My Icky Sticky Evolving Relationship With Consumerism

Beyond the Book: Privileged anti-Capitalism?

Ashes to ashes and all that. Image description: a photograph of our bedroom after our house fire.

I feel like a lot of us consume in ways that we don’t fully investigate. We are aware that consumerism is “bad” and we are aware that we participate in it to some degree. Sometimes an article on labor practices or the environmental impact of our constantly upgraded cell phones will cause us to shake our head and delay a purchase or two. We have one or two things we do regularly to feel like we are on the better side of the consumerist spectrum. We’ll recycle faithfully and bring reusable bags to the grocery store when we remember to put them in the car. But for the most part, we will consume in patterns set for us in our childhoods, responding to vague decades-old definitions of safety, security, and comfort tempered by the finite realities of our budgets. For those of us who will not become anti-capitalist activists or environmentalists, this will often be our relationship to consumption for our entire lives.

But sometimes a thing will happen that will throw your relationship to consumption onto its head. For me, that thing was a house fire that wiped out all of our belongings.

In September of 2020, at the age of 39, after decades of amassing a very cluttered family household of clothing, furniture, books, toys, crafting supplies, makeup, and so much more, I was left with the following items:

• The pair of pants I was wearing

• The shirt I was wearing

• The underwear and bra I was wearing

• The earrings I was wearing

• The engagement ring I was wearing

• The phone and wallet in my pocket

• My passport

• One dress and two sweaters that were sealed in a bag under my bed

• Three very smoke and soot damaged paintings

• One boob sculpture thing

• Two art prints that were rolled up and sealed under my bed

• A set of partially melted keys

• My wedding band

That’s it. No pillow for our head, no shoes for our feet. And after the initial daze of having watched in absolute terror and bewilderment as flames shot out of the roof of what was our home settled, and as we started to realize that we really were never going back and that everything really was gone, I was tasked with rebuilding an entire life of possessions from scratch.

And as I started thinking about everything that was gone, and everything that needed to be replaced, I started to realize how very fucked up my relationship with consumerism had been.

Here is a list of the things that I was (and still am) heartbroken to various degrees to have lost in the fire:

• The original artworks I had collected from BIPOC artists

• The books that I owned that were signed by authors I love and the books that I had owned for decades and read and reread so many times. Books that help make me the writer I am today.

• The notebooks filled with notes and outlines from my first two books

• My plants - the first ones I’d ever been able to keep alive in my adult life

• The plushy frosted doughnut I won at Universal Studios Florida having beaten my partner at carnival basketball. I kept this on my awards shelf in my office, with all of my recognition for being good at writing and stuff.

• The baby pictures of my kids that don’t also exist on social media. Especially this one photo of me breastfeeding my older son Malcolm that I kept in the same broken pink wooden frame that I had first put it in when I was a new mom at 20. Little side story here: When Malcolm was about six he came to me just totally scandalized by the fact that baby cows drank milk from their moms’ bodies. He did not believe me at all when I told him that many human babies did the same with their parents. Then I reached over to my nightstand and grabbed this beloved photo and handed it to him. He stared at it in silence for a good five to ten seconds and then said, “Well, this is awkward.” Shit. Now I’m crying. I think I miss this one picture more than everything else.

I’m just speaking for myself here. My partner and kids lost a lot in the fire. I know that Gabriel is still mourning so much of the memorabilia he had collected in decades of touring and performing, I know that he would love to have all of his writing notebooks and family photos back. I know that both of my sons lost their first guitars and my older son is really sad that he hasn’t been able to get a replacement copy of his high school diploma. But for me, the above list - that’s it. An 1800 square foot house crammed to the gills with stuff. Stuff that I spent so much money, time and energy over the years acquiring. Stuff that took so much human labor and environmental resources to make. That’s all I missed. Enough things to fit in maybe two decent sized boxes.

How fucked up is that?

The truth is, when I look back at my decades of consumerism, I had very rarely been intentional or “responsible” with my spending choices. So much of what I owned was effectively fancy garbage and it burned up and was then shoveled into a giant trash bin as such.

And I’m not all that ashamed of this. I am sad, and sometimes angry. But as I became suddenly aware of how fucked up my relationship with consumerism had been, it also quickly became very clear why and how little choice in it I actually had.

At the same time that our house burned down my book So You Want To Talk About Race was in the middle of a six month stint on the New York Times Bestseller list. I was seeing book sales that I had never dreamed of, and suddenly I was commanding speaking rates that I wouldn’t have been able to ask for without giggling before. If the fire had hit us a year or two earlier, we would have been so very fucked. But it hit us at a time where we could afford to rebuild with the care that I would never have been able to do before.

