This week new host Shanna Bennett speaks to Maddy Clifford about being an artist and entrepreneur who has student debt. Shanna and Maddy discuss the inequity of the student debt burden on black women and how it affects their career choices. Maddy also shares how she got involved with the Debt Collective and the student debt content she creates for TikTok.

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Transcript – 

Shanna Bennet: Hi, I’m Shanna Bennett. And I’m here with Maddy “MADlines” Clifford, an artist, activist, writer, coach, and art entrepreneur, and we’re on Matter of Life and Debt. Maddie, welcome to the podcast!

Maddy: Thank you for having me. I’m so happy to be here. I’m happy to have these conversations and do it in a way that just kind of feels fun. I know it seems random because we’re talking about debt and that’s like the least fun subject ever, but I think having more conversations like this is so perfect. So thank you for having me.

Shanna Bennet: I agree. No, we’re, we’re so excited. And just to give some context, I know that Nikki, the creator of our podcast bumped into you while doing some work with the Debt Collective. She reached out to me and said, “Hey, I think I found the perfect person to be on the podcast”. We’re obsessed. We’re fangirling. You are a Grammy-nominated musician. You have 43,000 followers on TikTok. 30,000 followers on Instagram. So you’re someone with a significant platform and you have a lot to say, and you have a very distinctive and creative way of doing that. So we’re, we’re very excited. There’s a lot to cover. Let’s dive right in.

Maddy: Let’s go, I’m down. I’m ready.

Shanna Bennet: So do you have any student debt right now? And if so, how much?

Maddy: Yes, I do. I currently have all federal student loan debt and it is, the total right now is over $112,000.

Shanna Bennet: Oh my gosh. You’re my sister in debt. Yeah, I’m at $133,000. What did you study? What were your majors?

Maddy: I got my BA at the University of Washington and it was in English. And then I got an MFA, at Mills College here in Oakland, California.

Shanna Bennet: Nice. So one of the things we’ve been enjoying doing is going back to the very beginning when you’re with your family or your friends, What were those conversations like about higher ed and about the cost? Like, was that even considered or not?

Maddy: I didn’t hear very much conversation whatsoever about the cost. It was very much about education. And I remember just education being something that was really important for both sides of my family. It was really this idea that it had everything to do with upward mobility and with making something of yourself.

And I actually struggled a lot in school in the early stages of my schooling, because I was diagnosed with dyslexia in fourth grade. And so I actually thought that I was incapable of learning. Like I had so many challenges. And then, I got a scholarship to go to a school and they use the stringing method.

I think that’s what it’s called. It’s a specific method to help people with learning disabilities. And after that, I took it and ran. And I started to really excel in school and I started to feel accomplished particularly when it came to writing and when it came to art and when it came to performance. I always, actually still to this day, do very poorly when it comes to standardized tests, but in terms of getting good grades, I’m always able to get really great grades.

I was on the honor roll when I was in college. Everyone kind of just encouraged me to go to school. And that was something that I loved. I actually loved school. I’m a super nerd and everything about it just made me happy. But on the flip, I do remember obviously feelings of nervousness around the cost.

I know that my mom, just basically flat out told me, we can’t really afford to pay for all of your college. We can, here’s like, some money that we can give you, but you’re gonna need to take out loans. For undergrad, it was never really a big huge issue. I think it was like, okay, well you’re going to a state school.

And I think the shift when I really started to feel the burden really just thrown on my shoulders was after graduating and going into the job market, not being able to find a job. I remember my first job after getting a college degree from the University of Washington, which is one of the best schools in the country.

The only job I could find was with AmeriCorps and I was paid $5 an hour. I worked full time. I was doing work that was empowering young girls in the city. And then after that, I just really decided to just get my MFA on my own. Didn’t really have a lot of conversations. People did warn me about it, but I just kinda kept thinking in my head, I just need to keep going to school. This is going to be a good decision. Student debt is the best debt to have of any debt. And I just kind of kept going, but I never had anyone sit down and talk to me about what it really meant to take on the burden that I was taking on.

