and turns that included the raised awareness within Occupy about the student debt campaign that 1T Day accomplished, the perceived failure of May Day to turn into anything other than a feel-good day of action, and a fortuitous scheduling conflict, the Occupy Student Debt Campaign moved into a loose coalition with Occupy Theory and Free University.[14] The Education and Debt Assembly series we launched quickly became Strike Debt.[15]

We knew that the Occupy Student Debt Campaign’s Pledge of Refusal had failed in part because, despite the enormity of the $1 trillion figure, student debtors actually possessed little real economic power. Moral hazard arguments made by bank lobbyists had persuaded politicians to erode virtually all consumer protections, including even bankruptcy for private loans.[16] Could a symbolic stand really make a difference? Not likely. The power of the student debtor could be found only in a collective solidarity for all types of debtors. From credit cards to payday loans to car loans to mortgages to medical debt, rather than see each form of debt separately, we all would need to come together in order to really refuse. But how to demonstrate that to the average debtor?

An idea for a “debt fairy” that would wipe out student debt with the wave of a magic wand had been raised on the Occupy Student Debt Campaign listserv. The concept of buying debt on the secondary market and writing it off had apparently been floating around chat lists for some time.[17] But because there is no secondary market for student debt, the idea seemed better suited to more readily available forms of debt.

Medical debt seemed like the most obvious place to start—after all, why on earth is defaulted medical debt being sold on a secondary market to predators who profit from collecting debts that have already been written off by buying them for pennies and harassing debtors until they pay dollars? And can someone really be accountable for choosing life when asked to pick between death and debt? The injustice of medical debt would surely be understood by the masses.

The goals of the project were complicated. We wanted to take a swipe at the debt system and expose its cracks and places of moral vulnerability. We wanted to follow John Holloway’s prompt and “crack capitalism” by making a rupture, exposing reality as a bubble, daring to peer outside the box. Inside that crevasse we might find each other’s most dignified selves. It would be in the performance of saying “no” that we might simultaneously create the new world, new selves, and a new politics.[18]

Cracking the hard shell of indebtedness, orchestrating a political kind of coming out, helping people hold each other’s hands as they step out into the spotlight—all seemed to have the potential to build a form of solidarity that had the potential to change how people understood themselves in relation to their debt and, just as importantly, to change how people understood others in relation to themselves. Giving money to the needy is pretty much always understood in the context of charity. Creating a platform whereby people could help each other seemed to demand a kind of politics that—even if accidental—could have real impact.

Exposing the arbitrary and pointless nature of the medical debt system seemed like a way to break people out of their everyday experience and shake them awake. But would the public come to see debt generally as a part of a whole? Would they see medical debt as an entry point to understanding a deepening crisis or an exit—a market-driven flaw in an otherwise-moral system? After medical debt the Jubilee would roll on to other forms of debt. From payday loans and credit cards to mortgages and car loans, we would connect the various forms of debt, display the system, and challenge the moral framing of debt.

The act of buying defaulted debt also had its own tensions and contradictions. Paying off this sort of debt is very different from refusal. Instead of withholding money from an unjust system, we would be moving money from debtors to debt collectors, who are not even original creditors and profiteer in the most predatory of ways from people’s suffering. Once debt becomes available for pennies on the dollar, it has already been written off by the original creditor. It is bought and sold purely on a market, and in some sense it is no longer owed. The debt collector—someone to whom no direct promise was made—commonly uses both legal and illegal means to convince the debtor to pay.[19] Further, depending on the age of a debt, payment may or may not impact a consumer’s credit report positively, negatively, or at all. So even though there was the appearance of charity, the benefit was mostly psychic relief from harassing collection practices.

The tension around the nature of legitimate promise—the lines of legitimacy—was not only external but also internal to the campaign. Those who leaned in favor of the charitable aspects of the campaign accepted the prevailing framing and understood the transference of promise to a secondary party as legitimate. Whereas those inclined toward the political aspects of the campaign rejected the creditor ideology and understood the secondary market as fundamentally illegitimate. For some, the direct action was striking a weak link to expose it with the hope of dismantling it. For others it was about offering mutual aid and letting people know that they are not “aloan.” And so as we stumbled forward we tripped over something that could be understood simultaneously as both direct action and also mutual aid. It was inside the lack of clarity, the nebulous nature of this problem, that we found resonance. Albeit briefly.

