For the Love of Money

On the Want of Having

The commentary here, and for that matter, most of what I have done to date, finds its way back to my initial predilection for money, now tied to my preoccupation with finance (/fɪˈnæns/) and economics. It began as these things often do, without having any money at all, let alone knowing anything of politics or the economy.

In fact, it did not start with wanting money but wanting things—the 1993 Toy Biz Marvel X-Men Gold Wolverine Deluxe Edition, the Nintendo Game Boy “Play It Loud” Black Edition, a Chicago Bulls Michael Jordan jersey, attending “Camp Hope,” etc.—followed every time by a “no” from my parents. I, of course, with the undeveloped boy’s mind, took this denial as some dislike of me or disapproval of these things rather than what I should have understood it to be. A lack of money, purchasing power, discretionary spending, and so on.

And those were my wants alone. Beyond them was what my parents wanted for themselves, for me, and for my sisters (and what they wanted, too). And then beneath that, what we needed, just to be, and then to be more than we were. My parents spent most of my childhood, to the exclusion of nearly everything else, paper chasing for the family. Stay fed, clothed, housed, and most of all for them, stay educated. My father in particular was not going to play with that. It is not hyperbolic to say money shaped me from the jump.

Though immigrants, my parents’ story is quite the American one. They came here for economic opportunity. For the proposition that here, more than anywhere else, perhaps in history, can a person arrive with nothing, make, and become something. And then give that to their children and watch as their progeny do what those before them could not have dared.

What could make us any more American than this deal? The one every generation has made here, going back to the first. Arrive with your labor and ability and you can convert it into whatever dreams may come. Quite literally the American Dream, but it costs. That is to say, everything—life, liberty, and the pursuit—is downstream of money. Your labor and ability earn you wages, the way to pay or exchange for the things. Then can you go to the school, learn the things, play the sports, get the girl, get the house, get the car, have the family, do the travel. Do you see where I am going with this?

Back then, my mind would spin. I was thinking not about money per se, but about wanting and having. What was it that would make my circumstances such that I could have all the things? There had to be a cheat code. Enter seventh grade social studies. The subject matter: United States History. It was here that I was properly introduced to the Founders, the Virginia Dynasty, Enlightenment thinkers, that whole lot. I am fairly certain I had no grasp of “politics” or “policy,” but whatever those white men did to make America, that was how a person could make it such that more people like me could have all the things, or just that one thing.

It probably should not have taken me as long as it has, and so many endeavors since then, to work out that the country was formed, in no small part, around the question of who gets money, who is owed it, and who decides. Hustle was not enough. Opportunity was not enough. Having a dream was never enough. Once we wake up from that recess, we are left with reality. After two hundred and fifty years, we are seeing the economic consequences of this. Whether labor and determination translate to the American Dream (read: money) is not God-given. It is political economy. Justice is not only ethics. It is participation and distribution. It is who can receive liquidity, who can own assets, and whose labor makes those things so.

How, in the most capital intensive and economically developed country ever, can the most pressing topic in the American discourse not be about money? At a moment—a long-lasting one at that—when the wealth gap and economic inequality seem more like features than side effects, I struggle to name many matters that deserve our attention more than this and all it entails. Hence why, as we say in the parlance, “cash rules everything around me…get the money.”

You see, for us in Black America, this is all too common. What I am writing about has been the main subject of our experience from time. Maybe it started with Timothy, but this money talk did numbers with us. Our analysis on the matter is endless and poignant. That is what happens when you do not have what you want when it is so nearly within reach. And as this country inches toward a new arrangement of haves and have-nots, our experience is going to be a good deal less exotic. You will see the light bulbs go off then as others will learn what we have known.

If I have persuaded you at all that this story is an American one, that it is rooted in where the country has been and bears on where it goes next, then it might make sense to turn to a deceptively simple question. What do we even mean by monet at all?