I Don't Want to Die Poor

by Michael Arceneaux

  I’m still fighting, though, Mama. God is with me. I’m just not at church. I can already hear you: “Mmhmm, go to God’s house.” I’ll go with you to Christmas mass again. You know you were happy that I invited myself the last time.

  You wait for your reward in the afterlife. I still want you to have paradise now. I want to be able to give that to you. There is no one on Earth that I think deserves it more. You do not care for monetary things and never will, but I will find a way to repay the debt I owe you. I am determined.

  If anything, even when I get over the hump—truly and finally—you will continue to disapprove of my methodology. You will not approve of this lingering defiance to break mores and tell my business. The irony then, now, and forever more will be that nothing I do in this world will have happened without you. You may find your religious objections to be in accord with the divine, but what makes me see God in you is you finding it in your heart to not only love me through disagreement and disappointment, but to make evident that no matter what, you will be there.

  That has meant more than any rosary you have ever sent me. Or novenas in the mail to make sure I am praying. Or even the cookies and pralines you baked and sent me, though they for sure have been the most satisfying.

  Love is complicated. We both know that for varied reasons. But when it is true, it is pure, and there is none purer than a mother’s love for her child. You have proven that more times than I could ever count. Again, I am going to find a way to pay you back.

  Until then, I’m still so sorry even though you don’t want me to be.

  TO FREEDOM

  In the midst of writing this book, one that is largely themed around the varied ways in which student loan debt can consume one’s life and impair so many different facets of it, a billionaire and two actual populists all introduced a different possibility for those marred by student loan debt. One was an act of benevolence (or bluster, depending on who you are asking), the other part of a more ambitious idea to reimagine higher education in America. Both represented a type of freedom that I have long yearned for but have yet to attain.

  On what was described by many as a muggy Sunday morning in Atlanta, Robert F. Smith, a billionaire investor and philanthropist, stood before 396 graduating students at Morehouse College ready to change the trajectory of their lives. Initially, his commencement address sounded typical. He talked about the remarkable life that got him an invitation to speak in front of these fancy Black folks in the first place. For Smith, part of that story began at Carson Elementary, a very well-to-do school with a predominately well-to-do white population far, far away from the part of Denver where he resided. He declared he’d never forget having to take the No. 13 bus to get to Carson.

  “Those five years drastically changed the trajectory of my life,” he explained. “The teachers at Carson were extraordinary. They embraced me and challenged me to think critically and start to move toward my full potential. I, in turn, came to realize at a young age that the white kids and the Black kids, the Jewish kids and the one Asian kid were all pretty much the same.”

  Doesn’t this sound like the ending of some sanitized biopic released from a major Hollywood studio? Doesn’t matter which one. They’re all put through the same rinse. Forgive me, Sesame Street taught me better than this. At our core, we all indeed are pretty much the same, but I did look for Barney and Baby Bop for a second as I watched Smith deliver his remarks. I believe Smith’s story to be true, but on its surface, the beginning remarks suggested this would be a solid tale but not the kind to rile up a bunch of Black folks sweating profusely because it’s May in Atlanta, Georgia, and they’re sitting outside, shaking and baking.

  It was when Smith deviated from his prepared remarks—which were nice if you read them in full—his commencement address became one that will live in infamy.

  “My family is going to create a grant to eliminate your student loans!” he announced.

  It was a stark contrast to comments former President Obama made in his Morehouse commencement address in 2013.

  “We know that too many young men in our community continue to make bad choices,” he said. “Growing up, I made a few myself. And I have to confess, sometimes I wrote off my own failings as just another example of the world trying to keep a Black man down. But one of the things you’ve learned over the last four years is that there’s no longer any room for excuses. I understand that there’s a common fraternity creed here at Morehouse: ‘Excuses are tools of the incompetent, used to build bridges to nowhere and monuments of nothingness.’ ”

  The lecturing, infuriating as it was, continued.

  “We’ve got no time for excuses—not because the bitter legacies of slavery and segregation have vanished entirely; they haven’t. Not because racism and discrimination no longer exist; that’s still out there. It’s just that in today’s hyper-connected, hyper-competitive world, with a billion young people from China and India and Brazil entering the global workforce alongside you, nobody is going to give you anything you haven’t earned. And whatever hardships you may experience because of your race, they pale in comparison to the hardships previous generations endured—and overcame.”

  I will never forget seeing then presidential candidate Barack Obama at the Toyota Center inspiring me in ways I never found previously conceivable as a child born under Reagan and raised under Bush I, Clinton, and Bush II, a time that included recession, economic booms that didn’t hit my family the same way, and mass incarceration that resulted in many of the other Black boys I grew up around finding themselves in and out of jail. I could have never imagined a Black president and then it became the standard.

  Still, for all the reasons I liked him—his gifts as a writer and orator, his intellect, his wife, his children, his sarcastic wit, and his ability to dance poorly but not look too embarrassing—there were parts of President Obama that irked the hell out of me: most of them rooted in how he would scold Black people on the virtues of individual responsibility while not speaking as boldly on the conditions we are subjected to that place us at a significant disadvantage.