And, for that, I feel like I might’ve made different decisions. But I didn’t have a lot of people talking to me about money, to be honest.

Shanna Bennet: I had a similar experience. In my social media stalking of you, I saw some footage of Jamaica, and you’re Jamaican, right?

Maddy: Yeah. My dad’s from Jamaica, and I just got my dual citizenship. Yeah.

Shanna Bennet: Hey, that’s awesome. That’s awesome. Yeah. I became a citizen of the US I think maybe like three years ago. So yeah. Look at us doing things!

Maddy: That’s so cool. Okay. So now I like you even more, oh my gosh. I feel like for a lot of immigrants education is important, but like Jamaicans specifically are just like really it’s a big thing. Education.

Shanna Bennet: And that was my next question for you. Do you feel like that impacted your family’s approach to higher ed? And was it acceptable for you to go an alternative path if you want it?

Maddy: Well for me, I identify as biracial and black and Jamaican. So my dad is the first generation. My dad only had a sixth-grade education, which was as high as he went. My mom did get her master’s degree. So, I just felt like both sides. Education was really big and it kind of pushed onto me. Not in a negative way, but it was really thought of as a way to gain upward mobility. And also just traveling to Jamaica throughout my life, just seeing, a lot of people just cannot go to school because they literally have to pay from when they’re children. And just seeing the access that you are awarded, just to be able to go to school. Some of the biggest choices that I ever made in my life as a woman, as a woman of color, had everything to do with the fact that I was in school.

And I was learning this theory, like feminist theory, or I was learning about black diasporic studies and English language. And all these different things that I was learning, it really impacted me, the choices I was making and my critical thinking. That was a big thing too.

I see how in our nation, a lot of people don’t have critical thinking skills and I think it’s because a lot of people don’t gain those skills throughout high school. It’s something that you really learn more when you’re in that college setting. I hope that answers your question. It was like a roundabout way.

Shanna Bennet: Yeah. And one of the reasons too, that we want to have more and more of these conversations and kind of elevate people of color and their voices, specifically women, is because the data shows that as women, we carry more student debt. And black women in particular, I think we’re the most educated group in this country.

If not one of the most educated groups, we continue our education. We’re seeking out more advanced degrees. And so we have more debt. And usually, like you said, the conversation at home is all about upward mobility. What’s actually happening is at 17, 18, we’re making decisions about our values later in life. And we don’t even realize it. You did a video. I think it might’ve been on TikTok where you were encouraging artists to figure out what their values are, right? What’s important to them? But when you’re 17, 18, and your family’s talking to you about upward mobility and maybe your family doesn’t have all the resources to send you to school, you’re thinking, okay, so what is a doctor, lawyer, engineer? Like for my family, that’s what everybody was pushing. I think I could have pursued art if I wanted to, but I wouldn’t be surprised if I got some pushback because of hashtag capitalism. It’s like show us the money, do the degree that we know is going to have a significant return quote-unquote.

And so already we’re valuing and devaluing art, before we even started. Like our values are set at 18 when I’m signing that loan paper. And at 35 now I’m like, wait, what makes me happy? Wait, what are my values? Wait, I can’t even have those thoughts because now I have six figure student loan debt.

So now my whole world has to be focused on making an income. Making an income enough to support my student debt. What if I wanted to live by the beach and be a surfer and make enough to eat? Like, what if I don’t have the choices?

Maddy: No, those are really important questions. And I think that also, it goes back to like, I remember those conversations, like when I was first starting at the University of Washington, cause I was in some of those programs where they were supporting the youth of color or the first-generation kids. And they were telling us, no, you guys need to go into the hard sciences and the soft sciences. And there was this idea that if you were going into the soft sciences, that you were like, it was a, it was a really dumb decision, basically like on your part. And for me, it was always, well, I know this is what I’m passionate about. I believe poetry saved my life. Literally, I believe that. That’s just what I feel.

