![]() We should have been honoring her every day. We shouldn’t have to have Tubman’s face on the $20 bill to honor her. How do we honor someone by putting their face on the symbol of their oppressor? Tubman’s life was offered up for five of the $20s that will now bear her image. Tubman’s freedom was bought and sold for the economic system that we are now attempting to memorialize her with. When Harriet Tubman and her brothers escaped slavery, a $300 reward was offered for the return of the three of them. And I think it’s fitting that their image is on the true god they worship and have sacrificed us all to. There is a reason powerful white men have graced our currency since this nation’s founding. The way we fund our education, the way we’ve zoned residential property, where we build jobs, how our court system operates – they are all built to maintain the hierarchy that keeps rich white (mostly male) people on top and the rest down below. Our insistence that winning the war on racism is about winning the hearts and minds of individual racists keeps the fight against racism abstract and ineffective. ![]() Our refusal to see the economic drivers of racism in America prevents us from enacting any real change that would improve the lives of people of color here. Race has always been one of the easier identifiers for those who need to designate an “other” for exploitation. It has always required that a select few occupy the top tiers, while the rest are forced into their respective rungs lower on the ladder. Our economic system has always required winners and losers. ![]() From sharecropping to our prison industrial complex – it’s always been money. After the abolishment of slavery, institutional racism continued to be motivated by profit from cheap labor. Racism was born, not of intrinsic hatred or bigotry, but as a moral justification for the immoral means of production that this nation relied upon to prosper. Slavery was about free labor to quickly grow and cheaply maintain white wealth. Slavery in America was, at its core, an economic system. But the image of Tubman on our currency as some sort of corrective action for centuries of oppression and subjugation, or as a symbol of how far we’ve come in ending racism, is more symbolic of our fundamental misunderstanding of race in America. Yes, I do get some joy from knowing that white people have to look at Harriet Tubman’s proud and defiant black face every time they reach in their wallet. ![]()
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