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Chloe B. McKenzie: Advocating for Financial Justice

Chloe B. McKenzie: Advocating for Financial Justice

A researcher, writer, educator, and financial artist, Chloe B. McKenzie is on a mission to close the wealth gap for Black women and women of color—especially in the trans and gender-nonconforming communities.

McKenzie comes from an affluent household in Prince George’s County, Maryland, one of the wealthiest Black communities in the country. McKenzie’s story of expensive schools, caring mentors, and Wall Street opportunities is intertwined with childhood abuse, burnout, and illness. She understands the juxtaposition of her disparate experiences, how her personal misfortune exposed her, and how financial fortune shielded her.

McKenzie is the founder and visionary of BlackFem, a nonprofit organization working to transform school-based learning so that girls of color in underserved communities have the skills, habits, and resources to build and sustain wealth, and is continuously conducting groundbreaking research on financial trauma, abuse and shame.

OFM had the opportunity to chat more with McKenzie about her activism and how she hopes her work will develop resources to close the wealth gap and help people build healthier relationships with money.

Hi, Chloe! Thank you for taking some time to chat with me. You are a wealth justice activist. Can you tell us more about what that is?
For the longest time, I always tried to figure out what my purpose was. Just to kind of highlight my trajectory to be able to answer this question, I got my start in finance after I graduated from college. I went to Wall Street and became a trader, so I traded everything from student loans to mortgages to credit card receivables. Essentially, the debt that average Americans touch. So, in many ways, I felt very morally bankrupt. I became a financial counselor at a homeless shelter on nights and weekends to make myself feel better about the work that I was doing.

That is where I started to see that there are vey unique experiences and struggles that people have against wealth inequality that is ultimately created by the wealthy elites in our society, which happens to primarily be cis, white men. For me, wealth justice is three things; I always say that wealth justice is a process, a feeling, and a movement all in the same thing. Being a wealth justice activist really means that I am committed to, one, actively undoing generations of financial trauma, abuse, and shaming.

Secondly, wealth justice is a commitment to acknowledging and understanding the unique and intractable struggles that people have against wealth inequality from an intersectional lens. When we talk about wealth inequality or injustices that we see economically, a lot of people are invisible. We only like to talk about social problems from one dimension. Race, gender, or class. What we do when we only look at it from one dimension, we are rendering people with multi-dimensional identities invisible, and those people are the ones who probably have the more severe damaging and intractable experiences against that social problem.

Wealth justice and being an activist means that you are dedicating your time, your work, and your solutions to actually honoring the more unique struggles against a social problem. In this case, it is wealth inequality. The third thing, being a wealth justice activist means you are committed to healing. In my case, I want to intentionally help people heal from financial trauma by holding our social, political, economic, and cultural institutions accountable for how they perpetrate and transmit financial trauma to some of the most vulnerable populations.You grew up very affluently. Did that make an impact on why you wanted to pursue this kind of activism?
It definitely did. Even though I grew up very privileged and affluent, I also grew up in a super abusive household. Those two things taken together, on many occasions, I felt like I needed to reject my privilege. I chose to live in my car to escape a lot of the abuse that I was experiencing, but at the same time, the fact that I was able to have a car as a 16-year-old was part of the reason why I was able to survive. It totally plays into that because what I did not realize is, as I became this expert in wealth management and creation, my story helped me understand financial trauma in the first place.

I started to question, how is it that you are considered an expert in wealth building, but you still have a contentious and almost toxic and unhealthy relationship with money? Why are you still experiencing anxiety economically and financially? Why are you still experiencing pain when it comes to your financial experiences and relationships with money? I think a lot of that plays into some of the violence that I experienced from a familial and relational standpoint, but also the violence geared towards me by just being a Black woman in America and having to operate under an economic system that was designed to be violent towards people that look like me.

