Love Letter to Bree Newsome

Reflections on privilege during Black History Month

Bree Newsome climbing flagpole, screenshot from video via CBS News

Neighbors, if you’ve been able to purchase a home, how exactly were you able to make it happen?

That was a discussion topic posed on

Culture Study

, a famous and successful Substack, by writer and journalist

Anne Helen Petersen

. She hosts “threads” (basically a community conversation on Substack) for paid subscribers a couple of times a week, and back in January, I was intensely interested in this particular discussion topic.

The reason I was so interested is, as Petersen noted in opening the topic, that there’s an enormous lack of transparency in how home buying is accomplished in the US. I have always been curious about the realities of this big, milestone purchase, but it’s pretty taboo in our culture to open up about it with any real detail, so I jumped at the chance to read what Petersen’s subscribers were sharing. (A big and sincere thank you to Petersen and her subscribers for being so open. The conversation is important.)

Eye-Opening

The thread ended up getting almost 850 incredibly eye-opening responses. I couldn’t read every single one or catalog all the methods folks used to make their first home purchases, but I feel relatively confident after reading several hundred that a majority of people revealed, in one way or another, that their families were able to give them money that made it possible.

Some of the stories were along the lines of “family paid for college, which led to a great job in the tech industry, a huge bonus, and a house.” Some of the stories were about an inheritance after a grandparent passed. Many were straightforward: “My parents gave me the down payment” scenarios.

I knew that lots of people are helped by family in buying a home, but I was shocked to read variations on the theme of financial privilege in reply after reply after reply. Or so many stories that weren’t just about the “small boosts” flavor of financial privilege but about the “vast generational wealth” kind of financial privilege. (Quite a few commenters also self-reported that they were white.)

Full disclosure: Our parents did not pay college tuition or help my husband and I buy our first home (which we also did not expect of them). The college debt and time it took to have the resources to finally buy, is a big reason why we didn’t purchase our modest townhome until we were in our 40s. I think that’s part of the reason why I was in so much shock reading the thread.  

Acknowledging Privilege

I think the other reason I was in so much shock was that another theme emerged in all the open sharing of home-buying journeys . . . so many people “acknowledged privilege” in a way that felt a bit like, “since I’ve acknowledged the way I have disproportionately benefited from a system that allowed my family to accumulate wealth everything is cool, right?”

There didn’t really seem to be much further reflection, and certainly no suggestions about how we might address the deep inequities in our society that allow some to own a house while at the same time, others struggle to meet their basic needs and maintain shelter of any kind.

Pause: I know, I know. I can hear some of you thinking about it, so let me clarify here. I don’t think every person who receives financial help from their family to buy a house or monetary support of some other kind is automatically an awful, undeserving jerk. (Although, excess of this pretty reliably produces awful, undeserving jerks.) I think wanting to help our family members financially, if we can, is pretty natural. Also, to be fair to Petersen’s subscribers, I didn’t expect that they would somehow solve the hefty issues of the wealth gap, hyper-capitalism, or the huge role that racism has played in wealth accumulation in the comments section of Substack.

Stuckness

That clarification aside, what stood out was that maybe we’ve gotten a little stuck in the “acknowledging the problem” phase of social change. It’s a little bit like we’re at a proverbial AA meeting, and everyone has taken Step 1 (admit we’re powerless over alcohol, and shit is getting wildly unmanageable), but we’ve decided that’s far enough. Alcohol tastes good; partying is fun. Sure, it’s wreaking havoc on those around me, but I’ve admitted that. Isn’t that sufficient?

But the truth is that if we say we want a better, more equitable world where the health and well-being of us all are flourishing, we have to DO something with whatever privilege we’ve got to create that world. Recognizing you have a privilege is insufficient.

Here’s Where Bree Newsome Comes In

Okay, at this point, I’m sure you’re wondering where Bree Newsome comes in. You’re all reading this like, “Angie, I thought this was a love letter to Bree?” Here goes . . .

For those of you who may not remember her, Bree Newsome was the Black woman who climbed a flagpole at the South Carolina state capital on June 27, 2015 and took down the Confederate flag. It was a powerful act of civil disobedience following the Charleston church shooting of 10 Black victims by a white supremacist on June 17, 2015. The visibility of her act resulted in so much public pressure that just two weeks later, the South Carolina legislature removed the flag permanently.

There is something more to this story, though, which I first learned about back in November and December when I attended workshops through Embodying Equity about working through discomfort and harnessing privilege (you might remember Embodying Equity, which I encourage you to learn about, from this note). A great deal of planning and practice went into Bree’s act, and she had an accomplice, a co-conspirator. He was a white man named James Tyson.

James Tyson with his hand on the flagpole, screenshot from video via Washington Post by Andrea Densky

Using Privilege

That day, James helped her get over the spoked fence that surrounded the flagpole, and then he stood at the bottom watching for the police to arrive. When they arrived, they decided to direct their Tasers toward the pole to force Bree to come down. The pole was metal, tasing it would have electrocuted Bree, likely causing her death due to shock or falling. At that moment, James reached out and put his hand on the pole. He told the officers, “If you try to electrocute her, you’ll have to electrocute me, too.”

James knew his privilege as a white man would cause the police to pause and reconsider. He did not just say, “I have this privilege,” he used it in support of Bree and risked not just comfort but his life to ensure a much more significant change in how things would be done in South Carolina from then on.

James and Bree were arrested after she came down and spent a day in jail. In interviews about that day, Bree has said of James, “It’s become common to hear social justice advocates say that they don’t need white allies; they need white accomplices. An accomplice is what James was that day. History will rightly remember him alongside the many white accomplices over the centuries who have risked their own safety and, in some cases, spilled their own blood in defense of Black life and in the name of freedom.”

Bree & James giving a talk, Photo from News @ The U via University of Miami

Love Letter

This may seem like a winding path of a note, but it’s a love letter to Bree because she inspires me toward co-conspiracy. I’ve followed her online for years now, and her whip-smart analysis of the corrupt systems in our world always catches my breath every time. Like this tweet about Gaza.

For example, when it comes to housing, Bree refers to it as “a human right” and fighting for that right as “housing justice.” She has said, “We need to examine the meaning of public safety. Billions upon billions are spent on policing, and we are not safe. Housing is safety. Healthcare is safety . . .”

I thought about Bree’s words a lot while reading that thread on home buying. I was thinking about what we need to do with privilege (the way James used his) so that everyone has their basic human rights met and we can all benefit from a sense of safety and social stability.  

I don’t know what inspired James Tyson to partner with Bree that day, but I’m sure that her ability to articulate the reality of our system and what it could be helped fuel his willingness to put time, money, career, reputation, and even physical safety on the line.

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I want us all to have what Bree has been talking about for a nearly a decade now in her on and offline conversations, and I aspire to be like James, willing to move beyond just saying, “I benefit from this privilege,” and start using that privilege to fight for the world I want.

This Black History Month, I wanted to profess how much I love Bree Newsome, not in a celebrity-up-on-a-pedestal sort of way, but in a fight-alongside-my-sister sort of way.

Like many other inspirational Black women, Bree reminds us that Black history is white history is American history, and it’s in our power to help write a story we’d be proud for our descendants to tell.

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Two questions today, Neighbors:

1) Is there an inspirational Black women that you’d like honor this Black History Month? Tell us about her!

2) What do you think about “stuckness” in acknowledging privilege versus using it to change systems? What causes it, how do we move beyond it?

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