Composting Toxic Philanthropy into Healing Gardens

Last week, Robert F. Smith promised to relieve the student loan burdens of the entire 2019 graduating class of Morehouse. In his statement at the graduate ceremony, Robert F. Smith said, “True wealth comes from contributing to the liberation of people.”

Smith's actions at Morehouse reveal the shroud of debt that haunts students. His remedy to it serves as an invitation to other leaders in the global philanthropic sector to step up and share wealth for collective liberation. Will other philanthropists learn from his example?

As Robert F. Smith says, wealth is made in loving connection. Some of those connections are ancestral. Others are emergent. Some are simply natural: birds, plants, seeds. All can be cultivated, transplanted, harvested.

Reparations is a form of wealth circulation.

For those of us seeking philanthropic monies, when do we use love, tradition, and professionalism to access #funding? When is shame a useful tactic for #reparations from hostile entities or companies? How do we mix modes and funding sources, and what happens when we do? Another question begs addressing: when are reparations morally bankrupt, too tainted by #ToxicPhilanthropy, to be pursued and accepted?

This post is about the moral aspects of financial reparations. It emerges from more than three years of practical research into the everyday economics of earth healing. More farming, much financial education in the field. Presently, I'm distilling the learnings into a free and open method for people seeking to design a decolonial business and organize funding campaigns, which might include financial reparations.

To devise this method, I spent years on the road, moving between urban farms and rural organic homesteads, farmer cooperatives and autonomous Indigenous communities. I share these ideas as someone who likes getting dirty. Here, in this post, the dirt is the dying dollar and the blood debts of colonialism, misogyny, and capitalism.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr used the term "beloved community" to mean families, barrios, churches, nations that live racial justice, have peace, and share wealth. For so many of us raised in the wastelands of capitalism, terms such as beloved community and liberation seem outlandish. Literally, we fear they are only to be found if we leave this realm of existence. This sense of fatalism is compounded each time we lose someone to police violence or border vigilantes. #SayHerNamePamalaShantayTurner.

Reparations are heartfelt financial apologies that don't always feel good to colonizers, sexual predators, and the company they keep. Reparations help targeted individuals and communities to recover ancestral traditions and innovate solutions to climate breakdown and proud fascism, including surveillance capitalism.

Decolonization is moving beyond colonialism, misogyny, and capitalism to create living systems that promote biological diversity and beloved community. No borders, no prisons.

Rematriation is a return to the land as our living, generous Mother.

We can't rematriate and decolonize without reparations. Our waters are really polluted. Our people too often mistake "products" such as plant extracts for the long, loving process of actual cultivation. Much of our stolen lands remain behind barbwire fences and under legal, colonial lockdown. 95% of farms on the lands now named the United States are owned by white people. We need cash to produce many forms of system change.

Imagine if you had the support of Robert F. Smith, a clean slate and actual seed capital.

Most of the folks I teach decolonial business principles to want to start organic homesteads and beloved communities organized around land healing. Farms. Gardens. The radical freedom schools of the 1970s remade for the present. Personally, I'm working towards a migrating university and decolonial business academy.

With a clean slate and seed capital, we'd blend herbal remedies and give massages to new parents and all people grieving stillbirth. We'd care for our own children and our neighbors, not pay random strangers with exquisite credentials. We'd exist as much as we can from the land, not the global marketplace, while engaging in ecological and community regeneration.

In short, we'd compost our trauma and help Mother Nature heal. She's on strike, and we get it. So are we. We're so tired of this crappy, failing system and the people who promise to reform it. In the absence of a clean slate and seed capital, however, we find ourselves doing liberation and beloved community in small batches between shifts. It isn't sustainable, and it can't effect system change.

And really, if you're as honest as we are, you know we need more than corporate or community sustainability to face climate breakdown.

What if we can sink our hands into the soil of natural abundance and create beloved community, rather than sink into the mire of capitalist despair and individual failure? Such is the promise and daily practice of healing gardens and urban farms, regenerative agriculture and the global movements for rematriation, decolonization, and reparations.

