Guest User

July 7, 2022

Episode 208: Rebecca Walker: Women Talk Money

Guest User

July 7, 2022

Rebecca Walker has contributed to the global conversation about race, gender, power, and the evolution of the human family for three decades. Since graduating from Yale, she has authored and edited seven bestselling books on subjects ranging from intergenerational feminism and multiracial identity to Black Cool and ambivalent motherhood, and written dozens of articles on topics as varied as Barack Obama’s masculinity, the work of visual artist Ana Mendieta, and the changing configuration of the American family.

Rebecca has written, developed and produced film and television projects with Warner Brothers, NBCUniversal, Amazon, HBO, and Paramount, and spoken at over four hundred universities and corporate campuses internationally, including Harvard, The Whitney Museum, and TEDx Lund. When Rebecca was 21, she co-founded the Third Wave Fund, which makes grants to womxn and transgender youth working for social justice.

Rebecca has won many awards, including the Women Who Could Be President Award from the League of Women Voters, was named by Time Magazine as one of the most influential leaders of her generation, and continues to teach her masterclass, The Art of Memoir, at gorgeous and inspiring places around the world.

There’s no doubt about it; money is a taboo topic in our society. But not talking about money only serves to uphold inequalities and injustices. Rebecca Walker is an advocate for transparency and, during this episode of the Rational Reminder Podcast, she shares the importance of exploring the factors that have influenced our relationship with money so that we can begin to understand how we can use money as a tool to effect the kind of changes we want to see in the world. This is the intention behind her latest collection, Women Talk Money. No matter your gender, race, or financial standing, this episode will provide you with a new perspective on how to approach money. Rebecca is a well-known speaker, author, consultant and was named by Time Magazine as one of the most influential leaders of her generation. Tune in today.

Key Points From This Episode:

What money represents and why it is so important that we understand it better. [0:02:21]
The intention behind Rebecca’s latest collection, Women Talk Money. [0:03:05]
A brief overview of some of the stories Rebecca shares in her book about our relationship with money and how it impacts our lives and society as a whole. [0:05:13]
How race, class, and gender impact how knowledge about money is transferred. [0:08:50]
Problems that arise when we aren’t transparent about our finances. [0:11:22]
How the way we approach money ties into many broader societal issues. [0:15:45]
Examples of how not talking about money renders people powerless. [0:17:45]
Rebecca explains how she has taught her son about money from a young age. [0:20:58]
Rebecca’s approach to talking to other people about money. [0:22:30]
Issues that may stem from an obsession with money. [0:24:32]
How Rebecca defines “enough.” [0:27:09]
The role that men can play in empowering women in relation to money. [0:29:24]
Advice for women who are struggling to form a healthy relationship with money. [0:33:33]
How Rebecca defines success in her own life. [0:36:04]

Read the Transcript:

So off the top, what does money represent to you?

Money represents so many different things. It's the energy through which we can manifest our vision for our lives, really. And not just for our personal lives, but for our families and our communities and the world. So it is an essential... You know, none of us are going to be able to fully escape, exit capitalism, late stage capitalism, however, we want to describe it. And so while we're in, it's important to think about it as a tool for moving through the world as powerfully and intentionally as possible.

What effects do you think learning about money has on people's lives?

I think it's critical to learn about money. I think that this book is really... People come to it and they say, oh, you know, this is completely different than I thought it was going to be. They thought it was going to be a book about how to invest, how to create a budget, breaking down the stock market, savings bonds and T... And I say, well, this is actually the book that comes before you do that work. This is the book that really helps people to excavate their own stories about money. What they've learned about money, what they feel about money. Do they feel they deserve money? Do they feel guilty because they have too much money? Do they feel that they're just following a script for how to engage with money or do they feel that in fact they have an awareness of how they want to use money that makes them feel good. That makes them feel good and that is, again, as I just said, in alignment with the higher vision.

So I think that so many people think about learning about money in this very specific, solely financially pragmatically based way. It's these numbers, you're making this, you do this with it, da da da da. And for me learning about money, it's about learning about yourself. What do you care about? At the end of the day when you die, you will have left a legacy, not just in how you've treated people, how you've loved, what you've created, what you've said, but how you have used your money, how you have transformed your labor, your mind, your intellectual capacity into something that can help and support the things you believe in. So in that way, I think that learning about money is really about learning about yourself and knowing who you are, first and foremost, so that you can act effectively and skillfully with money as an extension of yourself.

