Dreaming Our Way to a Thriving World - Community Share

Community Creative Lane Smith shares their thoughts on Dreaming Our Way to a Thriving World.

Welcome to the series here on my Substack, Community Share. I am inviting those who wish to share their hearts and souls in relation to a specific topic. The Series began on Juneteenth with the first topic: Dreaming Our Way to a Thriving World.

Posts will consist of any creative medium (writing, drawing, painting, ceramics, video, song, podcast episode etc) of their choice to showcase creative dreams, hopes, goals around the topic. 

If you hear the call to participate, please reach out.

Without further ado…

photo credited to Devon Rowland 

Dreaming of Less, Dreaming of More

I've heard a lot of radical activists (Black and non-Black) say that it is not necessary to "have less" or refrain from making more money in order to be anticapitalist since we are all trying to survive under capitalism, and knowing your own worth is part of resisting exploitation. I don't disagree; I think that is true for a lot of people, and it's certainly true for Black people who have had so much stolen from them intergenerationally – but this is a message that I've chosen not to apply to myself. Just because I could potentially have more than what I grew up with under a system ready to grant unearned privileges to people raced as white, that doesn't mean I need more than I have or that I should strive for it just because I can.

As a "white" person who has made a commitment to being a traitor to whiteness and to being guided by Black liberationist politics, I've spent years developing discernment around what guidance is for me to follow and what isn't. That's not to say that I'm done or that I've perfected that discernment, but it's something I've consciously practiced for quite a long time, and it shows in some of the decisions I've made about how I live – including the decision to abstain from trying to make more money or to try and live a middle-class lifestyle. 

I choose to live in a majority-Black neighborhood in a majority-Black city, and I have no shame about being a full-time single-parent caregiver on welfare rather than using my multiple master's degrees for a white-collar job that pays just a little more than the cost of childcare. It is indeed a privilege for me to ignore the stigma against single parents and people on welfare, but in choosing not to distance myself from the Black single parents on welfare who are stigmatized the most, it's in my material interest to keep fighting for the policies that benefit both of us. That is a very different approach than "rising above" that status and planning to "give back" in some way when I finally have "enough" to be able to afford to be generous. I'm choosing solidarity over philanthropy.

I've also heard a lot of radical activists (Black and non-Black) say that white people have to make tremendous sacrifices to the point of pain to make any difference toward racial equity. Even though I might appear to be practicing what they advise by living in poverty, I don't entirely agree with the spirit of that argument. The self-sacrifice and martyrdom narrative for white people tends to reinforce a savior complex, for one thing. For another, I don't experience simply giving up the aspirations that white supremacy has tried to instill in me as painful – on the contrary, freeing myself from the pursuit of the supposed abundance that racialized capitalism defines as desirable has made me feel that I have so much more of value than I could have ever imagined.

The kind of abundance that I experience now is the kind that I never learned to want or hope for: having close, friendly and mutually supportive relationships with my neighbors; having neighbors, friends, comrades and lovers who are very different from me in ways that expand my understanding of reality; feeling personally invested in public spaces and services (like libraries) because I use them myself – they're not just things that I theoretically believe should be available if possible to those who need them; feeling held and cared for by others because it's physically impossible for me to be completely independent; freedom from guilt and shame for receiving what I need to live and not valuing myself on my productivity; having the autonomy to choose time for daydreaming, rest, recovery, or pleasure in moments throughout the day, rather than working tirelessly to "earn a vacation;" the security of knowing that my quality of life in old age depends on the quality of my family and community relationships, not on what the government decides about Social Security or on what the stock market is doing; being comfortable being myself as a radical transmasculine person with tattoos rather than worrying about being perceived as "professional" or "respectable," and more.

Everything I listed above is the type of freedom, pleasure, and joy that I once thought only came with social status and wealth. Even if I didn't consciously believe that I had to be in a certain income bracket to experience the kind of creative, free, romantic lifestyle I dreamed of, the perception that they go together certainly influenced me on a subconscious level because the two times I was engaged to be married, they were to men from families much more affluent than mine. It was really only when I stopped working office jobs after giving birth and then separated from my husband and divested from middle/upper-class aspirations that I found I could live the kind of life I'd always wanted, as a creative writer and full-time caregiver, in poverty. 

Now I feel like I must backtrack because there's no romanticizing poverty. I live in a house that is crumbling around me, with all kinds of pests crawling through at all times of the year. I live on a street where break-ins are common, and I've had more than one unwanted encounter with police. I'm subject to the effects of environmental racism and other policies that directly impact majority-Black cities. It's not a utopia, except in how my neighbors and friends work together to make it feel like one despite the things we can't control. 

When I imagine truly thriving in this world, I dream of having still less of what I've been told to want, and still more of what I've gained whenever I let go of what I don't really need.

The house I live in was one that my kids' dad and I bought together in 2015, and it was cheap enough for us to afford because it was foreclosed and stood empty for ten years before we bought it, in a Black neighborhood in Baltimore, one of the most affordable cities for housing in the country. The house wasn't in the best shape, and the plan was to fix it up, but we found ourselves without the time, motivation, or skills to be able to do that. When we separated and he moved out, I had my hands as full with childcare as I had been before we separated, plus now all of the house maintenance falls on me too. I've had to face the fact that a big single-family home is too much for me, alone with my young children. If I could rent an apartment, I would, but I live on $2000/month total, plus food stamps, and there is no rent anywhere that is that low. 

