STEP ONE

Grieve

It’s not what you were expecting from a book about wealth. Yet before we can move forward with using money as medicine, to heal divides and restore balance, we have to grieve. Grieving requires softening your self-protective defense mechanisms enough to feel: getting beyond the denial, numbness, righteousness, apathy, and other obstacles we have put in place to avoid the depths of pain. The humanity that was previously made invisible must be made visible again.

We who were colonized have to grieve for the people, the cultures, and the lands that were forcibly taken from us. We have to mourn the suffering of our ancestors who were cheated, humiliated, raped, and killed. We have to grieve for hundreds of years of our being disrespected, displaced, and dispossessed. We have to grieve for our children, who embody the trauma of this history, and now have the decks stacked against them as they face the future.

Those who have embodied and sustained the colonizer virus also have much to grieve for. The fear, anxiety, and mistrust that characterizes being a member of the 1 percent is no joke. The survival mechanisms they often adopt include staying walled off, physically and emotionally disconnected, and well medicated.

White people have to grieve the guilt that accompanies whiteness. You cannot and must not opt out of whiteness. You have to grapple with the messiness of the privilege. You have to come and collect your people.

Settlers and their descendants have to grieve the lives of their ancestors, the culture that made their acts of domination and exploitation even imaginable, possible, and acceptable. What confused, numbed, dissociated hell it must have been, on a deep level, even if they enjoyed benefits on other levels. Hurting people hurt others (something else I learned growing up watching Oprah). Generations down the line must grieve the culture of the present, which perpetuates the colonizer mindset of domination and exploitation.

Trust me, I know that there are those who are not ready to consider the suffering of colonizers and oppressors, let alone forgive them or welcome them. However, the Native principle of All My Relations means that settlers are our relatives too. It means our interdependence is inescapable, so we may as well acknowledge each other’s trauma and engage in healing together.

Stephen Jenkinson, a white Canadian trained in theology at Harvard, best known for his writing and speaking about his work with people who are dying, has also reflected profoundly on what it is to be a non-Indigenous, a settler. He calls it being an “orphan,” a term that includes all the people uprooted from their ancestral homes for whatever reasons, whether it was by choice or not. The European settlers who came to the Americas are orphans, but so are the slaves they brought over, and so are the people lured to America’s shores in recent decades by the promise of work, wealth, and the American Dream. They are all orphans, in his worldview:

Orphans are not people who have no parents: they are people who don’t know their parents, who cannot go to them. Ours is a culture built upon the ruthless foundation of mass migration, but it is more so now a culture of people unable to say who their people are. In that way we are, relentlessly, orphans.¹

Orphans broke the ties to their lands of origin, to the bones of their ancestors, to their old ways. The grief that this has caused is enormous, yet it is almost never acknowledged. In the wake of the choice to abandon, to sever, to forget, Jenkinson believes, is shame of secretly believing you come from nothing that has merit. First and foremost, Jenkinson calls for sorrow and grieving among orphans, acknowledging the profound longing for connection and purpose and ancestry.

Reframing colonizer-settlers as orphans and cultivating empathy for them will probably rub some people the wrong way. I get it. It’s not just about turning the other cheek, taking the higher road, or being more virtuous, though. It’s literally a pragmatic choice in order to end the cycles: the cycles of pain and hurt; the cycles of divide, control, and above all, exploit. According to those who work to heal abusers, the point of recognizing the victimization of perpetrators is not to excuse, forgive, or in any way diminish the destructiveness of their actions, but rather to develop an accurate understanding of how oppression works, how it is sustained and recreated over generations, how to end it.

So all of us have to grieve how the culture of domination and exploitation took us over, no matter the color of our skin or how we came to live in this country. We have to grieve what all we’ve done since being infected with the colonizer virus: how exploitation was at the foundation of how we earned and used and managed money, how transactions replaced relationships, how we lost sight of our common humanity.

In her book Medicine Stories, the curandera-historian Aurora Levins Morales writes:

Ours is a society that does not do grief well or easily, and what is required to face trauma is the ability to mourn, fully and deeply, all that has been taken from us. But mourning is painful and we resist giving way to it, distract ourselves with put-on toughness out of pride. . . . What is so dreadful is that to transform the traumatic we must re-enter it fully, and allow the full weight of grief to pass through our hearts. It is not possible to digest atrocity without tasting it first, without assessing on our tongues the full bitterness of it.²

One of my conversations while writing this book was with Hilary Giovale, a trustee of the Geo Family Foundation. A white woman who became involved in philanthropy after marrying into wealth, she’s become something of advocate for awakening other white folks to white privilege, and believes that white people absolutely need to be saved from white supremacy.