That is so interesting. And so many of the stories in your book, the individuals learned about money from how and who they're brought up with as opposed to being taught somewhere else. What's the implication of that in learning to care about yourself, do you think?

I think so many of the pieces, the one that just came to mind is this Sonalee's piece. Sonalee is a writer who on Instagram calls herself The Fat Sex Therapist. And she writes about the ways in which her immigrant family, that was very focused on controlling her body through money. So withholding money from her because she didn't have the kind of perfect body type and wasn't of the sort of beauty standard that they thought would guarantee success in this country.

And I think about Latham Thomas's piece, who's an incredible person working in the doula space, around maternal health rights and the incredible rate of Black mortality in Black women when they're having children. And she learned about her first teaching on money was watching her mother who was a real estate agent, go into the bank and try to cash her commission check of $23,000, I think. And the bank teller in Oakland, California, thinking that she must have gotten this money illegally, calling the police, and Latham seeing her mother handcuffed by the police who assumed that her mother had gotten this money illegitimately. And that is the story of many Black women.

There are stories that are common to immigrant women, Black women, White women who have privilege, White women who don't have privilege, trans women who need money. We have a great story by a trans woman who's talking about the importance of money to pay for her transition process to become herself. And so she's intersecting with socio-cultural narratives as well.

So yes, I think all of the women, really in this book, all of the writers and all of us are getting messaging very early in our lives about money. That needs to be metabolized, that needs to be looked at that needs to be unpacked. And that's what each of these writers is doing. So Latham sort of comes into consciousness around the fact that she's holding this idea that it is unsafe and possibly that she will be criminalized for having money as a Black woman in America. And how does she rewrite her story around money, if that's her first imprint about it? Sonalee also, how does she rewrite her story about money if it's been used primarily by people she loves to try to control her body?

So I think it's very important to understand the ways in which the culture at large and then the people in our immediate families are transmitting these ideas to us constantly about our worth, about how we should be, how we should conform to a certain way of living and thinking about wealth, thinking about prosperity, thinking about health.

And so many of us go through life without even questioning that. And that's kind of what I mean about skipping to the next book. You know, it's like we go through life thinking, okay, this is what we do with money. We invest it. We try to get more and more and more. And we buy this and we buy that. And that leads to pretty much hoarding, which leads to a kind of built-in system of profound inequality and a sort of lack of awareness of how we could instead write our stories around money to address that inequality and do different things with our money. So part of this is breaking that narrative that we've just been sort of accepting blindly, just thinking, oh, well this is what it is, you know? No, actually this is not what it has to be.

And have women and men traditionally been taught about money the same way?

Obviously we can't generalize about either gender. I think that men of color are taught about money in different ways than privileged White men. Men who are not privileged, who do not come from wealthier backgrounds are not taught about money in the same way as... So there's so much variety. And the same is true for women, I think. We have a great piece from Leah Hendrix-Hunt, who's the daughter of Helen Hunt, who's one of the most wealthy women in America, if not the world. And she's writing about how she was taught pragmatically about money in a certain way that I would say some men haven't been taught.

But if we're going to generalize, let's just generalize for the case of just making... I think that women are definitely left out of the conversation about money management for the most part. I think that's changing a lot. Some people that I'm really loving in that space like Sallie Krawcheck, for instance, the founder of Ellevest. I think Suzie Orman did a great job when I was in college and after, and she continues to try to bring the voice of the feminine or bring the narrative around money to see it expressed from a woman's point of view. Even if she's just being a woman, talking about money has been very important.

But traditionally, when you look at most of the advisors, when you look at most of the people talking about money in all the different platforms, they have been primarily men. It's been a men's game. As we know, women were not allowed to control their money, were not allowed to get credit along, were not allowed to have bank accounts without their husband's names until fundamentally recently, we're talking the last 50 years. So we've got a lot to reverse. So there is a certain comfort and historical precedent of men being in charge of money, literally.

And then, in our country, Black women and men were literal currency as enslaved people. So that speaks to the complexity of who gets taught about money. So you think about cultures and peoples who are left out of this conversation and it doesn't always split on gender lines. But I would say generally, yes, we are taught very differently and included to different degrees in the conversation, both by habit and design.