I’m not going to go into these really highly competitive programs, and do things that I don’t actually like. And luckily for me, yeah, I did have support in pursuing that. And I think it was because I showed early signs of like having a gift with it or whatever, but it happens throughout people’s lives. Right?

We hear that a lot now, too. Like when you hear people say, well, you were ridiculous for getting that philosophy degree or for getting that, MFA degree or whatever degree it might be. And they’re not taking two things into account.

First of all, they’re not taking into account that these programs are predatory sometimes. And what they do is they’re not preparing artists. I’m an artist, a coach to artists and you can prepare artists to be able to be entrepreneurs and to be able to thrive in their career fields.

But a lot of these programs don’t do that and that’s not the students’ fault. They should be teaching them business skills in those programs as well. Two, our society has a huge empathy problem. I mean, the issues that we’re dealing with, most of them have to do with social issues and to tell people that, oh, the soft sciences doesn’t matter is ridiculous. Philosophy doesn’t matter. Like we’re not asking these questions, we’re having the same problems over and over again as societies. Why? Because we’re not actually studying this stuff and we continue to devalue it. So I think that there’s a lot of like, we should come together more in that. And I think, for me, I know with folks that I know that have MFAs or that got degrees in the soft sciences, I think they have sometimes a lot of shame around that. One thing I’ll add actually though, is I want to bring up the statistic about being a woman of color, specifically black women. I read an article where it was like a high school diploma, a white person with a high school diploma makes the same as a black person with an undergrad college degree.

And so, I used to get mad at myself. Like, why did you get this MFA? Cause a lot of people, I remember people were telling me at the time, are you sure you want to do this? Are you sure you want to do this? But I got a job after I got my MFA. I got one of the best jobs in the country for poets. And it was called WritersCorps. They just got rid of the program. This is a 20-year program that served over 30,000 students. And I was able to teach, I still do teach poetry to incarcerated youth, and this job actually paid me a livable wage. I know for a fact they would not have hired me because I didn’t have enough publications.

They wouldn’t have hired me without my MFA. It’s a catch 22 because you’re telling people that they shouldn’t have, you’re especially telling black women these things. Cause you’re telling them you were ridiculous for getting this degree, but then you’re not going to get the same job or we get paid the same amount as a white person with a, with a lower degree. So, It’s frustrating.

Shanna Bennet: It’s really frustrating. There’s also a stat that the Debt Collective tweeted about on February 15th that says 20 years after paying on student loans, the average white debtor has paid off about 95% of their loans. In those same 20 years, the average black debtor still owes about 95% of their loans.

So it’s when we talk about these sometimes quantifiable, but also nuanced things relating to how the debt affects our life, it’s hard to sometimes communicate that to folks that are just not a part of the experience. But it truly does affect your life in a lot of different ways. It’s unreal.

Basically the idea, the catch 22, it’s be personally responsible. Like I just feel like there’s just a lot of racism in the way that people talk to black women about debt. Or like the way I’ve just noticed this, because I’ve been doing this Debt Collective’s TikTok and I’m on the wrong side now. The conservatives are coming.

Shanna Bennet: We can talk about that. We can talk about that all day. Do you have a TikTok account? I’m not too active right now, but the comments that you had a choice and you should have known better, it’s your debt, pay it. If I took out a car loan, I’d owe it. But in terms of messaging, which I think is what you’re doing, especially on your own platforms and then maybe in partnering with the Debt Collective is how do we express this message of, “hey, there’s a problem here. This system is broken.” In a way that can garner more empathy and more awareness, more understanding. Because right now there are many roadblocks and it’s all capitalism. It’s all very much, tied into this idea of morality. It’s very interesting.

Maddy: Yeah, I think one of the ways is definitely talking more about how much debt we’re in and that was really hard for me as an artist. Well, I’m an artist and an activist. So I’m in communities where there’s a lot of martyrdom that happens. And there’s a lot, there’s this starving artist trope, there’s a tortured artist trope.