The reason I have more house than I can handle is partly because I grew up in a poor, rural area where farmhouses were the norm. Not being used to city life, only a particular style of house felt like a "home" to me from my childhood, so I looked to recreate what felt familiar by buying the cheapest approximation of that style of home. Now I realize that living a comfortable, manageable life in a home that I can maintain and keep clean, repaired, and free of pests means I have to go deeper and dismantle that vision of the large two-story house with a front porch and big backyard as "home."

I know a lot of white people who would leave their neighborhood (or, at this rate, even this country) if they suddenly had enough money to do it. There's a colonizer mindset that sees the whole world as fair game, whatever is most advantageous – whether that means fleeing a place perceived as deteriorating or up-leveling to a "nicer" neighborhood as soon as the opportunity arises. There's no sense of commitment or responsibility to one place, to the land and people you're a part of when you live somewhere. Most white people I know don't even know their neighbor's names. 

I've certainly felt that temptation to flee at times when things get really bad, but of course, I don't have the means to leave, and even if I could, the same problems are everywhere. If I'm finally able to make my own money while caring for my children, and I'm able to stop living in the ruinous house owned by my kids' dad and disentangle our finances completely, then I won't leave my neighborhood, and I'll downsize to a townhouse instead of looking for another single-family home in better condition.

Once I started trying to have less of what I've been groomed into wanting under racialized capitalism, I kept seeing more of where "less" would be more freeing, more pleasurable, and improve my quality of life. A year ago, I still paid for Amazon Prime even though I knew Amazon was terrible for workers; it took their complicity in the genocide of Palestinians and their investments in AI that are used to harm people that made me finally divest from them. Now I'm trying to extract myself from Google for the same reasons, which is a longer process because so many years of photos, notes app entries, email accounts, and so forth are stored with them. Giving up streaming services made me realize how my kids really only watch a few shows and going old-school and buying the discs of those shows (or checking them out from the library) feels empowering because I know nobody can take away our access to them with a snap of their fingers. They also get bored watching the same things and choose to do something else besides watch TV, and I'm amazed and heartened by their creativity (which almost always involves the contents of our recycling bin!). There's surprisingly so much about giving up the things that have come to be seen as necessities (but really aren't) that feels more like freedom and empowerment than "sacrifice." 

The next step for me is to consider how I contribute to oppression in Sudan and DR Congo. I've never been one to buy the latest device just because a new one has been released or spend money on fancy electronics beyond the basic phone and laptop, but I'm still thinking about how I can reduce or eliminate my reliance on these devices even further. I know individual consumer choices aren't the answer to more significant political problems, but at the same time, boycotting and divesting have proven to be effective tools for us to leverage. There's also a psychological impact to divesting because we don't have a material stake in rationalizing our investments. 

It's wild to me that once I got a taste for LESS, I've wanted more and more of it. When I hear about the "sacrifice" required to bring about racial justice, I'm confused for a moment, and then I have to laugh. I wish more people knew how much more prosperous life can be with less of what capitalists and white supremacists want to shove down our throats. I understand that people are scared to lose what they have, especially when it feels like they don't have much compared to what we believe is needed to survive, let alone thrive. It really comes down to relationships. I think most white people have never sustained their inner and outer antiracist work to the point of developing genuine, mutually supportive relationships with Black people, and they believe they'll always be treated with mistrust, so they don't see what they'd be making sacrifices for. But then the mistrust continues to be valid, because they're holding on to the safety net of white privilege.

All I can say is that when my child has a birthday, it's only my Black friends who remember and text me. When I'm having a bit of a hard time, it's my Black and non-Black POC friends who offer to help in material ways, as well as being the first to offer emotional support. Yes, I have lost a large number of white friends over the last twenty years, but the friendships I have now are of an entirely different quality and there really is no question in my mind that it was worth it. Every single "loss" that I've experienced by throwing my lot in against whiteness has been more than worth it. 

The love, community, and connection I experience help me know that another world is possible and that we who care about building that world will survive the death throes of this horrible Empire. Those relationships are what make it possible for me to feel connected to the place I live in and make it so that fleeing transphobia and fascism and the guilt of being a member of a genocidal nation-state is no longer the best that I can dream of. I don't dream of an escape plan or a savior in the form of a political leader coming to the rescue. I dream of having more of what I experience now, plus sharing it with friends who used to be "white" but have jumped that ship and set fire to it on their way out, realizing the water is fine and we were never sailing toward any destination worth arriving at anyway.

Author: Lane Smith

Lane Smith is a transmasculine nonbinary writer with over 20 years of experience as an activist, organizer, and Tarot reader. They have been involved in struggles against war, the death penalty, attacks on LGBT rights and body autonomy for marginalized genders and birthing people, police violence, apartheid, and genocide. They have worked as a social worker in prisons, and in the field of harm reduction with people who are at risk for HIV/AIDS. With a professional Master’s degree in Social Work and an academic Master’s degree in Humanities and Social Thought, Lane expresses their ideas in clear, nonacademic language in the interest of putting social justice values into practice. Lane is the editor of the Tarot & Politics zine, and a member of Solidarity Tarot where they live in Baltimore City, Maryland.

Links: www.mxlanesmith.com

IG: @leftlanesmith

If you enjoyed this piece, be on the lookout for more sharings here from Lane and learn about and support their phenomenal upcoming book, 78 Acts of Liberation: Tarot to Transform Our World.