How important do you think it is to talk openly about money?

Oh my God, it's incredibly important. I think that I have become this advocate for transparency. Like, I want to tell people, okay, so this is what I made for my last book, this is what I made. I feel that there's something about the shrouding of the actual financial details of our lives that plays into some of this confusion about money. And especially within women's communities, that the sort of taboo around talking about money, keeps us from sharing important information with one another, keeps us from understanding the way that money is working in the culture, who's getting what, who's not getting. So the less we talk about it, the less aware we are really of how it works.

And once you start talking about it's shocking for people who haven't talked about it at all. I remember learning about S Corps for instance, and I don't know, here in America, the S Corp is this fantastic, in terms of tax savings and being able to invest in your retirement accounts, it's a special taxation code or designation set by the IRS that allows for building wealth in a way that many people, and I would say White men have been doing for a very long time. And many other of us had no idea this was even a possibility. And I only learned about that because I was in a conversation with someone who was very knowledgeable on the subject. Another woman actually, and this is how we learn.

And also, as we really see in the book, I think each writer... And when you do an anthology, a collection, I've done five, I'm not sure how I've done so many. I write my own books, but I somehow, when I fall in love with an idea, end up doing a collection, because I think that more voices on the subject will actually be more informative and enlightening and they will form a kind of community within the pages of the book. That's very powerful to me. But when you do a collection as an editor, you do quite a bit of, not therapy, so to speak, but as an editor, I want people to move from a kind of stuckness through a kind of processing of what happened to them, to a point of recognition and revelation all the way to the end, to some point of resolution. And I think that's what is happening in each of these pieces. And that's what having conversations about money with one another helps us to do, to get unstuck and get ourselves to a healthier, more clarified place with our relationship with money.

Do men and women go through that process differently? Do you think?

Well, I mean, hard to say. This book is really focused on women, so I really have spent a lot of time thinking about it in that context. But one of my earlier collections, What Makes a Man, is about toxic masculinity and I interviewed 200 men and I asked them about when they quote unquote "became a man." And almost all of them, I would say 96% of them talked about either being verbally or physically pressured to become a man. Meaning to be stoic, not have feelings. Meaning to focus on being a provider and working for the family and that being the primary way of contributing to family life. Being a soldier and a protector. And so when I think about that, I do think that it's quite possible that in the context of masculinity, men are taught that they should be the breadwinners in order to gain respect and that there is a kind of mandate put on them to bring home the bacon and assert themselves in that way.

And so there's not really a lot of room for emotion in that. There's really not a lot of room for alignment with one's own personal ideas or beliefs. That is the belief of masculinity when it's taught that way. So that's very different. When you think about women, we are often taught to provide in psycho-emotional ways for our families and money is kind of thought of as the way in which we can amplify that, the way in which we can amplify our role as the emotional heart of family life and of the sort of culture, as opposed to this kind of directive that is often completely detached from emotion.

So I think there's a lot to talk about in that conversation, but I really wanted to make a distinct space with this book for women because we are so... When you think about men, it's much more explicit. You know, go make this money. For women, it's like, you need to have a job, you need to work, you need to have your independence, you need to be able to blah blah blah blah. But it's not quite as direct. And it's often shrouded. And I think we are taught not to talk about it. Like, okay, so that's kind of, you know, you're doing that and it's important that you do that, but don't talk too much about it because that will call attention to the fact that men are slowly not the breadwinners and in charge, and you'll be challenging their egos really.

And I think all of this is changing. Obviously it's changed so much in the last 20, 30 years, and yet we still are dealing with this. And if you look at what's happening in America right now with the erosion of civil rights, with things that are unspeakable at this particular moment, a lot of us are in shock. I think there is a sense that certain people are trying to take us back to a time in which we really aren't supposed to talk about anything as women. And we are moving toward a space where the state has a lot more control and is taking away our voices and our autonomy. And so I think it's more important than ever for us to be clear about our right to talk about and control and decide, not just what's happening right now with Roe, you know, our own bodies, but our money. How we are going to make it, spend it, think about it, control it. So, yes, I think gender plays a huge role in these discussions.

What about marginalized communities?