So there’s a lot of ideas about scarcity and like having to prove yourself and that being broken is a good thing. Or being starving is a good thing, which isn’t true. And I think for a long time, I actually got used to getting pushed back. Cause I was like, oh, I’m actually making this into a business. I’m trying to make money. And I think a lot of people were like, whoa, whoa, what are you doing? And I think people didn’t also know, hi, by the way, I’m also a hundred thousand dollars in debt. Like I’m in the hole. But it’s funny because people just- I think also women or black women specifically too, are just starting all these businesses.

They’re going forward because of the fact that they don’t have a choice, they’re really trying to like, have some capital here. Literally something. And I think that’s not always talked about in the conversation and black women do hold up a lot of the community in general and are taking care of their families.

And they’re also doing jobs that have a positive social impact. So I think that can help with the messaging because a lot of the messaging is like, oh, you just don’t want to pay because you’re sitting around all day. Like, no. And even if they were sitting around, who cares, let them rest, like who cares? It’s none of your business. Like we’re resting now. You don’t even hear about that.

Shanna Bennet: Yeah. We’re tired. But at that point, I think in our last episode I mentioned being out of school, so I left graduate school and I ended up doing this kind of social justice cross-cultural, health literacy work that I was obsessed with. But I was getting paid pennies. So when you talk about finding out what your values are and what’s important to you, here I was realizing I love this work. I love social justice work. I love assisting, breaking down, medical jargon for inner-city, BIPOC women who were learning about infant nutrition, right? It was great. But I had this debt monster that I had to consider.

And so when people say you should have known better, how was I supposed to know what 17, 18? That at 22, 23, I was going to love social justice work. And I really didn’t mind that I wasn’t getting paid a lot. Like money has never really been intrinsically important to me. But it has to be when you’ve now had a Spanish major and industrial-organizational graduate degree.

So now it has to be important to me. So now I do have to build myself and my life around this capitalistic idea of an income and the gross wage. all these things that I just didn’t consider before. So the papers that I signed at 18 were already deciding for me, years later, what my values were before I had the opportunity or before my brain was fully formed to even consider that. It’s interesting.

I want to speak to what you just said. Because it was a really profound tweet, the Debt Collective posted, whoever runs their Twitter is amazing. Because they always say really on point things, but education is dangerous because educated people are free people.

Maddy: They go places and do things that the powerful can’t control. Student debt is a way to neutralize any liberation education might provide. It’s an anchor to keep you in your place in a highly unequal hierarchy.

Shanna Bennet: Amen.

Maddy: Yeah, I feel like that is in a nutshell, how I feel about student loan debt. Yet, like you said, being so young and being able to take out so much debt and that you can’t ever file for bankruptcy for taking out.

It’s really mind-blowing to think about. To just really sit and consider. And, I don’t really know what else to say besides the fact that I feel like it is something that’s done this way of saying, well, if you’re going to pursue whatever you want to pursue, get that higher education, then we’re going to, you’re going to have this debt.

Right now everyone has the luxury of coming out of the womb and knowing exactly what it is they want to do. That’s another reason why this debt just feels sinister. There’s something sinister about it. And when you have moved through our higher ed lending system, you feel it. It’s not right.

Shanna Bennet: I was talking to someone at work the other day who is very accomplished, very organized. I’ve seen this woman turn an entire department around and made it more efficient. And when she’s talking to me about student debt, she’s like, yeah, I paid for years. I paid for years on an income-based repayment plan and then realized that my balance was increasing. I had no idea. Now granted, as adults, we understand the concept of interest. But when we tell you that when we’re on the phone, talking to the student loan servicers, and they’re like, “hey, I can help you out. Let’s get you on this income-based repayment plan.” They’re not telling us. They’re not telling us that these payments, these monthly payments that we’re making are not covering the interest.

No one told me. I was so proud of myself when I finally got myself together, had my budget all out. For once I was making payments on time, in full, and then a year later I’m like wait, it’s going up, it’s not going down. Like it’s unreal. And it’s sinister and it’s broken and it’s antiquated and it’s unfortunate.

It’s unfortunate. This kind of is not really a segue, but we’re going to make it as a segue into my next question. In terms of your coaching, are you interacting with artists that have student debt? And how is that affecting maybe their creativity for example?

Maddy: I would say I’m interacting with people that especially are in the space between art and activism. So people that are doing things that they like are creating art that has a social impact. And a lot of those people are the ones that are straddled with this huge debt, this burden. And, it really causes a lot of mental health challenges for people. And that’s why I felt really happy to be able to talk about it. I’ve talked to mostly my family about it and I’ve broken down into tears and they kind of like, I’ve talked to my grandparents and they’ve kind of mentioned feeling bad that they didn’t really talk to me more about it before I took on the debt. But, I think that mental health is like a really big mental health issue. And I worry about people. It’s a huge problem for sure.

Shanna Bennet: It’s a huge problem. Hopefully, we’ve hinted at your work with the Debt Collective, but they’re so organized. They’re like a well-oiled machine. Them and student loan justice. They do some great work. And the hope is that the more pressure we put on our elected officials, the more we’ll see some change and get some traction and start moving here because at least a couple months ago, I feel like every other article was student debt related. And I was shocked when this presidential run, how many years ago it was, it was a topic of conversation. I’m like, wait, so we’re going to talk about student loan debt and we’re openly going to make these promises to voters. Wow. We were really getting somewhere. This clearly is a bigger issue if folks are talking about it.

I really like how they’re bringing up key points. And one of the reasons I’m excited to volunteer with them is because I’m learning so much more too, just like creating content for the page. Some of the things that you hear like, oh, there’s no way we’re gonna be able to cancel it. They’ve already helped cancel like $6 billion of debt already.

Like there’s this idea that some horrible things are gonna happen to the economy. It’s like, we’ve already not had student loan payments for the past almost two years now, or a year so? And look, the government’s not shutting down. They don’t need our money. I love that point. Like they don’t actually need the money. And so it’s like, wait a second. What’s going on here?

Shanna Bennet: At what point did you realize that student debt was a social justice issue or racial equity issue, a gender equality issue? At what point did you realize it’s a bigger deal?

Maddy: Ooh, that’s a really good question. I started to realize it in romantic relationships. Like I remember I was dating this guy from the UK and he had a child. I don’t have any kids. And I remember I told him how much debt I had and he was just kinda, oh, I don’t know about… like it really affected him wanting to date me, which was really interesting to me. Cause I’m like you have a child and that’s something I’m not judging you about, but he was just shocked.

And I had another experience where I started to take my debt into account. Almost like when I’m navigating how much to get paid. Because I just feel like there’s so much like our society just kind of naturally tries to pay women less, black women, less. A lot of the time I’ll take it into account just because it pushes me to ask for what I deserve, because if I don’t, then I’ll just be like, oh, well, you know it’s this program, that’s doing this good work or this good work. And I see a lot, honestly, I do see a lot of women of color, doing that and allowing that because like the work has a social impact and I just really hope that they take into account that they still deserve to have their basic needs met.

Shanna Bennet: Absolutely. And then it’s, it’s no surprise that we are carrying more student debt. We’re getting paid less. There’s the gender wage gap. There’s the racial wealth gap. And then on top of it, the stats are showing that we’re just not having children or we’re having them at a slower rate.

Maddy: But I do sometimes think of my debt, like it was as expensive as having a kid or two kids pretty much. And it is something that when you’re getting into relationships with other people, like, how are they going to feel about it? Or, you know, are they going to judge me about this kind of thing?

Shanna Bennet: Right. I think I have a video on Instagram where I’m pretending that somebody asks me how much I have. And I get my stuff and like sneak away. And it’s so funny because so many people were like, no, I would just answer. I would just tell them. Yeah, I would totally bring it up on a first date.