Yet how can we reclaim our ancestral homelands and find the funds to make healing gardens grow? Over and over again, we find ourselves bamboozled, entangled, hoodwinked by the dying dollar and toxic charity.

When I teach people decolonial business principles, I invite people to see wealth in its many forms.

Wealth is natural, spiritual, linguistic, ancestral, monetary. To be rich is to cultivate knowledge and experience, learning plant medicine and technical expertise like coding or illustration. Wealth is financial, digital, practical. It is birdsong and a secure internet connection. What forms of wealth do you have and which do you seek to grow?

We know we're rich; we also know we're cash poor. And why. #StolenLands. #StolenLives. #StolenLabor. We see that clear as night.

Much of the work I'm doing is for people who reside on the economic and political margins. We are the world's majority, yet we have been made marginal. And we've been targeted, again and again, by death squads, some of whom wear ties to work.

This isn't hyperbole or hashtag sensationalism.

We're the descendants of people stolen from Turtle Island, Africa, and Abya Yala to farm plantations on Borikén, the world's oldest colony that also uses the name Puerto Rico, in the 1500s, 1600s, 1700s, 1800s. We're the Tamil and Bengali and Hakka stolen from Asia to fill the void after slavery's supposed abolition. We're the children of refugees who fled the wars in the modern nation states of Iraq, El Salvador, and Iran in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s. We're the ones working to liberate babies in prison on the border right now.

We're naturally fertile resistance to everyday genocide.

We're Indigenous to the very land that serves as the terrain of the United States: the Lakota, the Ohlone, the Pawnee, the Tsalagi. We've been here since time began. Descendants of the stolen, we too have built our lives here. Today, we're planting justice in Jackson, Mississippi. and picking phat beets in Oakland, Califas. We're the young women of Guatemala, Ecuador, and Nicaragua who are seeking legal support in the U.N. for having been denied abortion after being raped in our home countries. We're also our ancestors, every living aunty, all future children everywhere.

From Argentina to Borikén to Mississippi to the Ohlone bay on Turtle Island, we're growing healing gardens to supplant the failing nation states of global patriarchy. We're curanderas, midwives, doulas, and teachers of the next gen. We're abortion providers besieged.

#NiUnaMenos is fierce, loving feminism on Abya Yala, call her by her name.

#QueSeaLey is a feminist movement to ensure abortion rights in Argentina and elsewhere in Abya Yala.

#NoMoreMMIW stands for "no more missing and murdered Indigenous women." Really, there's not a lot I can say there without tears and deep ancestral fury that crosses continental divides.

I write desde Borikén AKA Puerto Rico where basic survival is at stake: la Junta De Control Fiscal seeks to dismantle and privatize almost all social, medical, and public services. Here, the entire governing system is on the verge of collapse, including legal abortion.

And in the empire?

In the lands now called the United States, there are some 30 laws against abortion being tested in states such as Alabama, Georgia, and Missouri to force a hearing in the Supreme Court. This is happening at the same time that more and more earth healers are sharing knowledge about plants that regulate fertility naturally via digital platforms and grassroots circuits.

You get it. We're visionary, furious, yet cash strapped. So now what? This swirl of passionate connections tends to be the mindset and reality of the people whom I'm guiding in designing businesses and reparations campaigns. How do we go linear and online to secure consistent funding?

In late March 2019, Nan Goldin spoke about the money, blood debts, and power of the Sacklers.

Upon hearing of the news that the #SacklerTrust was suspending its grantmaking, Goldin told BBC Radio 4, ‘I would appreciate the news if I heard that their money was going to pay reparations for the people whose lives they’ve ruined and the communities they’ve destroyed. There’s 300,000 people dead in this country. Their money should go to in some way pay for all the damage they’ve done.’

The #Sacklers are guilty of fueling the opioid crisis. If we who are organizing reparations campaigns access their monies to help stem the crisis, how do we clean the money, not launder it, to change the system? What happens to our work and souls in the process?

Toxic philanthropy is toxic masculinity institutionalized. As I was researching the topics of toxic charity and toxic philanthropy, I found one useful resource that underscores the misogyny of the global philanthropic sector.

Writing for the Institute for New Economic Thinking, Lynn Parramore writes:

But another sort of deep-pocketed philanthropist is harder to pin down. The harm she causes seems less direct; her motives more lofty. This type is fond of touting 'win-win' solutions to social problems and tossing out terms like 'impactful' and 'scalable' and 'paradigm-shifting' —the kind of lingo fed to business school students in lieu of critical thinking.

I'll admit I am both bemused and a little confused by Parramore. The article solely cites men who engage in #ToxicPhilanthropy but then feminizes the concept in its abstraction, making it appear as though women hold far more power in her own critical thinking as well as the noxious philanthropic sector she's examining. "The harm she causes seems less direct; her motives more lofty," writes Parramore. Indeed.

Yes, there are folks like MacKenzie Bezos who is oh so generously donating half her billions of wealth, but look who made the cash. #JeffBezos. Yes, there are women in the Sackler Family who determine its distribution, but who made the cash? #StraightWhiteMen. Yes, it takes the labor of millions and perhaps billions to produce such wealth, but under capitalism that recognizes individual visionaries more so than the communities who raise them, I'm ignoring the majority for a quick minute.

Philanthropists like Robert F. Smith are the radical exception we celebrate. We need more funders who promote liberation. More! More! More!

Morehouse is a historically Black institution that educates male students. It carries a beautiful, empowering tradition. Traditions change, so too human futures. How can we find ways to bring funds into as many targeted communities as possible, especially those that serve sexual and gender minorities such as transmen and twospirits who can't access college?

Since the story of Smith's generosity entered the news, several #BlackTransWomen have been murdered. #SayHerNameMuhlaysiaBooker. And let's stop this horror entirely. Not one was a student at Morehouse. Most of our trans sisters don't have homes or respected credentials so intense is the violence against sexual and gender minorities in BIPOC* communities.

How can we get such funds into our hoods, streets, colonies? And quick, quick, quick.

This is the question I've been wrestling with while helping people design reparations campaigns for projects that support abortion rights and all forms of biological reproduction, including pregnancy termination, and the sexual health of trans youth. Really, from whom do we seek funding? When do we ask via grant applications and when do we shame publicly, either predatory individuals or their foundations?

#AndyRubin #BillCosby. #HarveyWeinstein.

For those of us working to repair the damage this world system produced in our families and communities, we tend to see our work as already bloody. We don't want to hide the bodies. We're mourning them. We want to staunch the daily bloodshed in our communities that companies such as Monsanto and Safariland have produced and continue to produce globally.

How can we guard against becoming tainted by the toxic system we seek to unseat? Are there any conditions under which we would refuse #bloody monies from toxic philanthropists such as the #BayerFund, which manages Monsanto products? What about #WarrenKanders’ Safariland, which makes tear gas and other weapons? And what are the best means for us to seek that cash if we can't go to court?

In other words: If we are working to dismantle toxic companies and promote decolonization, what are the moral borders of our work?

For many of us in these targeted communities, we see today through the lens of the past and the future. We follow the law of living energy, and we are living the demise of colonialism, misogyny, and capitalism. That is why we feel even more daring and inclined towards launching reparations campaigns.

Death of the world system is our daily reality. In these times, more and more of us are turning to each other to cultivate food security and regulate fertility. We don't trust the state of the union. We see storm clouds brewing. And we don't much like twitter, linkedin and facebook even as we use them to check the political weather reports.

Still, we need funders and seed capital. Decolonization isn't a metaphor. Rematriation and the quest for financial reparations are social movements.

Collapse is creeping, like deadly nightshade. It happens in locations. One by one, two by two, twenty plus tornadoes. Rematriation is flowering. One by one, two by two, three sisters planting. Same for reparations campaigns. One by one, two by two, more to grow.

What happens when it falls, the global governing system that is so beset by crises and the public revelation of corruption? When the tornadoes come to town, the rain won't stop, the fires surge? When the financial and monetary system finally dies?

Rematriation is dust to dust.

*Black Indigenous People of Color.