The blurry lines of what was really mutual aid or charity or solidarity or political action sparked online public debate: Could people really do this? Was it legal? Would there be tax consequences? What did it mean? As people—regular people—heard about the Jubilee, they understood it through the prisms of their own daily and often painful experiences. A single mother donated a dollar with a note saying that she was deeply in debt and didn’t realize she was not alone; she just wanted to feel a part of the Rolling Jubilee community. And she was not alone—there were hundreds of others just like her, donating an average of $40 at a time.

Mutual aid had become the direct action of alleviating debt ourselves rather than asking for forgiveness from the state. And direct action had become mutual aid, as the act of striking debt meant helping others to help themselves by helping others. It was a translation of the key lessons of Zuccotti Park—and the same formula of Occupy Sandy. It came to be called MADA—mutual aid as direct action.[20] The activity was helping others, but the narrative was political.

But What Would It Really Mean to Occupy Debt?

There are always contradictions. Although debt is one coherent whole when stretched over the entire capitalist system, it plays out very differently across that system. Going beyond the stunt would mean creating an organizing form that could manage old solidarities toward a new solidarity of indebtedness.

Much of the theorizing about debt is rooted in a long history of European philosophical discourse: Marx, Nietzsche, Deleuze, Foucault. The theories that we drew on came alive momentarily when they met the compassion of human hearts. But the theories of debt abandoned us at the place where debt and capitalism touch down in the real world of daily existence. And this is where the beautiful resonance of MADA gave way to our lack of analytical depth.

Yes, debt is about class. But in developing a dominant analysis that chose to elide the bumps and ripples, class quickly became a proxy for race—for white interests and white affects; the default is always white. And so our new solidarity of indebtedness seemed very much like the old familiar ones. Material conditions brought us together as the indebted briefly, but the bonds of debt were no match for the bonds of race. The racial manifestations of debt were as obvious to some as they were denied by others. These racial tensions manifested in conflict over where the Jubilee should do its work, how, and with whom. The solidarity of indebtedness that the Jubilee seemed to bring about was found only in the brief moment of rupture. Soon after, that crack in capitalism healed itself with thick scars.

Capitalism is fundamentally about hierarchy, and debt is ultimately about power—who has the power to lend, who is powerless and must owe. Debt manifests as a chameleon—secretly exploiting the poor as public debt paid through public transit systems that the racialized poor use to travel from outskirts to centers and back again, swiftly changing color as predatory mortgages first manifest as economic opportunity and then turn into the nightmare of mass foreclosures.

Debt may be broad, but life is specific. In its specificity debt has manifested along with increasing racial inequality both nationally and globally. From Africa to Detroit debt has been used to strip resources and clear land.[21] For African Americans debt has produced the indignity of equity theft and foreclosure, an economic hate crime that has resulted in the loss of all economic gains subsequent to civil rights, a crime that happened in slow motion, while those with greater power used that power to turn a blind eye.[22]

And there is a history to debt. Power dynamics are manifest in how we frame that history and in who gets to tell the story. The creditor class always emphasizes the now. But, here, in the United States, the recent history of increasing personal debt could reasonably begin with the 1934 Housing Act, which set into motion the development of the white middle class via government policies that constructed the meaning of community as bound by a racial wall. Government policy circumscribed communities by creating economic barriers to who could and who could not get the credit to access the American Dream.

With this temporal framing it is pretty easy to see how redlining, blockbusting, and steering, which were only delegitimized by the Fair Housing Act of 1968, are at the root of the uneven terrain of American capitalism today. With a twenty-to-one white/black wealth gap this is difficult to deny.[23] Of course, we could also start much further back with the rupture of transatlantic slavery, for which a $2.1–$4.7 trillion debt was calculated as owed to African Americans as of 1983, and would be far more today.[24] There are many ways to frame debt, but the creditor class always emphasizes the now, dehistoricizing and abstracting.[25]

Starting an analysis subsequent to the civil rights movement covered up the racialization of debt and played right into the hands of the systemic forces we were fighting against. When the narrative of debt begins with the oft-cited neoliberal attack waged beginning in the seventies, important histories that have direct bearing on today’s inequalities are rendered invisible and forgotten.

Unspoken differences in understandings of the narrative of debt quickly began to pull the Rolling Jubilee apart from within. These differences played out through conflict over whether it would be beneficial to associate Strike Debt with the Martin Luther King Jr. national holiday or to draw attention to the killing of a black teenager in East Flatbush, New York, a predominantly black neighborhood with some of the highest subprime and foreclosure rates in New York City.[26] These differences of opinion were racialized to the extent that some even shared their understanding of Strike Debt as a “white organization” publicly.