Yeah, I think that's what, what we're speaking to here, the intersection. So the same has historically been true in communities of color. Specifically, obviously in the African American community, in Native populations, there is a sense that it's more important that we not be sophisticated around these issues. That many things are in place to keep us ignorant around money, to keep us in a sense of trauma and scarcity and need. And that is part of a plan. It's part of the design of keeping us fundamentally, in one way or another, enslaved, on the reservation, at risk of deportation, terrified of violence of all kinds, because we are not privy to some of these conversations around intergenerational wealth or multi-generational wealth or generational wealth. We are not being taught the basics of economic principles.

I think about my son, who's 17. I've been talking to him about money his whole life, and making sure that he understands how money is working. And he goes to a great school and they don't teach economics until 11th grade. There's no discussion about how money works in this country until they're 16, 17 years old. That's too late. And he's at a school that is not full of African American students and Native student. So even his information that he's getting too late, if that was the only place he was getting it, I know for sure is not being taught in other schools where it absolutely needs to be taught. So I think that poverty and information and education around money are correlative. So the less people know about money, the less people know internally about how they feel about money and what's happening with them with money that's not just, you know... And the less they know about how to build and use their money skillfully, the more likely they are to not have any.

So it's not rocket science and we definitely need to reform our educational system so that everybody is taught the basics, not just about this financial system that we're living within and the various levers and ways in which it works, but also our government. That's something that is very important to me right now, and it always has been. My father's a civil rights lawyer. The fact that our kids are not being taught explicitly how the government works, what rights they have, what rights can be taken away. We're right now in a technocracy, so they're not being taught about how technology is being used to monetize them, to surveil them, all of us. So again, all of this is very intertwined, inextricable. So the less you know, the less you know. And the less prepared you are to have a functional life, really, to be able to negotiate the vicissitudes of this reality.

So you mentioned, you talked to your son about money. Who else, and how do you talk about money with other people? How do you open up those conversations? Do you have any tactical recommendations?

Great question. I talk to my son about money in different ways as it comes up in his life. When something costs... You know, he wants this, and then we talk. I think when he was five or six, he wanted a Lego or a few Legos. And at that point it was about, okay, here's $15, that's your budget and go and figure out what you can get with that $15. Or I think it was $10 actually. He has an interest in Japanese fashion, so then it became, well, who's making these clothes? Where are they being produced? What are they being paid? What are the different elements here financially? Where does exploitation start? How do you feel about that? We're thinking about China and cotton coming from China and cotton being harvested and where it's being harvested and how those people are being treated, all of those things.

And then going on trips and traveling and thinking about what are these people being paid and why are we spending money in this space and not in that space? And talking about real estate. Where are we living? Why do we live here? So those conversations, as he's grown up and brought certain things to me, I've tried to use those as teaching opportunities around money. And then of course I forced my father who's really a big stock market guy, to teach my son everything he could about the stock market that he did not teach me. And I felt very upset with him for not teaching me.

In terms of bringing the subject up with others, I'm very frank with people. I think people know, I'm a person who's not drawn to small talk per se, and I think a lot of people say that, but I'm very focused on what's happening for you right now. If we got off of this and we started talking, I would be like, okay, so tell me what's happening in your lives. Are you about to have a kid? How's your mother doing? Are you taking care? You know, what's happening?

And in the context of trying to figure out how to connect with someone, by connecting with their authentic story of who they are in any moment, I never leave money out of that conversation. I always want to know, okay, so how is that working for you financially? How are you handling that? And then I generally talk about how I'm handling that. If it's having a kid, somebody's about to have a child or deciding not to have a child, I talk about what it was like for me and some of the challenges that came up. And try to give advice when I can, or at least my experiences, or if someone is in a different position that I may or may not be in, I try to really learn from them and let them know, look, that's an experience that I haven't had to face, so how are you handling that financially? Economically? What do you have to teach me about how I might plan for that to happen in the future? Are there things I should do?

I talk a lot right now, in this stage of my life, I'm thinking a lot about trust and estates. I was not thinking about that 20, 30 years ago. And so this is the moment when it's about making sure that things are in order in my family, that my parents have handled those things and supporting them in that and understanding what that is. And then also thinking about doing that for myself and my children and my family. And, so I'm just, I'm very frank about all of these things. I don't see the value in not talking about them.