  There’s much to celebrate about his administration—I have written as much in my work—but consider the period where he delivered these remarks. In that period, he was criticized for the timidity in which he tackled the foreclosure crisis, which devastated Black America, and housing segregation, which continues to hurt Black people most. The students he was speaking to were plausibly already affected by the former and would be impacted by the latter in their futures.

  When some made this distinction between Obama’s remarks and Smith’s at the time, many Black folks took off and metaphorically lathered their face in Vaseline, ready to scrap on behalf of the first Black president. But he only looked Messianic on that one Rolling Stone cover during the 2008 Democratic presidential primary. He ain’t never been Jesus for real.

  It wasn’t about whether or not Obama should have paid off the debt of the 2013 graduating class of Morehouse College; it was about understanding that this country presents unique challenges to Black people, and no matter how much those challenges shift with time, they speak to systematic barriers all the same. So if you are not giving your all in the pursuit of dismantling those barriers, you don’t have the right to stand before a group of Black men at a historically Black college and tell them racism isn’t that big of a deal anymore, so suck it up. Sadly, we don’t all find our way to care from a nice, well-off-enough white family who can put us in the best of schools that provide us the type of access that can help eliminate whatever debts were taken on along the journey at a faster rate than the typical Black American’s.

  Robert Smith at least made a real gesture, and for that, a national hero was born in the news. Well, to many of us, anyway. For many, Robert Smith doing a nice thing is actually a terrible thing. To others, being generous to some is wrong because it teaches the wrong lesson.

  In “Grand gesture: Morehouse donor teaches grads the wrong lesson,” from the Edito
rial Board of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, they write: “There’s something to be said for paying what you owe, for holding up your end of a bargain.”

  As they see it: “It is unfortunate that many colleges are high-priced; that students don’t really understand the magnitude of the encumbrance they’re undertaking when they choose higher education that is beyond their reasonable means; and that their parents don’t guide them toward more affordable options like community college, state universities or technical schools.”

  I can understand questions related to how exactly such a grand gesture made by Smith can be actually executed, but this editorial board’s gripe is about the donation itself. Smith’s intentions were to make life easier for 396 college students who already had enough going against them for simply being Black men living in America. Those disadvantages are magnified by socioeconomic factors that can be directly traced to institutional barriers. Say, the very debt he offered to handle on their behalf. The editorial board sees this as a freebie given away to folks not holding up their “end of a bargain.” What this editorial board—more than likely filled with white men and women, like many newsrooms across the country—fail to realize is that Black folks aren’t offered a fair bargain to begin with.

  What type of people feign such allegiance to a bargain rooted in bias? The kind of folks who if they don’t directly benefit from said bias already, aspire to. After all, this is the same paper that did not technically endorse a 2016 presidential candidate, but was slammed for offering a “pseudo endorsement” of Sweet Potato Saddam at the time. As you read the editorial board’s “A guide to decide: Twelve tests to choose between Clinton and Trump,” where their allegiances lean are thinly veiled but very much identifiable. In their test for “economic growth,” the nod is given to Donald Trump “not only because he is new, and not just because he has committed to tax cuts for small business, for estates, and for the middle class, but because he is a businessman and a total pragmatist.”

  Donald Trump is a stupid-ass bitch who, thanks to a New York Times investigation, was found to have received the equivalent today of at least $413 million from his father’s real estate empire. Then there are the tales of how alleged creative accounting helped him not just shave off tax liabilities but actually enrich himself by blowing through his daddy’s money.

  I tried to hold back the vomit rising in my mouth as I read on, but true to form, the lies worsened: “He understands money, he understands power, and he is impatient with inaction.” And: “He is dynamic—a builder and deal maker. Being the ultimate political outsider, Mr. Trump, again, has the freedom to experiment. And we need something of the New Deal spirit now—willingness to try new things and throw out what has clearly failed.”

  Donald Trump shares Franklin D. Roosevelt’s fancy for internment camps and habit of trafficking in racism, but the New Deal spirit? That piece reads as erotica for the demented, but notice how favorable the treatment is for the proven failure whose entire narrative can be attributed to privilege and pillage compared to that for these Black men being given only a small fraction of the kind of leg up the sons of rich white men get. If any of us default on our student loans, our lives are ruined. We are condemned for not holding up our end of the bargain. We are considered to be examples of failure. Our credit will be destroyed, and in turn, it impairs our ability to work, to gain housing, and to effectively function the way a “responsible adult” is expected to.

  Sweet Potato Saddam doesn’t pay any of his loans back and is rewarded with more loans, and miraculously, further mythologized as an example of “the freedom to experiment.” If Donald Trump were Black, they would find every which way to describe him as a shiftless, bottom-feeding nigger who needs to start taking some personal responsibility for his irresponsibility. At best, he would have been Flavor Flav’s coworker on The Surreal Life, not the star of The Apprentice.

  If he were a woman, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette wouldn’t have found his long list of failures so aspirational either.

  The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette is but one paper espousing the mindset that people—especially Black people—are getting perceived free handouts. It’s a mindset typical of how conservatives respond to the topic of implicit bias, the racism that informs it, and the ways in which we tackle it.