The consensus culture we unintentionally inherited from Occupy inevitably led to an ideological hegemony that—regardless of accuracy, historical knowledge, or even self-knowledge—held debt as the cause of an unfair economy rather than as part of broader social, political, and economic processes.[27] The fetishization of “groupthink” came without deep consideration for the obvious truth that many of history’s greatest atrocities were committed with broad social agreement analogous to consensus. This problem was obvious to a racialized minority, which insisted that a simplistic class analysis could not account for even the most obvious differences within classes and that to build a debtors movement solidarity would need to be built across racial lines.

Miranda Joseph highlights the theoretical roots of this problem in her review of David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years. When “the process that produces not only the radically unequal distributions of wealth and power between the 99% and the 1% but also the differences within the 99% on which the abstract circulation and calculation of capital, for the benefit of the 1%, also depends” is unaccounted for as generative, it leads to a false idealization of social relationships without debt.[28] The community relationships that preexisted debt were far from ideal, yet debt is conceived as destructive of natural bonds that would form other relationships. Fetishizing community as a moral place if only for debt whitewashes the history of racialized communities, in particular, and also makes light of the long history of oppression and domination.[29] This leads to a cultural understanding of community as conflict free, exacerbating the problem and making conflict impossible to resolve, since conflict in and of itself is a violation of the rules of community.

Insisting on a framing of the narrative of debt directly subsequent to civil rights also framed out a conflict-ridden alternate analysis of the growth of predatory debt as part of a reactionary response to the gains of civil rights. Just as the Housing Act of 1934 created a market for housing via Fannie Mae, the Education Act of 1965 created access to education through Sallie Mae. And just as Fannie Mae expanded the housing market and housing debt, Sallie Mae expanded the education market and education debt.

The expansion of access to Fannie Mae to African Americans and the creation of Sallie Mae cannot be seen outside the context of the civil rights movement. The African American demand for a seat at the table is commonly understood as a demand for access to mortgages and access to improved labor conditions through improved education. Housing and education are linked in the American ethos as part and parcel with the American Dream, and not surprisingly, they were the most prominent areas of economic crisis—and resistance. Yet the refusal to attempt to build solidarity across the racial lines dividing white student debtors with the privilege to occupy Zuccotti Park and foreclosed African Americans facing structural processes of accumulation by dispossession and gentrification led to the failure of the movement we hoped to generate.

Debt mediates our sense of time, creating a past that starts at the moment of becoming a debtor and that flows into a future that has been foreclosed. As a result, debt mediates the subtle communication that lets us know where we belong. Our understandings of debt place us into communities of memory with duration and tempo, in which our temporalities match, through which we share history, the pace of time, common memories, and understandings of who owes what to whom. We live via these communities of memory—states of debt and indebtedness, which register and account for our relationships through economics as ethics.

By framing debt in simplistic opposition to the hegemonic narrative of bankers, and yet in tandem with policies that frame memory around white interests, the Rolling Jubilee morphed into a racial project that revealed a vision of a future ultimately as oppressive as debt—at least for the racialized.[30] As Lazzarato points out, capitalism’s power is its productive “ability to redirect passions, desires, and action to its own advantage.”[31] This is capitalism’s dark brilliance, and its organic power.

And so we stumbled onto MADA but tripped and fell on the rocky terrain where so far theories of debt have not shed light. And so in the end capitalism wound through the ironically named Rolling Jubilee producing subjectivities that reproduced the same power dynamics and hierarchies we thought a politics of indebtedness would change. MADA may have been a powerful methodology for creating rupture, but resonance is not depth.

The Time on the Clock of the World

Seven hundred thousand dollars later, the Rolling Jubilee has not yet been able to roll beyond medical debt. Instead, ideas of jubilee and justice and economic realities and color-blind racism rolled over us as we learned firsthand the potency of capitalism’s ability to manage affects toward maintaining its system ideologically, socially, economically. What was designed as an event to strike and awake became an ongoing process. Rather than building an organized movement, the project lost any clear political path and became nothing more than a game-show-esque charity.