Do you think money can become too much of a focus in people's lives?

Absolutely. I think many people are obsessed with money and they chase money and they will do anything for money. And they're not really reflecting on, something someone asked, when do you know that you have enough? There's a way in which many people are, I don't know, thinking that if they just keep making more and more and more money, they'll be protected from the struggles of life or whatever is coming down the pike for all of us in this particular moment in human history. And so there's this drive and focus on just that. And I think that's where we see a lot of abuses of power. That's where we see a lot of psychological personality disorders. I think that's where we see a lot of pain in family systems. When people are so focused on money, that they are unable to focus on all of the other aspects of life and they believe that they can treat or support or feed all of the other aspects of life through this pursuit of money.

So, yes, I think that's a huge problem in our culture. A kind of hyper fixation. And that's across the board. And obviously, when you're poor, when you're working class, when you're struggling just to stay afloat, you have to think about money all the time, because if you don't think about money all the time, you might not eat. You might not sleep. You might, you know, whatever it is. So you're forced to think about money all the time. And yet even in those communities, there has to be a way in which there's a balance so that the survival drive is balanced with the human ability to envision a different future for yourself.

And this is true in every spot on the spectrum. We have to be able to balance what we see, what we want for the world and how we can move toward that with this focus on making money. They have to be connected. And if they're not, then we get, I think what we are experiencing right now, which is a kind of runaway drive toward wealth that is unbelievably destructive. And wealth equals power, and people are afraid to lose power, and so they're afraid to lose wealth. And so we have what we have.

So how do you think about the concept of enough? You mentioned enough. How do you think about that?

Yeah, I mean, I think about enough, I've thought a lot about this, actually. I think about enough as enough to support my family and to really focus on the things that I care about for my family. Education, health, experiences that will cultivate their humanity, their empathy, their ability to feel connected to people of all different backgrounds. My mother's family was very, very poor in the deep south, her parents were sharecroppers. They were displaced constantly because they didn't own their own home. So I think a lot about enough being having a place that I cannot be removed from.

But also enough to me includes being able to give money to others and to be able to support the causes that I believe in, the rights that I believe in, the organizations that are fighting for the rights that I believe in. To have enough to contribute to the people that I know and don't know, who at whatever given moment don't have enough for the basics. And obviously there's a world in which I'd love to have a hundred million dollars or a billion dollars to do that with, to sort of restore some balance in the world. But my sense of enough is related to my sense of my own energy and my own mental health and what I believe my purpose is in this lifetime. And it's not to spend 75% of my time focused on making that billion dollars. That equation doesn't work for me.

So it's this dance and knowing that I'm human and I know myself and what I can give. I want to show up for everybody that I need to show up for. And I want to make sure that I can have enough to share, and it doesn't have to be a billion dollars, but it's still very meaningful.

What do you think is most important for men to understand about the way that women experience money?

That's a great question.

I'll give you some real quick additional context.

Sure. No-

Despite our efforts to the contrary, the vast majority of our audience consists of men.

Okay. So all you guys out there. All you men out there. My dear men listeners, I think that it's really important to understand that it's hard for women, I think, generally to talk about money and to feel confident and competent and savvy about money. I'm sure some of you are thinking, well, my wife is really kick-ass at handling money. That's great. But often there's a story under there that needs support or excavating, that sometimes it's important to have really honest conversations and to share what you know. If you're listening to this podcast all the time, you're obviously learning a lot about money and if your sister or mother or spouse or whomever is not, you may be learning things that are very valuable to share. That it's not about holding onto this information as a form of power, but you will actually be more powerful within your community when you share that information and help to empower the women in your lives, to be more sophisticated and equipped to handle and manage and think about money.

I think it's important that you know the history of how women have been traditionally excluded from the management of money and that you are sensitive to that history. And that the rights that women have won to participate in our culture as equal beings extends into this space. And the more autonomous women can be, the more likely we are to have the agency to develop our own lives and to fight for the civil rights that benefit all of us. So it's very important that you work as an ally to women if you value your own civil rights, if you value your own autonomy, because we will stand with you, if you stand with us, and this is a nice place to start.

How does the current financial system affect women differently than men or does it?

