On Beliefs, Shifting Values, Resources, and the Hyphen Between African–American
A hyphen is a small mark, almost invisible, yet it carries whole worlds. In the phrase African–American, that slight line holds memory, rupture, improvisation, and the unbroken thread of a people who remade life out of what tried to undo them. I have returned to this hyphen for years, asking what was forced onto it, what was carried across it, and what might be waiting to be reclaimed beneath it.
I am reminded of a scene from my childhood: my grandmother setting an extra place at the table, even on evenings when food was modest. She never explained it. She simply trusted that someone might arrive needing to be fed, and that whatever she had would stretch. That quiet gesture taught me that resources are meant to move, that companionship is stronger than competition, and that shared abundance is a spiritual truth long before it is an economic one.
“ Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth... ”
As I revisit this question today, I notice how much has shifted — the nation, the church, our communities, and the grounding of my own voice. What has not changed is the quiet pull toward shared abundance, belonging, and a spiritual clarity — one rooted in contemplation and open to all who are most impacted by systems of harm, regardless of zip code — that refuses to measure worth by what a person can earn or display.
American culture has long mistaken accumulation for blessing. It has built an economic imagination rooted in competition, extraction, and manufactured lack. The money-god is loud and relentless. It trains us to believe that worth is conditional and that security must be purchased.
Yet African-descended people carry another inheritance. Beneath the noise of the dominant economic order and the weight of survival lives an older insight: that provision is shared, that wisdom is collective, that land teaches, and that community is a living body.
Western philosophy often asserts, “I think, therefore I am.” Our ancestral memory answers with a different truth: “We are, therefore I am.” This shift — from isolated identity to interdependent belonging — is the axis on which shared abundance turns.
A worldview of shared abundance does not glorify scarcity. It recognizes that enoughness is a spiritual orientation, not a financial category. It centers spirit over accumulation, collective well-being over isolated achievement, interdependence over individualism, dignity over status, and rest over relentless striving. This is not merely an economic critique. It is an invitation to return to a way of seeing ourselves and one another that honors the sacred.
In the American story, racism did not arise simply from human difference; it grew from a deeper spiritual distortion — a belief that some lives could be secured by diminishing the lives of others. Over generations, that lie took on economic, political, and even religious form, shaping a culture that equates worth with possession and freedom with the ability to accumulate. For many communities of color — including those whose ancestral traditions emphasized mutual care, shared dignity, and sacred interdependence — this has meant learning to survive within norms that do not reflect who we are or where we come from. The wound this leaves is not only social; it is spiritual. It pulls people away from the insight that once helped them imagine abundance together. And when that wisdom is dimmed, other forces rush in — including the tempting promise of prosperity without egalitarianism — to define what counts as worth, safety, and belonging. Part of our calling now is to return to that wisdom — not in rejection of anyone, but in reverence for the God who created us for wholeness and belonging.
Yet even as this older insight endures, we live in a society shaped by a very different story — one that bows to the money-god. Under its influence, people begin to believe that their value lies in what they possess. Communities strain under the weight of competition. Leaders lose their grounding trying to maintain institutions shaped by metrics rather than mercy.
The wounds are visible in churches where budgets overshadow formation, in families burdened by shame around lack, in leaders stretched beyond discernment, and in communities internalizing failures they did not create. These wounds are not personal shortcomings. They are the predictable outcomes of systems that prioritize profit over people. Krishnamurti wrote, “It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” Healing begins with truth-telling — naming the spiritual injuries produced by an economy that refuses to honor the sacred.
Our ancestors carried this truth long before economists found language for it. They knew material deprivation could not erase spiritual abundance, and that survival required collective imagination.