For many, this went unnoticed. The change in subjectivity of going from a negative-value debtor to a creditor offering salvation to unknown debtors was apprehended by many as taking back some part of a stolen future, at least. Further, strict adherence to a color-blind racial ideology led to the reproduction of common racial dynamics whereby the shared labor, creativity, and ingenuity placed into the commons was commandeered by those insisting that race was not a factor and in protective retaliation for the wrongs of raising the issue of race and demanding that the group confront white supremacist social dynamics.[32]

In drawing on a color-blind analysis that leads to the false belief that the system spreads itself evenly, the Rolling Jubilee was never able to grapple with the racial dimensions of debt. The racial divide cast a dark shadow and infested the project like a plague. As a result, the goal of the project—to spark a debtors movement—did not materialize, and the organizers who remain attached to the campaign do not appear to have struggled to understand why.

Still, the failures of the Occupy Student Debt Campaign, Strike Debt, and the Rolling Jubilee demand that we answer the question: if things are so bad and we’re all in so much debt, then why aren’t we able to build a debtors movement?

Perhaps, the only real way to strike debt is by breaking time. Debt isolates us from history and the continuity of time, generating its temporality by training our sense of foresight, focusing our attention toward an ever more elusive future. Part of the struggle against the temporality of debt must occur through the ways in which we renarrate our stories and the ways we choose to reframe our history. Rather than striking debt, if we want to build a debtors movement, we will need to refuse the creditors’ framing of history by struggling to remember a past before debt. We will need to reject the idea that the debt system started in the 1970s and to tell the story from at least the 1930s onward. This kind of retelling would allow us to break out of the ideological communities constructed in the differential between student loans and mortgages and payday loans. We could more readily understand the differences in how debt spreads as an economic manifestation of oppression—race being the most salient form but by no means the only one. Breaking the temporality of debt would allow us to come together in real space and real time as a collective and economically powerful force.

To do this we would have to read the time on the clock of the world correctly.[33] We would have to understand the rise of debt as part of a counterrevolution against the kind of society the civil rights movement envisioned.

Imagine: white student debtors feeling solidarity with black homeowners living in reverse-redlined neighborhoods by holding on to the realization that their educational privilege came directly out of a systemic process that carved the white middle class on the backs of the suffering of the black poor. Imagine: defeating hierarchical relationships from the inside—from within ourselves—rather than through a false and idealized consensus process that allows the worst inclinations to dominate. Imagine occupying the collective memories that render our histories distinct, and rewriting the narratives of indebtedness so that solidarity functions socially as reparation.[34]

And so many of us will continue to stumble forward, imagining and reimagining a world of authenticity and freedom—continuing to build from our mistakes. 

Pamela Brown is an activist, writer, and scholar living in New York City. She is a columnist for Tidal Magazine and on the national leadership team of the US Social Forum. Pam was a founding member of the Occupy Student Debt Campaign and Strike Debt. She has been involved in many campaigns and writing projects, including the student debt pledge of refusal, the Debt Resistors’ Operations Manual, the Rolling Jubilee, and “Shouldering the Costs.” She holds an undergraduate degree in philosophy from Dartmouth College and a master of arts in media studies from The New School and a master of arts in sociology from the The New School for Social Research.

1. The concept of jubilee is drawn from the Old Testament. Every fiftieth year slaves and prisoners would be freed, land would be returned to former owners, and debts would be forgiven.

2. The idea of “striking” debt was rooted in John Holloway’s concept of “cracking” capitalism. Initially, many wanted to call for a mass debt strike. Others believed that such a moment was far off. Rather than Debt Strike, we agreed that Strike Debt would leave the possibility of a debt strike open, yet reference it, while also allowing for other possibilities. See John Holloway, Crack Capitalism (London: Pluto Press, 2010).

3. Pamela Brown, “The Student Debt System: a Critical Juncture in the Production of Inequality,” http://pambrown15.wordpress.com/2011/11/30/the-student-debt-system-a-critical-juncture-in-the-production-of-inequality/ (accessed February 12, 2014).

4. Richard Dienst, The Bonds of Debt (London: Verso Books, 2011), 63–64.

5. Student Debtors’ Pledge of Refusal, http://www.occupystudentdebtcampaign.org/pledge-archive/ (accessed February 12, 2014).

6. The average student debt at the time was approximately $27,000. One million times twenty-seven thousand is twenty-seven billion.

7. “1T” stands for $1 trillion of student debt.

8. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Declaration (New York: Argo Navis Author Services, 2012), 33–34.

9. Maurizio Lazzarato, The Making of the Indebted Man: An Essay on the Neoliberal Condition, trans. Joshua David Jordan (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2012), 53.

