By Jo Lum

Here is what I know: Our world is sick. We are in a global pandemic of injustice.

Here’s what else I know: We need each other to survive.

After a precious week with my brilliant elders and contemporaries at the Integrated Capital Institute envisioning how we can use money as a tool to create an equitable home for everyone in our human family, I will get on an airplane from California and fly to Minnesota. I will wipe down what’s around me to disinfect everything in arms reach. I will close my eyes and try to pretend this is just like every other trip home. I will distance myself from others in the hope of keeping my community and myself healthy and strong. I will do what is necessary to survive.

Truly though, we have never all been healthy or strong in this country. In the US, we have always valued men, white skin, able bodies, rich people, straight people, cisgender people, thin people, and English-speaking Christians over all others. For years we have sterilized the truth and with it the possibility of true connection across difference. We’ve done this through native genocide, slavery, Jim Crow laws, redlining, internment camps, stolen land, broken treaties, exploitation of labor, the wage gap, marriage bans, health care policy, the school to prison pipeline, police violence and profiling, and the list goes on and on.

Artist: Donald Thomas

The reality is that the founding and history of our country is as ruthless and violent as the sanitized story of vision and bravery. I don’t know my story very far back, my family’s wealth was acquired by my grandfather who worked for 50 years at the pharmaceutical giant, Pfizer- but outside of that all I know is that I am white. Regardless of gaps in my story, I know the sanitized truth enabled my white ancestors, settlers on native land, to amass through exploitation, violence, lies, and fearmongering; wealth, land, and power that was not earned but taken. The sanitized truth allows me to live an unexamined life of liberty and happiness while my brethren suffer and die. The sanitized truth keeps me comfortable while my people repeat (and repeat and repeat) the mistakes and violence of our ancestors. The sanitized truth denies me the opportunity to heal my own wound as a colonizer and oppressor and to repair the damage my people have enacted. The sanitized truth is dirty and deceitful and seductive. The sanitized truth was never shared, but assumed. It spread like a pandemic, and claimed dominance like an emperor.

As white people with wealth it is our duty to break from the ease of the sanitized truth and instead claim the painful whole truth. The truth that we are alive, rich, and powerful because our ancestors brutally and relentlessly prioritized money over human life.

Here’s what I’ve learned: Nature always speaks last.

When generations of people, systems, governments, and entities have neglected a people- then when the tidal wave hits, their walls aren’t as high and hearty, their reservoirs aren’t as deep, their collected supply isn’t as big. And yet, their ability to stretch, share, and thrive with what’s available, provide integrated care for each other when one is sick or exhausted or overstretched, connect in song and laughter and dream of wild possibility is vaster and more expansive than my imagination can reach. For centuries- oppressed peoples have risen in the face of tremendous danger and fear-- growing more resilient, adapting and innovating quickly. They have long known, understood, and prepared for the whole truth: that there is no one coming, so we have to save ourselves.

Simultaneously, white people with wealth, like me, have been moving through the world with the wind at our backs carrying a false sense of independence. In our ancestor’s pursuit of wealth at all costs, they created a transactional infrastructure in which we pay for all the support required to survive. This gives us the incorrect belief that we can make it alone when in actuality, we never have. Since we infrequently have to practice the vulnerability required when asking for help from family and friends, our relationships are also transitional and we begin to question our inherent value outside our monetary resources. This develops a constant fear of extraction from the “other,” keeps us at a distance, and makes us distrustful and paranoid. So, we isolate and only trust and defend our own and others like us. We build walls, hoard resources, and hide away in private. We put our faith entirely in the ability to pay for protection and care.

The security of wealth and power is a false one though, because nature always wins. Our walls will crumble, our supplies will run out, our reservoirs will dry up- and then what of us? Let us not forget about the people who make possible what we most take for granted: running water, electricity, heat, internet, phone lines. What will we do then when there is no one left to deliver our food, care for our children, protect our fortresses? Who will love and protect us when the money is gone and there is no more pretense?

Here is what I’ve learned: Trust is the opposite of fear.

Today, Friday the 13th of March, 2020 is a scary day. There is much uncertainty; much fear. Today and the weeks and months to come, poor, working class, and people of color will suffer the majority of this pandemic. Children will go without food. Thousands of people will go without work and wages- bills will accumulate and money will run out causing a cascade of further misfortune. Some of our most vulnerable and our precious elders will die. Our election, our census, our future will all be deeply altered.