The truth is, it’s expensive and highly inefficient to be poor. When you don’t have money for good shit you have to buy cheap shit. And when you buy cheap shit it acts like cheap shit and you have to replace it a lot. And then you have even less money for shit. That’s how you end up with a house full of cheap shit. It’s not because you love cheap shit or don’t know what quality shit is or you are some environment-hating monster who loves throwing shit in the trash and replacing it every year with more shit you’ll have to throw in the trash next year. It’s because you can’t afford to invest in the things that would last and save you money in the long run.

Take clothing for example. For most of my workaday life, I desperately needed my very unsatisfying and underpaid cubicle job in order to pay my bills and feed my children. I needed to look professional in order to get said job, keep said job, and maybe even get promoted in said job. Some of the more obnoxious people talking about the ills of consumerism would advise somebody like me to take the money I would have “wasted” on 10 cheap and flimsy items made from petroleum based highly flammable products and likely sewn by workers who were ill-treated and under paid and instead buy one really nice quality suit that was going to last me a decade. I mean - how could I pretend to be a good person who cares about people and not opt for the suit? Have I not read the articles in fashion magazines of how to build a capsule wardrobe?

But here’s the thing, there are seven days in the week and I needed to have clothes to wear for all of them, and at least five days of the week those clothes needed to differ enough to let my boss and coworkers know that I do indeed do laundry. Oh, and my kids would also like to have clothes for school because being known as “the naked kids” was not a goal of theirs, and they kept growing because I kept using a sizable portion of my meager wages (which was, to my calculations, exactly $20 less than I needed each month to pay for bills and food) to feed them so they were constantly needing more clothes even though I could swear I had just bought them clothes.

So you buy the fastest of fast fashion because it’s what you can afford and because it can give you a semblance of the “professional” look you need if you want to convince your bosses to maybe give you a little more money. Don’t talk to me about thrift shopping, it is almost impossible if you are tall or fat and often just as expensive, if not more, than buying something cheap and clean and ready to go off the rack). And you buy it for your kids as well so you can keep their rapidly growing bodies clothed and so they don’t get teased for wearing highwaters every day. And that fast fashion usually doesn’t stay in your closet long enough to fall apart because it is almost always the fashion of the very moment and six months later you need new clothes because you’re still trying to look professional and these clothes are outdated and faded and the sweaters are all pilly, and also maybe you like being fashionable and feeling pretty even if society says you are too poor to be so.

Home furnishings? Try leaving an abusive marriage at 21 with a baby, a crib, and a futon. Nothing more. You can afford half of a nice quality bed that will last you years and not make your back hurt, or an entire apartment worth of boxed, assemble yourself, uncomfortable plywood furniture - half of which will break in your hands like you are The Hulk trying to move a box of raw eggs and not a single mom trying to move a desk you bought on clearance at Big Lots when you try to move it to your next apartment after your landlord raises your rent and you can’t afford to stay in your current place.

All this to say, when I get sad about how little I miss the things that were lost in the fire, it’s not even about hyper-consumerism or even the impact on the environment - even though those things absolutely matter. It’s about the fact that for two decades I worked so damn hard to provide a safe and comforting home for my family and I couldn’t love any of it because if you are poor you are trapped in a cycle of having to stretch your limited funds to buy the cheap garbage that looks sort of like something you could love but then it falls apart in six months and you have to go buy it again because the shit you could actually love and care for and would provide you with a real sense of permanence and security in your home is forever out of your price range.

But I did work hard for all of those pieces of shit in my home. And I know that my labor isn’t shit, and I would have kept all of that shit I’d worked so hard for until it fell apart because it had my blood, sweat, and tears in it.

And then it all burned up and I was free.

But I was only free because I could afford to be.

The weird combination of having a sudden influx of money that enabled me to buy really quality items for the first time, and no place to put anything, as we had no place to live, meant that I had a lot of time to become really intentional with our home and my belongings. When you are moving from hotel to hotel and airbnb to airbnb for over six months, you will not buy a giant wardrobe of clothes right away because you don’t want to pack them up every few days or week. You will not rush out to buy a boxed, assemble-yourself living room set so you’ll have something to sit on because you don’t actually have a room to put it in.

Because I had the time, and because I had the money, and because I didn’t have the space to accommodate any fast spending, I found myself spending days, even weeks, searching for the perfect sofa that would fit my aesthetic for years and would stand up to the rough treatment of my very tall sons who think that just about any piece of furniture can be wrestled on, or ordering the exact kitchen range in the color of my dreams from Europe that fit all of my cooking needs because I could wait the 11 weeks it would take to get here. It was healing at a time where I felt so unmoored. A time where we had no kitchen, no photos on the walls, no sense of home. It meant a lot to know that this would be the last time I would have to replace everything and that I would love it every single day for decades to come (we now have more smoke detectors than rooms in the house in order to try to make sure that’s the case).

