Harriet Tubman is Not the Face of Capitalism

In April, US Treasury Secretary Jack Lew announced that he wanted to redesign the $20 bill to include the image of Harriet Tubman.  She was a conductor of the “Underground Railroad” who led hundreds of other escaped slaves to freedom.  The new currency is proposed to enter circulation in 2020, unless US Representative from Iowa, Steve King, and others can block the redesign.

Harriet Tubman resisted capitalism.  I’ve been considering the appropriation of her image to be the new face on the twenty and it doesn’t sit right with me, either, but for different reasons that those of the Iowa Republican.
When the announcement came out, I looked up images of her and stared. Mostly I saw strength.  Simple, determined, hard, soft, confident, and free describe her image.  She looks like the symbol of freedom, as we hold her to be now.  Money is the symbol of oppression to many, many around the world.  Money meant repression for her and her family and people in her lifetime, as it is for many today.  While she lived, she had a price on her skin.  She could have been bought with twenty dollars when she was a sickly little girl.  Now they want to put her face on that very thing that forced her to grow up under the worse conditions of slavery.
It first I felt – and wanted to feel – excited about Tubman’s image on the twenty.  I want to celebrate her efforts too.  Her image on the $20 would get many people to understand her important role in American history.  I want to celebrate her, but not this way.  The appropriation of Tubman’s image on US currency is to convince us that money is good and stands for freedom.  It’s a way to convince more people that capitalism is for them.

Patriarchy and Money
Let me be clear:  it’s not an honor for women to have our image on US currency at all.
Monetization and the commodification and centralization of resources is a patriarchal construct and has led to the competitive race to amass wealth and the ability to enslave people. Patriarchy and money came together around 4,000 years ago, in the Eastern Hemisphere, but only 150 years ago here.  Patriarchy is new, it’s radical.  It’s authoritarian and it’s terrible.  It coincided with the destruction of matriarchy.
The production and use of money has a direct link to human chattel slavery and other atrocities in the name of wealth and patriarchal authority.

As long as medicine is profit-driven, women will undergo unnecessary surgical procedures in hospitals so some doctor can line his pockets, as long as pharmaceuticals deny birth control, money dominates women. As long as profit comes before birth, money dominates women.
With men’s newly achieved ability to amass wealth, came marriage contracts, child brides, trafficking and prostitution.  The use of money has led to the oppression of women.  Putting our image on it at all doesn’t exalt our status in the modern society, it appropriates our image to validate the tools that oppress us.  Capitalism, its not feminist.  To put Tubman’s image on currency is like emblazoning a favorite slave’s name on the whip used to beat them.

Money and Slavery
Tubman’s image on the $20 makes her institutional, the money woman. It doesn’t fit.  Her image is more appropriate in an old, round frame above the fireplace, hung next to my own beloved grandparents, or in bronze as a large statue, under which we can place tokens of love and gratitude.  If Lew’s proposal is accepted, her image will be traded for rocks of crack and blowjobs.  It’s going to be folded in half and stuck into g-strings and lost down the muddy drains along dirty streets.  People would be murdered for bills with her image on it.

I emphatically do not see her as the face of capitalism.  All over the world, people will use those twenties and see her representing US money – US capitalism.  Slavery was central to the development of our brand of capitalism. Harriet Tubman resisted that.  She denied that.  She risked her life to fight it.

It was money that enslaved her, and specifically paper currency that made slave conditions worse.  The rises of American power, founded on colonialism, found it’s power through trade – trade in cotton, slaves, but also financial products.  Bonds were bought and sold and slaves were used as collateral.  They were sold to bondholders worldwide and enriched their investors.  Europeans bought futures of productivity from labor camps that were plantations.  The cotton boom led to the sale of increasing numbers of slaves.  This is capital investment, traded through paper notes and paper money, enabled and encouraged the slavery of Tubman and her people.

The expansion of capitalism occurred on the tortured backs of an enslaved population.  New research by Edward Baptist on cotton-field capitalism tracked the flow of credit south during the decades prior to Tubman’s time.  Huge amounts of money flowed south during the peak of US slavery. He said that southerners created numerous financial innovations that were essential to the slave trade.  Even though England had abolished slavery, investors could still purchase bonds, which strengthened US trade.  Baptist notes that the commodification of suffering and forced labor made the US rich and powerful.  Tubman worked to defy this capital investment.  By taking the commodity out of the system, she rejected it. She outright rejected the commodification of humans.  She denied them their capital investment.

Suresh Naidu, economist from Columbia University, wrote that the drive for profit exacerbated the worst aspects of slavery, like physical punishment and migration to ensure the collateral on their investments. This lead to the tragic separation of families.  Tubman went against the investors to keep her family and friends together, what a grandmotherly thing to do!  The more I read her history, the more I love her and want to commemorate her.  She represents love and family, not financial investment.

Historian Walter Johnson, who also wrote on slavery and cotton, said that federal money was deposited in the Bank of the United States, which was then lent to slave traders. This central banking system was developed by Alexander Hamilton, as was the US currency system. They can keep Hamilton’s image on it. It’s dirty money. He and Andrew Jackson made it that way and they can have it. Leave us out of it.