Well, we know that women in general are paid far below what men are paid. We know that women are still tracked into what are considered feminine friendly jobs. Nursing, administrative, sort of different jobs. That the workforce itself has been incredibly gendered. And we know that's also changing for certain populations. So I think I've covered a lot of that already, but I think it's important that we have more and more role models. That women are really put in positions of power. I'd like to see a lot more women in the Fed. I think that, again, we are dealing with a history of exclusion from these positions of financial power, decision making. We've been marginalized and we're catching up. So the more space that's made for us at the table, the more we fight to get, the better off we will all be.

I have a lot of faith in women in what we want to do with our money. When you look at how women spend money, often most of the time we're spending money trying to better the lives of our children and our families and the world in which we live. That's traditionally our inclination. And I don't want to, again, generalize or make this genetic or in any way say this is a given, but this is what we bring to the table. And if we are not allowed to be at the table, a lot of those decisions, that are ultimately going to be species saving decisions, are not going to be made correctly. And I think that's, again, what we're seeing now. And that the absence of our voices at all of these different tables is creating a reality in which the health education and welfare of huge swaths of the human population are being ignored and degraded, actually. So I think that's that. That's what I think on that.

Great thoughts.

Thanks.

What advice do you have for women who are struggling with their relationship with money?

I think women should talk about it, think about it. I think a lot of women have come to me and said that reading this book has been really good for them. It's been a beginning. It's something that kickstarts their process of reflecting on different moments that they've had in their lives that have really impacted their beliefs and actions around money. And so, I think that's the first step, try to remember your first experience with money. What did you feel? What did you learn? What did you change about yourself? And then just look systematically at those beats in your life. Usually they're like three or four or five by the time you're in your thirties, maybe, that have been definitive. And that you're usually carrying some residual feelings about, that need to be re-calibrated, understood within a different narrative so that you can make different decisions moving forward.

So I think there's that period of internal reflection and then bringing some of that to a friend, a family member, a coworker, a therapist, somebody who you think can guide you in getting some clarity. And then, again, my thing about the two books, and then really reach out to advisors who are very knowledgeable, do a lot of research, read a lot of books about the financial situation and how to actually build wealth or to build whatever is enough for you.

And just be unabashed about this process. I think simplify the whole thing. Think about it as learning how to drive. Something that's not mystified, it doesn't seem like it's too hard. Something that, oh, I never understood that. You know, I never got numbers. My father told me I was bad at math, so I never bound to... You know, whatever that story is, figure out how to let go of it so that you can actually understand that this is a system. If we think about the financial marketplace, there are different financial products that you need to just understand what they are and how you can use them. It's a kind of basic education, if you can get there. And literally it's not rocket science. But you have to believe. You believe you can go get a driver's license, so believe you can figure out how to build wealth or whatever is enough for you.

Our final question for you.

Sure.

How do you define success in your life?

Ah, how do I define success in my life? I always say to my loved ones that their smile, their happiness, their health and wellbeing is confirmation of my success. That the happier, the healthier they are, the more I have been able to do what I want to do in this life, which is have a happy, healthy family and community. And so I guess my measurement of success is how happy the people around me are. I don't ever want to be a person who people are relieved when I die. I don't want people to be relieved, I want them to be sad. I want them to miss me because I have made a really important contribution to their health and wellbeing. That's really success to me.

I think all of my books, you know, this book is number 10, I think, and they all are about trying to make space for people to tell their own stories. Whether it's my story, which I've now told in different ways and three different books and dozens of essay. How do I rewrite my story so that I am not a tragic mulatto, but a magic mulatto, you know, Black, White and Jewish, my first memoir about growing up biracial, is really that kind of story.

And I think another aspect of feeling successful for me is knowing that my work has helped people to rewrite their stories in powerful ways. And this book is no different. When women come to me and say, your book really helped me to rethink my relationship with money, or I remembered this after reading your book, or I felt that... That is a real measurement for me. That makes me feel successful. Expanding the limits of the kinds of stories that are permitted, that are amplified. Expanding that to be much more inclusive, because I think we need every story in order to honor every story and support every story.

Such a wonderful answer and a wonderful conversation. Rebecca, great to meet you. And thank you for joining us.

Thank you so much for having me. It was a great interview. I love talking to you guys and I wish you the best and all you guys out there listening, I believe in you and I support you. Go do the right thing, help us save this struggling planet.