I also had the time and money to look for companies that had better labor practices. I was able to buy clothing made with more sustainable materials. I was able to shop for quality vintage items that made me feel oh so smug because not only was I able to buy items that would last a lifetime without contributing to waste, I was able to buy from small independent shops in order to do so.

Y’all, quality vintage furniture is expensive as fuck.

Suddenly I had a whole new vocabulary around sustainability, accessibility, and ethical consumerism. This process had deepened my relationship with the things that I own in a way that I have never experienced before. I love my clothes. I love every piece of furniture in my house. I feel deeply connected to my belongings and I look forward to passing them along to my kids and my grandkids. I would never wish the trauma of fire on anyone, but I’m at the same time so grateful for what this rebuilding process has brought to my life.

And all of it could have me feeling quite smug and righteous. All of it can have me feel like I’m a “better” consumer now than I was just sixteen months ago. And sometimes it does. Sometimes I look at the way my mom and the clutter that always seems to surround her, who raised me and my siblings in a desperate kind of poverty that makes you cling to every single piece of trash that you picked up at a garage sale for decades like it’s treasure, and want to lecture her about being more intentional in her spending now that we have the ability to help her financially. Sometimes I catch myself being the same person who used to cause me to feel shame at not being able to magically conjure up the financial freedom to be “responsible” and “ethical” with my spending choices. Sometimes I’m an asshole.

Because the truth is that while this has been revelatory for me on an individual level, none of it is actually revolution. If only the wealthy are able to afford to spend in ways that are free from the toxic exploitations of hyper-capitalism, then we must recognize that we are just as big a part of toxic consumerism in all of our careful shopping as we were before only with the privilege that should hold us more accountable to the part we play. If our ethical shopping has been capitalized upon in such a way that only we can afford it, then it is exploitative and we are active participants in that exploitation. If the small number of us who can afford to buy goods not made by underpaid people working in unsafe and abusive conditions were to buy, and buy, and buy only from the most ethical of businesses it would have absolutely no impact on the industry at large when so many people aren’t even making a living wage and they still need to be able to buy things at accessible prices.

When our conscious consumerism is divorced from the real work of demanding living wages and safe working conditions for all workers and safe and secure housing for all people that would allow everyone to be able to make the sort of thoughtful, long-term buying decisions that the vast majority of people actually want to make, all that our “ethical buying” will do is reward those who cater to our wants and wallets by keeping the quality-made items that just decades ago were standard for all products that went to market out of the reach of the everyday consumer.

So where does that leave me and my beautiful home full of beautiful things? I’m not sure. I love my home, and I’m so grateful to be able to love my home. I do not regret the time and energy I spent meticulously picking each item that is in each room, and I’m not likely to throw my hands up and start spending willy-nilly in the future because what does it even matter when the system is so fucked. My spending is forever changed and my relationship to things is forever changed, as long as my finances will allow that to be so.

But I’m not done changing, and I’m not done growing. And as I change, my relationship to these loved items in my home is changing as well. They are not just part of the comfort and safety and permanence that I so desperately needed after the fire, and that I had been longing to be able to provide for my family my entire life. They are also reminders of my immense privilege and what that privilege owes. They are a reminder of how much 30 year old me who worked overtime at a shitty job to be able to afford a cheap toddler bed for my child deserved a safe and stable home and to be able to feel good about the things that made up my home, and how the people who were working even longer hours at even shittier jobs to make that cheap toddler bed deserve that as well.

I’ve long critiqued capitalism and it’s role in upholding violent racism and patriarchy. But this work, looking at my own spending and investigating my own place in the damaged caused by consumerism and consumerist culture is something that I’ve only now had the privilege to be able to explore. This is a new journey that I’m on and I don’t know really what it will look like to be someone who is increasingly aware of their economic privilege, who uses that privilege to try to do good, who tries to deconstruct that privilege, who understands that we do have some power with our individual purchasing decisions but the vast majority of harm is actually being done by people and corporations with more money and power than we will ever see in our lifetimes, who also understands that even with limited power I’m a person connected to other people whose privilege and oppression is directly connected to the privilege and oppression of others, while also being a human being who really like shiny things and new makeup - I don’t know how to perfect that balance or if it’s even possible.

But I’m so fortunate to have the opportunity to try.

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