This pandemic has shined light on another whole truth we have forgotten, one never more concrete than this moment: I am not well if community isn’t well and community isn’t well if I am not well. As white people with wealth, we must envision ourselves in a world outside of the frameworks of oppression from which we benefit. A world where we are loved and important for our personhood and not our resources. A world where we are all beautiful and strong.

The time is now to build something new, expansive, collective, complex, and comprehensive instead of continuing to hospice the old transactional way. As people with wealth, we must decenter our legacy and invest in a future that benefits us all equitably. We must practice radical vulnerability and transparency with the people and communities we or our ancestors have harmed. We must root together in shared values and humbly do what is necessary and requested to rebuild a trust long broken. We must use our power and resources to invest in long-term collective strategy that changes things at the root even if it seems to go against our personal gain. We must try over and over even if it means we make big public mistakes. We must honor the ambiguous, imperfect, inarticulate and incomplete in an attempt to be real instead of impressive. We must move from the whole truth of abundance and gush generosity like a spring.

Most importantly, we must remember our best asset is and always has been people. Wealth will not protect us. In fact, it never has. The only thing that has ever mattered is community. The only thing that will save us is each other. Each friend is a lifeline. Each connection a raft to survival. The whole truth is that while I am not enough alone, we are always enough together.

It is early in the turning, so this time we will probably survive in our castles. However, this pandemic is just the beginning of what is certain to be a tumultuous time. At this moment I am choosing trust over fear. Choosing vulnerability, exposure, openness, relationship, love, hope and magic. I am trusting the knit of connection sewn between myself and my beloveds. I am showing up when I’m afraid, sharing my resources, mourning our losses and celebrating the beauty and mystery of our world. I trust in my wholeness and value and that my community will protect me as fiercely as I will protect them.

I invite you to also trust, to mourn, work, dance, laugh, cry, and fight with me. Our resilience is necessary to forge the world we have been dreaming.

Here are some things white people with wealth can do right now:

Check in with each other. If someone is quarantined, offer to bring them food, or call them for a long talk. If someone can’t work right now- offer help. Tell them you won’t leave them behind. In a time when our broken systems require us to stay apart we need each other the most.
Respond to the requests made by poor and working class people like the demands made here in POOR Magazine. Or here by my local Minnesota organizations IInquilinxs Unidxs and CTUL. We must stand together to demand the end to evictions and foreclosures, paid sick leave, and an end to homeless sweeps and shut offs of utilities.
Give or contribute to requests for support like these (an incomplete list):

Minnesota Solidarity- If you are in the Twin Cities, add your name, contact info, and how you’re able to help to this spreadsheet.

Food4Life - Free Grocery Deliveries For People in Atlanta, GA / a #COVID19 relief initiative. Donate directly to this program here

National Covid 19 Prison Hotline Fund: Baltimore IWOC and friends all around the country are setting up a free hotline for incarcerated and detained people to call when they have Coronavirus symptoms, when there’s an outbreak in their unit, or when they are being denied adequate medical care for Coronavirus.

COVID-19 Mutual AID Fund for LGBTQI+BIPOC

Let’s Erase the Stigma: COVID-19 Mutual AIDS Relief- supporting folx in Providence, RI

Springboard for the Arts: Artist Relief Fund - Supporting artists in MN

Positive Women’s Network: Created and Lead by Women Living with HIV, who is closing day-to-day operations bc of immuno-compromised folks.

Service Workers Mutual Aid Fund: For service workers in Ohio out of work

Give to power-sharing social justice foundations that fund organizations working to change things at the root like: North Star Fund (in NYC), Bread and Roses Community Fund (in Philly), Chinook Fund (in Denver), Haymarket People’s Fund (in Boston), Crossroads Fund (in Chicago), Headwaters Foundation for Justice (in Minneapolis), Social Justice Fund Northwest (in Seattle), Mississippi Reproductive Freedom Fund, reproductive justice work completely lead by low-income women of color who may be low on services (diapers, etc) right now, Third Wave Fund, Trans Justice Funding Network, (national funders based in NYC).
Non-profit organizations all over the country are having to cancel their fundraising events. If an org you give to has emailed you canceling their event- give them at least twice what you would have given at the event. They are losing a lot right now.
Support The Runway Project and the businesses they fund or other similar institutions that invest in people of color entrepreneurs.
Join a network of like minded folx with class privilege like Resource Generation, Solidarie Network, or Resource Movement (in Canada) to combat isolation and participate in collective action.
Use your time in isolation to learn about systems of oppression in this country and how to show up as an ally. Here are some books and articles to start with: