ANCESTRAL WEALTH with Dr. Joey Liu & Simone Seol

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A Letter to Our White Siblings

If you're reading this, you probably clicked through from the Ancestral Wealth invitation page and saw that this class isn't open to white folks.

We imagine that might have stung a little. Or maybe it brought up some feelings – confusion, disappointment, maybe even hurt.

We want to talk to you about that, because you matter to us.

First, let me share a recent conversation.

I (Simone) was talking to a trusted friend and advisor, who happens to be a white woman. I told her about this class, and explained why it's not for white people.

We shared a brief moment of slightly awkward laughter, since this meant she wouldn't be welcome.

Then she got quiet and shared something with me that really opened my heart.

For years, she’d been in a male-dominated industry: financial services. I’ve known her to be a passionate advocate for women’s empowerment around money.

But, she shared – it wasn't until she rose to significant leadership that she fully saw how much of an “old boys’ club” it was. The informal networks, the unspoken agreements, the way men would be taken seriously in a way that women never could, no matter how high their rank or how impressive their accomplishments.

Eventually, her anger reached a boiling point.

Then she said:

"When I imagine hosting a discussion about women and money, having even one man in the room changes things. We can't speak freely or safely — even if he's a good person. It has nothing to do with his intentions. He just doesn't get it, and he can’t help it. So through that lens, I completely understand why you need to do this."

She got it, because she's lived a version of it.

Maybe you have, too.

I’m sharing her story because I think it is such a great access point for understanding.

When there's even one man in a room of women doing this work — even a good one, an aware one, a true ally — something shifts.

The women edit themselves. They manage his feelings. They try to make sure he knows he's not part of the problem.

It's NOT because he's a bad person. He might be wonderful. It's that he doesn't — he can't — fully understand what it's like to move through the world as a woman in those spaces.

His presence, however kind and well-intentioned, changes the energy.

When women say, “this room is not for you,” they’re not hating men, or excluding them forever, or rejecting them as human beings.

But they are creating the conditions to do the delicate but profound work of remembering who they are, claiming their own stories and connecting to their strengths — without censoring, translating, or managing.

That's what's happening here.

This class is for People of the Global Majority (Black, Brown, Indigenous, Asian, Arab, and Pasifika peoples) to reconnect with our ancestral relationships to money — relationships that were stolen, criminalized, buried, or erased through colonization and white supremacy.

And we need to do this work in a protected space.

We need to feel our anger and grief without explaining ourselves.
We need to name the harm that's been done without worrying about how it lands for white folks in the room.
We need to remember our own wisdom, our own systems of wealth and exchange, our own deep belonging to abundance — without performing, translating, or editing for the white gaze.

When a white person is in the room — no matter how aware, how kind, how committed to justice you are — something shifts.

It makes us careful. It pulls us away from our own work. Most of us have been doing that our whole lives.

This is where we finally get to stop.

Let us be really clear: this is NOT us shutting you out forever.

This is not a rejection of you, a judgment of your character, or a dismissal of your place in liberation work.

This IS us creating the conditions we need to align our relationship with money to our identities, our histories, and our lineages.

We're doing this SO THAT we can show up clear, rooted, and resourced when we DO eventually gather together.

And we will. Because we are one human family. We belong with each other. We need each other.

The world we're dreaming of for all of our children? We can't build it without you.

But we each need to do our own work first.

Your work is different from ours – and it's just as important.

Your ancestral relationship with money is tangled up with extraction, theft, and oppression. This is a historical reality, not judgment.

We know what might be coming up for you right now: "But wait. My ancestors were poor. They suffered under class oppression, and their wounds got passed down to me. How does this apply to me?"

We hear you. Maybe your ancestors were Italian, Irish, Slavic, Jewish — groups that faced real discrimination and violence. Maybe your people were serfs, factory workers, or displaced by war.

All of that can be true. And here's what's also true: however your ancestors suffered, at some point they were granted access to whiteness in ways that Black, Brown, Indigenous, Asian, Arab, and Pasifika people were not. It looks like this:

If you're in the US or Canada: being allowed to own land when others couldn't. Access to New Deal benefits and GI Bills denied to people of color. Moving into neighborhoods, getting loans, attending schools closed to non-white people. Not being enslaved, not having children taken, not being put in camps or on reservations, not being targeted by police violence.

If you're European: Europe built the colonial empires that extracted wealth from nearly everywhere else. Even if your specific family was poor, the infrastructure and stability you inherited — roads, education, medical and legal systems — were built on wealth extracted from colonized peoples. Your family may never have directly participated in colonization, but they lived within systems made possible by it.

Because "whiteness" isn't about skin color — it's about access to protection and resources that was extended to some groups over time and permanently denied to others.

Maybe you're thinking: "But wait. White people aren't the only ones who colonized, enslaved, or oppressed others."

True.

And what makes these systems different is their scale, and the fact that they created the modern world economy we still live in. European colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade built the financial systems, borders, and economic/cultural/racial hierarchies structuring our lives today.

On every single continent.

This is NOT about white people being uniquely evil; it's about the specific systems your lineage participated in, or benefited from, that are still operating now.

In short: the trauma of poverty, war, religious persecution, displacement, and class oppression amongst your ancestors is real.

Their suffering deserves to be honored. The epigenetic traumas that may have been passed down to you are also real and deserve to be acknowledged, cared for, and healed.

And: whiteness still gave them access people of color did not have. The truth is that poor white person and a poor Black person did NOT face the same barriers, violence, or systemic exclusion.

Both things are true and deserve to be honored.

This is exactly the territory your ancestral work needs to explore. Holding all of this complexity is sometimes challenging, but important and sacred work. We deeply respect you for taking it on.

So here's what we want to offer you:

While we're in our room doing our work, we invite you to be in yours doing yours.

Here are some teachers and resources we want to recommend:

Daniel Foor PhD - Author of "Ancestral Medicine: Rituals for Personal and Family Healing." His teachings offer ancestral healing for people of European descent in ways that include accountability for colonization and oppression. Recommended course (tiered pricing available): Inhabiting the Times
Dr. Resmaa Menakem - Author of "My Grandmother's Hands" (somatic abolitionism work that includes ancestral healing for white bodies)
Edgar Villanueva - Author of "Decolonizing Wealth" (though he's not white, his work specifically addresses white folks in philanthropy and wealth)
Isabel Wilkerson - Author of "Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents," which examines how America's caste system (with race as its primary organizing principle) compares to caste systems in India and Nazi Germany. Helps white readers understand systemic hierarchy and their place within it.
Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ) - A national network of white people working to undermine white supremacy and work toward collective liberation. Offers local chapters, organizing tools, and community for white folks committed to showing up in solidarity.

You might notice there isn't a perfect equivalent to what we're offering — no "ancestral healing around money and wealth for white people" course that centers reckoning and repair.

That's because this specific intersection is still emerging territory. And that gap is part of the work itself.

Your task is to take what's here, synthesize it, and figure out what your lineage needs. We won't be creating that curriculum for you, and we're not available to help you build it. These resources will give you solid ground to start from. The rest is yours to discover.

The following are some starting questions to guide your exploration.

Suggested Practice

1. Trace your lineage with curiosity and honesty.

Where did your family's wealth come from? What labor — whose labor — built it? What land? What systems?

Follow the thread as far back as you can:

What work did your ancestors do? Who benefited from that work?
When did your family acquire property, stability, or safety? What made that possible?
What doors opened for your ancestors that were closed to others?
What did they have to do, become, or accept to gain access to those advantages?

This isn't about blame or shame; it's about seeing clearly so you can act with integrity now.

If you have ancestors with class disadvantages, your work is to hold the complexity: the suffering your people endured AND the access they gained through whiteness. Both truths matter.

2. Reckon with complicity.

We don't want you to feel guilty or ashamed. This is about healing the fractures — in yourself, in your lineage, in the collective fabric we're all part of — so that you can be part of restoring wholeness.

Complicity isn't always direct. It doesn't require that your ancestors owned enslaved people or ran colonial enterprises. It can look like accepting the benefits of whiteness without questioning where they came from, staying silent to protect your own safety, or simply benefiting from infrastructure and stability built on stolen land and labor.

The questions to sit with:

What doors were open to your ancestors that were closed to others?
What safety did they have access to?
How did whiteness — even conditional, hard-won whiteness — function as a form of property and protection that others were denied?
And how has benefiting from these systems shaped who you are today — your sense of safety, expectations, relationship to authority and resources?

None of this is about judgment or pointing fingers. Your ancestors were doing what they needed to do to survive. And: their survival was made possible by a system that denied that same possibility to others.

Once again, both things are true. The work is to see clearly, to feel what needs to be felt, and to make space for different decisions moving forward.

3. Do your own ancestral healing.

Your ancestors carry wounds too — wounds of disconnection from Indigenous European traditions and practices, displacement, war, poverty, persecution, shame, and the violence of being used as instruments of harm against others.

These wounds are real and they live in your body, in your family patterns, in your relationship with money, power, safety, and belonging.

What might need healing in your lineage?

The trauma of poverty, starvation, or displacement
The loss of land, language, or cultural practices
The shame of participation in or benefit from oppressive systems
The disconnection from Earth-based spiritual traditions
The hardening required to survive - or to enact violence
The grief that was never allowed to be felt

How do you heal these wounds?

This work is deeply personal and will look different for everyone. It might include:

Learning about your ancestors' pre-Christian Indigenous European traditions and what was lost
Doing ritual or ceremony to acknowledge and metabolize ancestral anger or grief
Working with practitioners who specialize in ancestral healing (like those we recommended earlier)
Speaking directly to your ancestors — honoring their resilience while also naming the harm
Feeling and releasing the grief, rage, or shame that lives in your body
Breaking family patterns of silence, violence, or complicity

Healing your ancestral wounds is not separate from repair. It's what makes repair possible.

When you heal the wounds that make you defensive, fearful, or shut down, you become more able to see clearly, feel deeply, and act courageously. You can acknowledge harm without collapsing. You can redistribute resources without resentment. You can stay in relationship even in the face of difference.

Healing is not a prerequisite that must be completed before you act; they have to happen together.

You heal so you can repair.

You repair as part of your healing.

4. Explore what repair means for you.

No beating up on yourself. Instead, acknowledging the power and responsibility to make a difference.

How can you redistribute? How can you support? How can you use your unearned advantages and resources — however modest — to help dismantle the systems that gave you access but denied it to others? The very systems that are still operating today?

What does it mean to be in right relationship with the wealth and access you have now, however modest?

Repair is not abstract but concrete action. It might look like:

Financial redistribution:

Redirecting inheritance or windfalls toward reparations organizations
Paying a voluntary "reparations tax" or land tax to Indigenous land trusts
Tithing a percentage of your income to Black-led, Indigenous-led, or Global Majority-led organizations
Restructuring your will to include reparative giving
Supporting mutual aid networks in your community

Using your unearned advantages and access:

Advocating for reparations policies at local, state, and national levels
Using your professional skills (legal, financial, technical) in service of racial justice organizations
Leveraging your access to spaces of power to open doors for people of color
Challenging racist policies and practices in your workplace, neighborhood, or institution

Shifting how resources flow:

Prioritizing businesses owned by people of the Global Majority
Moving your money to Black-owned banks or credit unions
Hiring and paying people of color fairly and generously
Ensuring your spending habits align with your values around repair

Educational and relational work:

Educating other white people so the burden doesn't fall on people of color
Showing up to protests, rallies, and organizing efforts
Having hard conversations with your white family members about race and money
Being in accountable relationship with people of color doing this work (without extracting their labor or requiring their guidance)

These are examples, not a checklist. Your practice of repair will be unique to your resources, skills, lineage, and context. What matters is that you begin — and that you keep going.

And here's what's next:

We don't know exactly when, but there will come a time when we'll be ready to work with our white-racialized siblings.

Eventually, all of us will need to link arms, and build new futures — side by side.

When that time comes, we would love to do it with you.

When we reach out, we'll be asking you to show up having done your homework.

Because none of us is free until all of us are free.

With love and respect,

Joey and Simone

P.S. If you're still feeling some big feelings right now — defensiveness, sadness, confusion, or even anger — we understand. Those feelings make sense.

We invite you to sit with them. Get curious about them. Let them teach you something.

There's wisdom in your discomfort if you're willing to listen to it.

And then, when you're ready, do the work.

We believe in you. We love you. And we'll see you on the other side.