skeptical hope.
radical love letters #88 | on resilience
Hello friends, greetings from Chicago, where I’m giving a book talk at my alma mater. I’m feeling dreamily nostalgic, and my guess is there will be some waxing poetic about the trip in the Friday newsletter. Today’s a little dryer, though, and maybe controversial. Would love to hear your thoughts on nuancing the pros and cons of ‘resilience,’ especially related to money, in the comments. Thanks for being here. <3
I recently visited a Feminist Theory course who read my book, and a student asked me a question about the last chapter. Oof, I thought, here it comes. I was going to have to account for something I always sort of hoped to skate past. “You talk about resilience,” said a student who was asking nicely, but I could tell wanted to push me, “Can you say more on that?”
They caught me. The story of my life, or at least how it’s snapshotted in the memoir, is, inevitably, a story of resilience. The term, as we hear it most often, was developed in psychology to describe a person’s ability to adapt positively to adverse circumstances. A necessary skill to stay alive for many of us, but a frustrating concept when it’s constantly celebrated without enough attention to changing conditions that require resilience in the first place. “It’s left over from slavery, it’s left over from colonization,” says psychotherapist Lourdes Dolores Follins. “When you talk about people as if they’re animals, as if they’re subhuman, then you are only commenting on their physical capacity, which has morphed into resilience.”
In a comic by Connie Hanzhang Jin, she names the pain of hearing resilience as a compliment. She just wants to be able to fall apart, actually.
I knew as soon as I wrote the last page — which compared the literal rust of holding-on cities to the tenacity of working class femmes — that I risked turning my nuanced view of survival into a romanticization of struggle. I knew I might be accused of doing what Jin warns against above, and that celebrating enduring harsh conditions is nothing to celebrate at all.
The truth is, and I told the student as much, I’m aware, very personally, that it’s problematic to praise resilience, my body is exhausted from too much of it; and also— I don’t want to stop paying attention to it. What worries me about critique in general is that it often adds another layer of inaction. There is the problematic thing, then there is the critique of the problematic thing, and in that second spot, people get comfortable staying put. In many instances, I wonder if there is more danger in the laurel-resting. I’m not accusing the student of this — it’s part of the learning process to develop critical analysis, I believe in honing that skill! — but I think the question about resilience is a good place to interrogate some of its critics’ pitfalls.
Here’s an example that keeps coming to mind: when I was in my early 20s, coming out as trans was slowly becoming more common, at least in the queer circles I traveled in. The shape of LGBTQ activism was finding new footing, and in an effort to center the disproportionate risk of violence that Black trans women faced compared to their transmasc and white trans siblings, a statistic was circulated everywhere: ‘The average life expectancy for a Black transgender woman is 35 years.’ After a few years of that being hammered in our brains, a lot of Black trans women started asking movement people to please stop saying that. First off, it wasn’t an accurate statistic, and second of all, they feared creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. Shifting this meant finding a way to confront the realities of white supremacy and trans misogyny while also celebrating women who went on in spite of it. One attempt at countering this involved a social media campaign created by Black trans activist, Ashlee Marie Preston, called #ThriveOver35 to give examples of, well, resilience.
To be clear, I am not comparing growing up working class (or any of the adversity I experienced) to living as a Black trans woman, but this moment of movement history has stuck with me. What is the psychic cost of not celebrating —or at least paying attention to— our survival despite the odds?
This question also felt present to me last week when I was binge watching Ramit Sethi’s How to Get Rich. Those of you who read the newsletter on Friday know that I was in a post-tax-paying pit of despair, trying to grapple with ostensibly more proof that I will never escape economic insecurity, and turning to this personal finance show for some skeptical hope.
More on Ramit in a moment, but first, a very brief summary of my relationship to money: grew up in and out of economic insecurity, became an anti-capitalist and a punk so being poor was fine and sometimes even glorified, went to grad school and realized I was also an exploited worker and also it might be nice to have furniture not from the dumpster, got a visiting professor position that strung me along for four years (with a salary and healthcare for the first time in my life, and finally able to save some money) then promptly took the carrot off the stick, and (with exception of a brief stint at a nonprofit) I’ve been mostly gig economy hustling (which has included: writing, editing, yoga/fitness instruction, adjuncting, and SW) ever since. I would get tastes of stability—through the salaried gigs, through my former partner, etc—but the rug always seemed to get pulled out from underneath. (Here is a movie clip I’ve often turned to as an example of getting thisclose to succeeding, then someone saying ‘sike!’)