10. Ibid., 66 (emphasis in the original).

11. Ibid., 68.

12. Ibid.

13. Ibid., 66.

14. Although the strong turnout for May Day enabled a march that was sixteen Manhattan city blocks long, the attempt to occupy 55 Water Street failed due to a militarized police force numbering at least as many as the protesters holding a General Assembly at 55 Water Street at the end of the day of action. See “Did May Day Save Occupy Wall Street?,” http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/05/02/did-may-day-save-occupy-wall-street.html (accessed February 13, 2014).

15. For more about how our thinking developed, see notes from the first meeting here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ukbEvbeC6Ex6X4IdoudR__XOabJwLrc3SK4lidZa1iI/edit (accessed February 12, 2014).

16. Chris Maisano, “The Soul of Student Debt,” https://www.jacobinmag.com/2012/12/the-soul-of-student-debt/ (accessed February 12, 2014).

17. The idea of buying debt on the secondary market and forgiving it was proposed by Micah White as early as 2009 on the Adbusters forum. See “Blackspot Debt Collection Agency,” https://www.adbusters.org/blogs/blackspot_blog/blackspot_debt_collection_agency.html (accessed February 12, 2014).

18. Holloway (Crack Capitalism) proposes “the method of the crack” as a way to create dignity.

19. Very few debt collectors are regulated by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Many use illegal tactics ranging from harassing phone calls to attempting to collect a debt beyond the statute of limitations. See “New Federal Rules for Debt Collectors,” http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/24/business/new-federal-rules-for-debt-collectors.html (accessed February 21, 2014).

20. The concept of “mutual aid as direct action,” or MADA, was first discussed on an Occupy Wall Street listserv in reference to Occupy Sandy.

21. Saskia Sassen, “A Savage Sorting of Winners and Losers: Contemporary Versions of Primitive Accumulation,” Globalizations 7, no. 1 (2010): 23–50.

22. Maxine Waters stated that blacks had lost all economic gains subsequent to the civil rights movement in her talk “Race and the Subprime Crisis: The Future of Minority Neighborhoods” on October 9, 2009, at The New School. For the concept of the “economic hate crime, see Moe Thacik, “Confessions of an Economic Hate Crime,” http://www.daskrap.com/2012/7/confessions-economic-hate-crime (accessed February 12, 2014); and Cecil J. Hunt II, “In the Racial Crosshairs: Reconsidering Racially Targeted Predatory Lending under a New Theory of Economic Hate Crime,” University of Toledo Law Review 35 (Winter 2003): 211.

23. The current wealth gap of twenty to one is up from seven to one in 1995. See Rakesh Kochhar, “Wealth Gaps Rise to Record Highs between Whites, Blacks, Hispanics: Twenty-to-One,” Pew Research Social and Demographic Trends, http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2011/07/26/wealth-gaps-rise-to-record-highs-between-whites-blacks-hispanics/ (accessed February 22, 2014).

24. Joe R. Feagin, “Documenting the Costs of Slavery, Segregation, and Contemporary Racism: Why Reparations Are in Order for African Americans,” Harvard BlackLetter Law Journal 20 (2004): 53.

25. As Andrew Ross points out in Creditocracy, we could also start with the turn toward industrialization. As of 2007, China was polluting the atmosphere with more carbon dioxide than any other country, yet over the period of industrialization, the United States polluted to the extent that we still owe China a climate credit of as much as $2.3 trillion. This may be “financially complex but morally simple.” Andrew Ross, Creditocracy and the Case for Debt Refusal (New York: OR Books, 2014), 182, 187.

26. “Foreclosures in New York City,” https://www.osc.state.ny.us/osdc/rpt13-2011.pdf (accessed March 20, 2014).

27. Strike Debt initially began with a steering committee of which approximately half were people of color. The Rolling Jubilee began as a closed work group with significant diversity.

28. Miranda Joseph, “Theorizing Debt for Social Change,” Ephemera: Theory and Politics in Organization 13, no. 3 (2013): 671.

29. Miranda Joseph, Debt to Society: Accounting for Life under Capitalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014).

30. Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s (New York: Routledge, 1994).

31. Lazzarato, Indebted Man, 68.

32. My contribution included proposing and planning 1T Day, bringing the Rolling Jubilee project to Strike Debt, writing much of the Debt Resistors’ Operations Manual, and initiating and writing most of “Shouldering the Costs: Who Pays in the Aftermath of Sandy?,” InterOccupy.net, December 4, 2012.

33. Legendary activist Grace Lee Boggs asks activists to consider the question “What time is it on the clock of the world?”

34. Pamela Brown, “Solidarity for Reparation,” Tidal Magazine 4 (2013): 10–11.