You touched on it earlier, but can you talk a bit more as to why you think financial abuse is such a common problem?
I think we understand it, but I think our political, social, and economic institutions specifically refuse to accept the fact that all the wealth that was ever created in America came from two things. It came from stolen Indigenous land, and it came from violence against Black and Brown bodies through the institution of slavery. To amass great wealth that yields the greatest power in America, violence is required. The reason why financial trauma and abuse is so pervasive and prevalent in our society is because of the way that our economic system was designed to work.

For wealth to be created, violence is required, and that kind of shocked me when I started to do the academic research in the first place. It truly kind of encapsulates why people often use language related to violence when talking about finances. Saying like, after I went through that financial experience, I felt bruised. They are using language of violence. Even though we cannot see the lacerations, cuts, or bruises on the body, that experience and the feelings are showing up in our body, and they are being embodied in our financial behavior.

It is pervasive because of our economic system and the way we are taught to achieve or attain material safety. In other words, being able to have enough funds to meet our basic needs for our well-being. In many ways, it either requires that we be violent, or it requires that we experience violence in order to attain it. That is why it is so pervasive.

Related Article: The Equality Act Faces Transphobic Attacks from Senate Republicans

Do you see common threads among the LGBTQ community?
So, it is even worse. One of the things that bothers me about the academic research around economic inequality is that it is so heteronormative, and it also specifically adheres to the gender binary. There is virtually no research on the unique struggles that LGBTQ people, particularly, the transgender and gender-nonconforming folks in that community, have against wealth and inequality. That is the work I am doing. I talked about how looking at wealth inequality from one dimension is dangerous because it renders people’s experiences invisible, and I think by completely rendering the LGBTQ community invisible in our work when we are looking at how unique their struggle is against wealth inequality, that is a form of financial abuse as well. We are rendering their unique experiences invisible, so our solutions will never be adequate enough to help them overcome the issue.

There are a couple of statistics that I don’t think people know, particularly for Black trans folks. Nearly half of Black trans folks have experienced homelessness at some point in their life. Beyond this, the rate of unemployment among Black trans folks is nearly twice the rate of Black people in the U.S. population. We know that unemployment is very high among the Black community in general, but thinking about this intersectionality for Black trans folks, it is twice that. Think about the sheer impact that wealth inequality is having among this group, and again, look at the poverty rate among Black trans people. It is close to 38 percent.

Again, just for context for Black people in general, we know it is higher if you are Black, and 24 percent of Black people live below poverty. Nearly double of that is what Black trans folks are experiencing. Violence that trans people in general experience is a crisis that not enough people are paying attention to, but again, when we think about financial trauma and abuse, it is really to say, to what extent is wealth an indicator who is systematically offered or denied safety, belonging, and dignity?

The way I like to look at things when I am helping people identify ways that we can close the wealth gap for the most disadvantaged populations—Black women, trans and gender-nonconforming people, undocumented folks, etc.—is to say, these populations are required to experience trauma, abuse, violence, and shaming at a higher rate than any other population in order to attain some sense of material safety, belonging, and dignity. That is very pervasive, and unfortunately, part of the reason why the wealth gap is widening. If we do not have solutions and policies that are addressing that for those specific populations, we are going to continue to have this problem.

What solutions and tips can you offer to someone to avoid falling victim of financial abuse and build a healthier relationship with money?
That is a great question. I almost want to reframe it and flip it around, which is one of the ways that we know that we can heal from trauma and abuse is by putting the blame and shame back onto the abuser. One of the things I always talk about is, if we are experiencing a level of systemic trauma or abuse economically, we need to start telling the abuser that they are abusive. A lot of times, we talk about economic inequality from the language of fairness. That is not wrong, but do not think it only captures the kind of multi-layered texture of how violent our economic system is.

