Balancing the Scales: America’s True Debts
Margaret Atwood prophetically wrote Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth just before the 2008 economic crash which had been ushered in by irresponsible lending. I was in middle school during that recession, and I’m not sure if I’ll ever be able to grasp how previous generations understood debt, but I understood from a young age that my generation would be defined by it.
Payback is just as relevant post-2020 as it was in 2008. We are experiencing, yet again, a cruel economic recession, but our current confrontation with debt goes deeper. Atwood asserts that humans share an innate desire for balanced scales which is reflected in how we treat ourselves and one another in our culture, literature, and laws. Negative actions mean one “owes a debt to society,” “gets what’s coming to them,” or “needs to pay up.” Consequences are conflated with debt, which means we view almost every interaction as a give-or-take, constantly adding or subtracting from one’s moral balance. If they wrong you, they owe you; if the wrong is big enough, they owe all of us. The concept of the “criminal” relies on this.
Which is why, in the wake of 2020’s reckoning with racism and the criminal justice system, we are overdue for re-evaluating what is wrong, what is fair, and what is owed.
Americans clearly have no trouble understanding moral debts and the need for payment on them, as is shown by the way we treat “criminals.” But “payment” does not have to be vindictive or punitive. In fact, as Atwood’s “Payback” points out, charging interest on lending has historically been considered a sin in Christian faiths, and equally taboo or unlawful in Ancient India, Mesopotamia, and Greece; forgiveness is a fundamental aspect of justice across faiths and cultures. But when we criminalize poverty, what is there to forgive, anyway?
Clarence B. Jones, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s personal attorney and confidant, saw America’s powerful class as the real debtors all along. I had the honor of first meeting him during the summer of 2015. He was a distinguished guest at The Andrew Goodman Foundation’s annual training summit for its student ambassadors who organize for voting access on their campuses.
At the training, Jones emphasized his incredulity at this nation’s rapid scientific and technological advancements despite maintaining, overall, the same social and power structures it started with. His book, Behind the Dream, details how Jones reckoned with this by likening America’s wrongs against Black Americans to a bounced check. This ultimately came through in Dr. King’s speech on the Washington Mall: “It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check; a check which has come back marked ‘insufficient funds.’”
The United States has certainly aimed to forget, or ignore, its own moral debts to the oppressed of this nation throughout history and today.
Today, our nation’s lawmakers are battling it out over stimulus checks and student loan forgiveness. Many Americans are divided over just how much we deserve. We scoff at stories of others’ excessive debt, assuming they simply are refusing to own up to their choices. But the public, namely the poor, the Black, brown and indigenous, and the essential workers, are the backbone of this entire system in the first place. Wages have not matched productivity nor inflation; medical costs inherently rely on the immoral premise of profit for one’s life and health; emancipation was not accompanied by money, land, or resources; the United States continues its use of unpaid labor via the prison system; even written promises have gone unfulfilled in the form of unratified or ignored treaties with Native Americans. We have been put in today’s debts, both monetary and moral, only due to the failures of this country to keep its promises to its people.
Student loan relief, stimulus checks, healthcare, police and prison abolition, wage increases, housing — these aren’t requests for mercy. We are not the ones in need of forgiveness. It is the power-holders of America who are overdue. When the wrongs are acknowledged beyond a symbolic speech, only then can we begin to discuss justice, healing, and unity.