Hilary told me:

About a year and a half ago, I developed an interest in learning about my ancestry, because the story for most of us white folks starts here in America, with no recollection of what happened before our arrival. My understanding had been that my people had come from Scotland and Ireland several generations ago, and that we were very poor people, seeking a new beginning. Although this is true of my most recent ancestors I now understand that focusing on this story while excluding the big picture is part of the mythology that helps justify white supremacy. I came to realize that I had an ancestor who arrived in 1739 from Scotland and he landed in North Carolina. His grandson received a land grant. I was horrified as it became clear to me that it was land stolen from Indigenous people of North Carolina. Later that grandson went down to Mississippi and Louisiana, and he and some of his descendants owned slaves. There were records of slaves’ names and how much they were worth in a book of family genealogy. Again, it was devastating. I had to go through a process of deep grieving.³

When we white people start to learn about this history and to build relationships with people who are still living the intergenerational historical trauma of colonization on a daily basis, a lot of us are totally paralyzed by guilt and by shame, and we don’t know what to do, so we have to check out. We have to put our blinders on and become numb to all of that. I see that whole dynamic as part of the reason that we’re still so separate today. . . . The first thing you have to do is understand that you have white privilege. When you understand that you have it, you are going to feel bad. You’re going to feel some discomfort, guilt, and shame. This is part of the process and cannot be short-circuited. Engaging these uncomfortable feelings opens space for different ways of interacting with diverse people and projects. It creates possibilities for healing to happen on all sides.⁴

Philanthropist Peter Buffett talked to me about how it was no coincidence that the first philanthropic organizations were created in the Gilded Age, against the backdrop of industrialization which, alongside creating enormous concentrations of wealth, also led to anxiety, depression, and existential crises. For most people, work had gone from mostly autonomous productive activities that involved a sense of purpose and satisfaction, like craftsmanship or farming, to being a cog in the assembly line of industry somewhere, lacking any sense of agency or power. “It led to 150 years of purposeless, especially for men. The most powerful tried to put a salve on these losses with philanthropy, but the losses were huge. When you unpack this, there’s a lot of pain.”⁵

Organizations, companies, and institutions can support the grieving process. Once upon a time this idea would have been laughed at as unprofessional or indulgent, but there is increasing evidence that intentionally creating and holding space for grief can make an organization more productive. Organizational designers now recommend that pain be publicly acknowledged and mourned. Sharing the grief destigmatizes the feelings, validates them, and allows for healing.

The day after the election of Donald Trump in 2016, I was on a flight to Atlanta to attend Facing Race, a national conference of racial justice organizers and advocates. Days before, I had been confident that I was going to be attending a victorious celebration with a thousand of my closest friends in philanthropy and the movement. Instead, we boarded the flight like a funeral procession. We sat soberly, in extreme grief. As we gathered in Atlanta, no one could fathom the country’s choice of hateful, backwards-thinking leadership. A roomful of visionaries were unable to see through the tears. We spent those few days together talking through the election results, crying, and beginning to process. It was a lifesaver for me. I can think of no better place to have been in such a time. In the weeks following, I heard stories about how some foundations held space for grieving, while others did not even acknowledge the immense sorrow being carried by staff. In many cases, staff self-organized to hold each other up. Spaces for grief validate us and help to start the process of healing.

An organizational design consultant in post-apartheid South Africa commented how much of the emphasis in institutions is on articulating an exciting vision of the future. But “selling the vision of a new, exciting future to people who are still in grief is akin to telling a grieving husband at the grave of his wife to marvel at the beauty and virtues of potential wives standing around the grave. Such thinking ignores the loss, hurt, and pain that comes with change. The widower must first grieve his spouse before he can see and appreciate new possibilities.”⁶

Susan David, a psychologist at Harvard Medical School and author of Emotional Agility, argues that workplaces focus on positivity to the detriment of well-being, and that the suppression of negative emotions can be harmful. “Teams that feel safe enough to articulate discontent or talk about frustration are the most high-functioning teams,” she notes. “When we only allow some emotions, we create a huge amount of emotional labor. We also create a situation for individuals that is psychologically unhealthy and undermines the organization’s ability to learn and function more effectively.”⁷ It only makes sense that if people are busy suppressing some parts of their thoughts and emotions, they won’t be able to participate or focus fully.

Philanthropy has a culture of politeness. On the surface, everyone gets along and seems happy to work together, but there are often simmering issues that cannot be addressed because it is taboo to “rock the boat.” Pushing back is frowned upon. Being nice isn’t a problem per se, but when people cannot speak their minds or address what concerns them, we may miss out on the best thinking, and feelings of bitterness can begin to fester.

The role for leaders is to create a safe space for vulnerability by sharing their own trauma and grief, and modeling listening, compassion, and empathy. These developments are part of the shift toward enabling people to bring their full selves to work. Grieving needs to happen on an individual level and also within all the institutions along the loans-to-gifts spectrum.