Black communities did not endure because they mastered the dominant economic order’s demands. They endured because they mastered community — barter, mutual aid, collective parenting, shared labor, and the insistence that dignity cannot be priced. Ubuntu whispers: “We are, therefore I am.” Sabbath insight teaches: “Enough becomes possible when enoughness is shared.” African cosmologies remind us: “Provision flows through relationship, not possession.” These are not romantic notions. They are technologies of survival shaped by Spirit — quiet, steady, and enduring. Memory is not nostalgia. Memory is instruction.
Spiritual recovery begins with clarity. We turn from scarcity as identity, secrecy and shame around resources, hyper-individualism, accumulation driven by unhealed wounds, and narratives that confuse the Divine with material gain. We turn toward collective thriving, honest conversations about economic harm, shared abundance grounded in divine abundance, interdependence shaped by Ubuntu, and practices of rest, reciprocity, and shared stewardship. This is not self-help. It is cultural reorientation — communal systems change. Transformation begins quietly in one life, and inevitably ripples outward, widening what communities imagine is possible.
Our work is rooted in contemplation, offering an invitation broad enough for religious, non- religious, and spiritual seekers, and deep enough to sustain the kind of inner and collective change this moment requires. Three practices remain essential: money autobiographies, where we tell the truth about our formation around resources; circles of reflection and accountability, where contemplative community interrupts isolation; and communal learning and action, where education rooted in justice and ancestral insight prepares communities to live what they profess.
Our spiritual and economic wounds intersect with racialized wealth extraction, gendered inequity, migration and displacement, global labor exploitation, ecological harm, and the mental toll of scarcity. These are not isolated crises — they are symptoms of a deeper disorder: a society formed by fear rather than belonging. Healing requires integrating justice, spirituality, and collective practice — rebuilding imagination, not merely repairing systems.
For many in the African diaspora, Haiti remains a spiritual touchstone. Haiti is the only nation forged by enslaved people who defeated a colonial empire, overthrew Napoleon’s forces, and dismantled the machinery of bondage itself. The freedom they secured was later punished: Haiti became the only country forced to pay its former oppressor for the cost of its own liberation — a debt that extracted wealth for generations and reshaped global perceptions of a people whose strength and spiritual resilience have never dimmed.
To learn from Haiti is to remember that our narrative is braided across waters and generations. Haitian communities navigate imposed scarcity while cultivating pathways toward self-sufficiency. Their long history of resistance and collective care widens our imagination of sufficiency — showing what becomes possible when people refuse to surrender their humanity. Haiti teaches that the power that broke chains in the past is still alive, a living blueprint for dignity, shared care, and spiritual endurance.
Our commitments invite us to widen our circles of belonging. Cooperation is not merely a method; it is a worldview — one that honors lineage, shares power, and builds relationships capable of holding difference without collapsing. Cooperative futures widen the circle toward reimagining what a globalized solidarity economy need be — one shaped primarily by the insight, labor, and leadership of those most impacted by taking and dispossession. For such widening to take root, our movements must be grounded in humility, shared resources, ecological reverence, and relationships that refuse paternalism. Cooperation becomes not only strategy but spiritual ethic — an embodied recognition that our futures are interdependent.
The hyphen between African and American still holds tension and possibility. It is a threshold carrying grief, strength, rupture, and revelation. It reminds us that identity is collective, layered, and always becoming — an ongoing invitation to recovery for anyone seeking a more whole and connected way of living, a contemplative truth accessible to all who seek healing, no matter where they live or who they love.
We live in a society where the money-god feels omnipresent, yet its reach is not final. History has witnessed many empires' attempts to sculpt the human spirit. None have succeeded. Sufficiency is not a slogan. It is a way of living that restores dignity and relationship — with the Divine, with one another, and with the earth. If we are to shape a new spiritual economy — one grounded in dignity, mutual care, and shared abundance — we must remember what our ancestors never forgot: that we belong to one another, and that abundance takes root wherever people choose community over fear.
Rev. Diane Ford Dessables, M.Div., M.S., is a seminary-trained and United Church of Christ– ordained minister, the founding director of Gemstones in the Sun, with an academic background in media, religion, and society.