Thursday Thoughts (On A Sunday Night): How Do Black Creators Get Paid
a fleeting thought
For the last few months, I’ve been bombarded, mostly by white men, asking me for money when it’s due, before it’s due, or even when the job is only 90% finished. It’s the reality of renovating a house on a shoestring budget. They’re asking for money, while I’m working like hell, begging and borrowing–it felt like stealing to get them paid! Or sometimes, it made me feel powerful, working hard, making the money, having to watch the money drain away again but knowing what it’s building: a house, equity, generational movement.
But I’m also kind of flabbergasted, at others’ money management expectations, at my own. It makes me realize, more than ever, the importance of being paid fairly.
My ability to create and give is directly dependent on what I make. White men have no qualms asking for money up front, whereas I bend over backwards trying to make it work before asking for what rightfully belongs to me.
This comes up a lot in the context of my work, of how I spend my days; and especially as a “public figure,” website founder, content creator (I hate that line), writer–what have you. To be one, you need the net: the income providing partner, maybe a lack of children (or lots of help with them), and the mental agility to pursue creativity. Each time I’ve gotten a break from the house or the kids, I’ve semi-folded at the reality that this is so rarely offered. In a capitalist society, there are few things money can’t help with. And yet the equal distribution of it feels like a debate with no end in sight.
People like me, and maybe you, continue to work at the thing, just hoping to reach the point that doesn’t feel like wheels spinning, where asking for what we need doesn’t feel like the beginning of a spiral. Recently isolated with my kids for three weeks due to Covid, I’ve thought a lot about how I want to spend my days.
What happens when this book stops flickering at me on my desk?
After I edit it?
What am I working on?
What am I helping others pursue?
And quite simply, what should I be getting compensated for in order to “make it”?
Gabrielle Blair wrote a long post about being paid properly for work. She broke down, fairly clearly, the subsets of ways to get paid, how sponsorship pays, and of course, left the thread open to others to ideate how to pay creators fairly. And while it didn’t go in-depth about the complexities of Black women and labor, it resonated with me. André Leon Talley’s passing, and the lack of financial support he had in his last days, despite the amassed “rich and fabulous” friends who kept his company and inhaled his infectious energy for decades, seemed all the more relevant.
This is not a Thursday note to persuade you to become a paid subscriber (although that would be nice)! Rather, here are thoughts on behalf of creators, who are, not only Black, but also consume Black work, Black content, or look to people like me, or are people like me, that struggle with the same concept. I say this as someone who has and does rely heavily on sponsorships and modeling to get paid, and who is coming to terms with who my own “net” actually is: the consummate consumer. This work, and especially the Mae house, is weaving a net, not just for myself, but also from and for, a desire to be of service to others.
In the time between these thoughts, I’ve been sitting with these quotes from dear Audre Lorde as she still shepherds new generations forward:
Ignoring the differences of race between women and the implications of those differences presents the most serious thread to the mobilization of women’s joint power.
— “Age, Race, Class, and Sex”
and
The house of your difference is the longing for your greatest power and your deepest vulnerability. It is an indelible part of your life’s arsenal. If you allow your difference, whatever it might be, to be defined for you by imposed externals, then it will be defined to your detriment, always, for that definition must [be] dictated by the need of your society, rather than by a merging between the needs of that society and the human needs of self. But as you acknowledge your difference and examine how you wish to use it and for what—the creative power of difference explored—then you can focus it toward a future which we must each commit ourselves to in some particular way if it is to come to pass at all.
—From “Difference and Survival”
The thread is open.
With love,
L
Thank you so much. I just become a subscriber I will enhance my subscription in the very near future.