One example of this would be, if you are a part of the LGBTQ community, let’s say your workplace knows that and you feel like you are experiencing getting paid less. When you go into negotiations, it is OK, and I encourage people to tell the person who is in charge of setting their salary that they are being financially abusive. There is one thing that most wealthy, white people hate, and that is being called racist and abusive. So, one of the things we need to start doing is naming the abuse because I think that is going to change the way people respond to us.

If we are telling our politicians or people who we elect that they are being financially abusive and perpetrating financial trauma, I wonder to what extent that is going to shake them. If we start using the language of violence and what we are experiencing, I wonder how that is going to not only empower us, but also shift the blame back to where it belongs. We assume we are the blame for something that we never caused, and we ultimately deal with the effects of how the system was designed.You are the founder and visionary of BlackFem. Can you tell us about the company?
Absolutely. I started BlackFem because of the exact thing I mentioned earlier. A lot of the conversations we have around closing the wealth gap tends to highlight Black men and white women and renders Black women completely invisible. I wanted to create a nonprofit that was specifically intended to close the wealth gap for this particular group. The name comes from Black feminist, and Black feminism teaches us to liberate people who are situated at the bottom of this social, political, and economic totem pole.

BlackFem is looking at ways to focus on financial education and heal financial trauma, so we really focus on using the school system as a mechanism through which we can close the wealth gap. Where my work has taken me since BlackFem, I recently opened the Center for Financial Trauma and Wealth Justice. This is where all of this research about financial trauma, abuse, and shaming will live and continue to inform a lot of the solutions that I am putting out into the world via financial education and otherwise.

What do you find to be the most rewarding part about your work?
The most rewarding part for me, there are two things. One, being able to work with young girls and seeing their sense of belonging and dignity grow because of how they see themselves in the educational materials. That is huge. Two, with the way that my research is taking form, seeing how financial trauma, abuse, and shame is being adopted into our lexicon. I think that is very rewarding. To kickstart this necessary collective healing process, we must have the language that captures the multi-layered texture of our unique struggles against wealth inequality. I feel like I am helping people identify what language truly captures their experiences.

At the same time, it can be painful because we are talking about trauma, but it is helping people feel liberated. Like, okay, I never had a word for that, and now I do. Now, I can tell people when they are being financially abusive and perpetrating financial trauma. It is helping people feel more empowered, and that is rewarding.

What more do you hope to accomplish with your platform?
With the Center for Financial Trauma and Wealth Justice, one of the major research reports that we will be putting out, hopefully by the end of this year, is on the unique struggle that the transgender and gender-nonconforming community have against wealth inequality and looking at the kind of points of perpetuation and transmission of financial trauma among this population. I hope that these communities that I think have been rendered invisible are now going to be more adequately embedded in the ways that we think about solving social problems.

By no means can I say that I truly understand what it is like to be trans or gender-nonconforming, but my sibling is transitioning, so this work that I do is incredibly personal. I also feel I am demonstrating to people what it looks like to honor and highlight communities that are continually experiencing violence at the hands of our cultural and financial institutions but doing so in a way that not only highlights and honors their experiences, but also celebrates the strength and resilience of a community that I think we need to support more rigorously.

Before we wrap up, is there anything else you would like to mention our plug?
The only other plugs that I have, given everything that happened last summer with the Black Lives Matter movement, I wrote an Amazon best-selling book called The Activist Investor, which teaches people how to trade stocks. Given everything that has happened with GameStop and Reddit, I know a lot of people have been asking me questions about that. In honor Breonna Taylor, I made that book free to everybody for download on my website.

Specifically, looking at some of the research that I am about to drop on the pervasiveness of financial trauma among Black women, I want to highlight that trans women are women. So, when I do my research talking about Black women, I am inclusive of the transgender and gender non-conforming community for a reason. I will be publishing research on that in the next couple of weeks.

Follow McKenzie on Facebook and Instagram, or visit her official website to stay up-to-date with her latest research and studies. Click here to learn more about BlackFem.

Photos Courtesy of Richie Shazam @richieshazam   

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