In activist and academic circles we’re sort of trained to dwell in the rage against the system, to say, ‘See look, I work hard and still I can’t get ahead! Capitalism is rigged!’ It is rigged, obviously. And also: whew, is it a rough way to move through the world. I’m not the first to say this; in movement spaces, this gets packaged in recycled conversations on how we should focus on what we want rather than what we don’t, or debates about bombarding timelines with police killings, or whether or not we should incite panic around the anti-trans bills (to motivate action) or to focus on the resistance to them (especially to help trans kids from totally freaking out). It shouldn’t be a binary choice between the two sides, but it tends to show up that way.
But back to How to Get Rich, a show at the intersection of self-help and personal finance, which is an intersection I began exploring, sheepishly, in my late 20s. I kept it a secret at first, which is entirely a result of bullshit norms in punk and Leftist spaces that seem to imply it’s bad to want financial stability (the hilarious part about this is that these norms are often entrenched by people who have never experienced financial instability). I think I remember artist Nicole Georges describing this as ‘punk money trauma,’ something she encourages all punks (especially artists) to unlearn. People who are not part of these subcultures do not need to unlearn the idea that they should stay poor, because they don’t get any cool points for staying poor. I know this because I know poor people in real life, and also I am reminded of this while watching this little personal finance show. On How to Get Rich, many of the featured families included people of color, people without generational wealth in the service industry, struggling immigrant families, in addition to more affluent couples. None of the low income families apologize for wanting more security. Some of them talk about desperately wanting to do better than how they grew up so they can help their families.
The show is absolutely in need of problematizing —- it frames everyone struggling with money (from millionaires to waiters) as neutral, and that all any of them need is some help with personal responsibility (budgeting, picking up side hustles, etc.). There are interesting moments when the show will flash statistics on screen about the intersection of race and poverty, but they don’t go so far as to name racism (let alone capitalism). The solution to money problems, according to Ramit, is to take control on an individual level. Obviously, there is no talk about organizing to overthrow the system that requires poor people to exist.
In short, Ramit is teaching the low income folks in particular, how to be resilient. I fear the criticism of his focus on personal responsibility misses the bigger issue, though, which is the silence about systems of oppression. I guess what I’m hedging at, the thing I’m not supposed to say… is that personal responsibility can be good, actually. If nothing else, his personal finance advice seems (and I think inarguably is) more beneficial to supporting the working class than some anti-capitalist’s rant on Twitter.
When I answered the student’s question about resilience, I brought in the feminist concept of agency to help in defending my choice. Feminist agency asserts the ability to act within and in spite of structural harm. Imperatively, it names that the obstacles exist — that it will, without question, be harder for people with marginalized identities to make it through under capitalism, white supremacy, cisheteropatriarchy, and so on. But agency, I think, gives us permission to try anyway. The best part of any social movement says the same — the conditions are terrible, but we can and we will fight against them. That Leftists are okay when we do that on a collective level, but not an individual level makes sense theoretically, but it results in a lot of Leftists with generational wealth turning their noses up at personal finance resources that people drowning in debt might turn to with desperation, and eventually some hope. (This is a strawman example, I admit, but I don’t think it’s a far stretch from a common iteration of the phenomenon I’m trying to get at.)
So, yes, the bottomline is always: what are you doing to undo systems of harm? But the other stuff outside of that? If you’re being resilient and clawing your way to some more easeful living? I would never begrudge that.* And despite all the setbacks —even if it means critically but receptively watching Netflix money shows—-I’m going to keep trying for that myself.
*There are some caveats here; I would begrudge some people for their relationship to wealth. How to practice harm-reduction in a system that is inherently violent is an essay for another day, but please trust that I’m not saying “I support the millionaire banker in living his easeful life!” I’m also not going to make a list of who is and isn’t acceptable. My litmus test is, ‘Do you want to undo systems of harm and are you working toward that somehow?’ And also probably some questions about, ‘If you have money do you practice regular redistribution?’ But I am not the Red Army, and this is not my task!
*A longer version of this essay would include profuse gratitude to the SW community, which, I think, beautifully walks the line between anticapitalism and abundance. I have found the working class femme radical punks who want to destroy the system and also want nice things. Bread and roses, etc etc…
thanks for sharing your writing today <3