  As for New Deal Don, by the end of 2017, Trump along with Republicans in Congress had passed a $1.5 trillion tax bill. I’m more of a Joy-Ann Reid and Chris Hayes viewer than I am a Jim Cramer or Kelly Evans one, but I’ve watched Billions and somehow passed economics in college, so let me try to explain this in a way that won’t even give me a headache. The crux of the bill goes as follows: Corporations pay less than they already do, as do the other very, very rich people. As for anyone else, despite initial touting that it was a “middle class tax bill” from that apricot-hued asshole and budding tyrant, that was hardly the case. In other words, it was some wealthy white folks doing a money grab. Think Joanne the Scammer if Joanne had the backing of a major political party whose power was rooted in being financially backed by the wealthiest people in our society, along with the exploitation of our electorate’s prejudices and certain governmental systems that were designed with their racism in mind. For example, the electoral college that helped pave the way for all of this.

  As fate would have it, a little over a month after Smith made his charitable pledge that rubbed some right-leaning know-it-alls with a paternalistic streak the wrong way, it was revealed that the GOP-led tax bill was the bust opponents for non-plutocrats bill predicted it would be.

  The nonpartisan Congressional Research Service followed the U.S. economy’s performance in the first full year following the legislation going into law and found that lowering corporate tax rates from 35 percent to 21 percent not only led to a 31 percent drop in corporate tax revenue (almost two times steeper than originally forecasted by economists), but did not generate any meaningful new economic growth. Even better, data has shown that those who made less than $25,000 had a higher chance of being audited last year than those making between $200,000 and $500,000. So the bill many argued would only reinforce structural inequities has done exactly that. Around the time I graduated from college, similar GOP-crafted policy led to the greatest economic catastrophe since the Great Depression, and that gave way to a bailout. A smooth decade later, the ultra-rich were getting yet another giveaway.

  I’m no Suze Orman, but it sounds like folks like her need to quit pretending so many of us are financially screwed because of our new, unearned love of oak milk lattes and look elsewhere to explain the widening gap. I sure shouldn’t be upset with Robert Smith, who has a personal invitation to become my new benefactor and bestie. Granted, it is not lost on me that these very tax laws have helped Smith maintain the sizable wealth that allows him to be so giving.

  It was a point the New York Times editorial board made in their own editorial “We Are Applauding the ‘Gift’ of an Affordable Education. Something Has Gone Wrong.”

  In it, they lament: “A new generation of plutocrats has amassed great fortunes, in part because the federal government has minimized the burden of taxation. Americans once again are reduced to applauding acts of philanthropy necessitated by failures of policy.”

  From their vantage point, “Closing that loophole would be a much better graduation present for the class of 2019.” I understand and share the underlying frustrations expressed. As a Black person of a working class family who did not have access to any of the benefits others enjoy and often blames myself for taking out these loans just trying to have even a smidgen of what others got, I, too, am angry over how flawed this system is. But as a Black person struggling with debt because I went to a school like Morehouse College—in my case, Howard University—no matter the politics and bad policies behind it, it was nice to see a Black man come to the aid of other Black men.

  In addition to these editorials floating around, I noticed some across social media also took umbrage with Smith’s donation. Some have elected to i
nterpret these acts not as ones of mercy or bold but necessary moves needed in order to right an egregious wrong that has led to more than a trillion dollars in debt that threatens the greater economy; instead, they signify something else: a handout. How utterly boring. Such is an attitude steeping in selfishness and soiled by delusion—namely this idea that we live in a meritocracy. To them, if they have managed to either pay off their debts or never taken any on to begin with, why can’t the rest of us do the same?

  It’s a question that sounds simple only to the simple-minded.

  That degree of selfish thinking took me back to my New York Times essay about my plight with private student loan debt that started this journey to talk about it publicly, and the less than compassionate responses it generated from a few like-minded fuck-offs.

  I try not to read the comments, but when prodded by a friend to give a look, I did and was quickly reminded why I never read the comments. One in particular stood out. I won’t give her name, but she’s a white woman who lives in the Midwest. She’s probably the wife of one of those white blue collar workers the political press swears matter more than everyone else at the polls.

  She started off her remarks by sharing, “I always have a problem with sob stories such as this.” She asked why I chose Howard University and not Rice University. She mentioned grants. I can tell she does not know how much Rice University costs. Not to mention, when I consider many of the opportunities I have enjoyed in the midst of my struggles, most of them were directly related to being able to attend Howard University.

  Nevertheless, she carried on.

  She told me that my choice to be a writer and knowing that I had to pay an obscene amount of money a month in student loan repayments was “another bad choice.” Career advice followed: “Why not have taken a job with a good salary and made a big head start on those loans, and used weekend spare time to start writing, writing when the loan was smaller?” I wish I could get a job tutoring her on reading comprehension because I pretty much explained a lot of that in the original essay. I make a lot more than the median U.S. income, but the structure of my debt—which my lender refuses to bend on—is what put me in the predicament I was speaking to. That along with so many outside factors simply beyond my control.