Money vs. Matriarchy

Matriarchal economies are sustainable.  Economies can exist without the use of money, as is shown throughout history, all over the world.  They didn’t fail because they’re weren’t sensible and sustainable, they were taken over and stomped out with the cultural genocide of colonialism and patriarchal institutions like slavery.  Matriarchal cultures have been systematically destroyed by patriarchal colonial regimes. Look at witch burnings, for example.

Matriarchy is traditional here.  The Cherokee, for example had a matriarchal economy, in which women owned the property.  There was a women’s chief, as well as a war chief and peace chief.  The children stayed with the mother’s family.  The women wouldn’t put a price on natural resources like crops.  Even after the tribes were removed to Oklahoma, the women would get in trouble with the Indian agents for giving away their food for free at the trading posts.  They were forced to sell it at a price. “Mother Earth gave this to us and it doesn’t cost money,” they would say, and my native grandmas still say.

My father’s parents were Cherokee, Creek and Choctaw from Oklahoma, and you couldn’t even say Jackson’s name in my grandma’s home, unless you used a few appropriate cuss words, or were willing to face the consequences.  She  supported civil rights activists who denied capitalist ways.   The way to honor Tubman is to support anti-capitalist movements, not appropriate her image to validate it with the public.

The commodification of natural resources, including human labor, directly led to the destruction of matriarchal economies here in North America. The introduction of the US dollar directly led to the destruction of matriarchal cultures among the southern Muskogee nations.  After Hamilton developed the banks and the US currency system, Jackson and other men worked to back the new US dollars with gold.

After gold was discovered by colonists in North Carolina and Georgia, it was Jackson, known also as Sharp Knife, who initiated the removal of the First Nations in 1830.  The Trails of Tears, had Choctaws, Cherokees, Creeks, Chickasaws and Seminoles forced to move to Oklahoma or killed.
Thousands of people died from exposure, disease and starvation on these forced removals.  Should Tubman’s image represent that?  Jackson, and many other founding fathers of US capitalism, surveyed and sold land to others that was promised or set out in reserve for the tribes.  They got rich doing this.

Our First Nations were forced by the US government to recognize private property, end the matriarchal system of communal ownership, and forced to adopt laws and governments that were based on white political systems and became the Five Civilized Tribes.  Before this, the Indian people took in escaped and free former slaves and gave sanctuary under this communal economic system.  When many slaves escaped to freedom, they came to us.  Their trail to freedom led to us.  African Americans here have never stood alone and do not stand alone now.

Anti-Capitalist Feminist Rant
How about defeating capitalism, instead of putting a dear grandmotherly face on it to make it palatable to the oppressed?  We don’t have to recognize arbitrary prices or positions of power.

The feminist movement I grew up with has been about breaking the glass ceiling and joining men’s clubs like the US Senate and executive boards.  I don’t want to join those clubs, I want to belong to better clubs.  I don’t want women honored for being the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, if that company poisons the water in other community, or destroys their forests, or destroys their cultural sovereignty.  Getting into Congress or the Boards of Directors of those companies that oppress others and enforce capitalist culture around the world should not be our goal.

It took us 150 years of begging for equality and finally were “granted” the right to vote in a government that was not set up by any of us for any of us. There wasn’t a women’s chief who represented us, who sanctioned the US Constitution or the Declaration of Independence.   It wasn’t women who built the US banking system or built the financial institutions of this country.  The US government still has not passed the Equal Rights Amendment.  We are not equal in this government, and still only get 80% of that dollar that gets bestowed upon us for our labor.

Our goal should be to create and participate in government on our own terms, with our own power.  We need to take back birthing, we need to take back medical care, we need to take back food, we need to take back our own labor from profit-interested corporations.  We can elect our own chiefs and enforce our own standards. We can adopt “sharing” economic systems.

Furthermore, as feminists, we have a responsibility to the environment.   Profit-driven capitalism is inherently destructive to the planet and will destroy the great multi-diversity of species that we enjoy in our ecosystem.

I’m So Done With Money
Appropriating Tubman’s image, a woman with so many followers, is a way to convince people that they are empowered within the economic system that still enslaves them.  Modern definitions of capital are based on wage-labor, the production and specific exchange of commodities.  Wage slavery still exists.  We are still limited in choices by the amount of financial capital we have.  We do not, in fact, need to define our personal wealth, in terms of potential labor or potential earnings.  We do not have to subscribe to such a fatally flawed and brutal system.
If we look around us, we can find examples of community solidarity and mutual aid: Kurdistan, Ayotzinapa, the Basque Mountains of Spain, the Black Hills of South Dakota, and North Dakota, Honduras and so many others.  We do not have to submit to patriarchal capitalism in this day and age.  Social media and global solidarity is making it harder for capitalism to oppress local communities these days.  It’s a new day and we don’t have to stick to old standards, but we can remember some traditions and really honor them, not just put a face on them, by adopting them and modernizing them for current needs.
When I see Harriet Tubman’s image, I think she looked like a grandma. She looked like one of those women who did what she had to do to take care of her children.  She looked like she loved her family.  It was out of love for her family that she kept returning to her home state to rescue them and other slaves.  Why couldn’t we honor her with a love holiday, a family love holiday?  Let’s be done with money already so women like her in the future don’t have to waste their strengths and skills rescuing women from slavery or trafficking.
I don’t want to cling to hopes of reform from within the system that was set up without us, and not designed to include us.  It’s like getting out of an abusive relationship.  We just have to leave.  Let them have their corporations and their money.  We can build alternatives.  We still have strong women like Tubman.