On a first date, I’m not telling you that I have six figures loan debt. I’m just not. I’m not. Maybe on a second or third date, but I’m not going to lead with that. I’m someone that had to work on that shame. Like I’m no longer shameful about it. But it’s still money. And it’s still a little private to me to share on a first-date interaction.

But that’s really interesting. Yeah. And then too, so we’re waiting to have children, some of us. We’re waiting to purchase homes. We don’t have as much saved for retirement. And then I think it also stifles entrepreneurship and creativity because if you’re working a nine to five to help pay back your debt, you don’t always have the room or the capacity to do more than that. And many people are doing more than that, but it’s still a barrier.

Maddy: Definitely. I think a lot of people are talking about the great resignation and I think people are just feeling like they don’t want to work these jobs that are like soul-crushing and they’re not even making any progress on getting their student loan debt to go away.

It’s really stressful. And I think some of the rhetoric that taking personal responsibility and all of these ideas as if people haven’t been doing that and they’re not seeing results. It’s as if people are trying to sell you trickle-down economics. It’s like Reagan already talked about this. Turns out, it didn’t go well. Turns out the rich actually just keep all of their money and we don’t see any of it. So you can miss me with that rhetoric. Yeah.

Shanna Bennet: How did you find it within yourself to kind of stand out for your worth and your value and kind of be that advocate for yourself?

Maddy: I think ideas around money and where we place our value in society really started to hit home for me when I was doing this work in juvenile halls. Because I’m an abolitionist, I believe in restorative justice and using other means of dealing with social problems. I feel like jails disappear people. They don’t disappear the social problems, right? And the harm that’s caused. And when I just started to see how much money the state of California invests in incarcerating and punishing people, as opposed to actually investing in their education and their rehabilitation and having basic needs met. I was working with children that all that really did wrong, quote-unquote, was being poor, surviving trauma.

And I just started to see this as, this is definitely a value as a society, as a state, specifically as one of the most wealthy states in the country, which could be like, if it was its own nation, it would be one of the wealthiest in the world. It’s like, oh, it kind of just clicked for me how we place value and it’s not set in stone. And I think that’s one of the things we have to really interrupt. Because we often think the hard sciences are innately more valuable than the soft sciences. I don’t even think there’s that binary, differentiation.

Because once you get into, deep into physics, it’s almost poetic and artistic anyway. If you go into quantum physics, it’s like what’s going on here. Right? So I feel like all that to say, I started to just be like, no, wait a second. Like part of social justice is also pushing up against our ideas about what is valuable and what isn’t, and we’re constantly needing to reaffirm.

Especially because when we think of labor, labor is gendered as well. So a lot of the jobs that are considered to be gendered as feminine or female jobs are automatically devalued. And again, that’s not because they’re less skillful or they don’t require less skill. They’re not because they’re easier.

It’s literally just because women do those things or like society has pushed women into those particular roles. And so I just kind of started to see it all around me and it gave me a better sense of finances, a lot of the time we think of it as statistics and a lot of math, which it is. But it is also a lot of psychology, it’s a lot of sociology. It’s a lot of about like, oh, what are we deciding matters? And it doesn’t matter, you know? There’s a lot of people, there’s a lot of white men just playing with these numbers, playing with our lives, playing with them, our futures, like just being like, well, that works for me. And I think you’re right.

Shanna Bennet: It has a lot to do with acknowledging what we’re valuing socially and then kind of figuring out where you fit in there. So in human resources, I do payroll. Okay? And when you do payroll, guess what, you see what everyone makes. And my sister also does payroll. She’s in her mid-twenties now. And I’ve watched her in similar situations, kind of look around her, have an idea of what the pay bands are, have an idea of what the compensation is, and then go, I can do that. In fact, wasn’t I just using that yesterday? And so they’re making that. It’s like, it’s like, yes. I was like, wait a second. So that’s how much I can earn? Okay. Well, it gives me an idea on the next job, what I’m gonna ask for. So I think that, and some really good mentors, like some really good men or women, whoever it is in your life that is kind of the buzzword is pouring into you and kind of giving you back that confidence and saying, no, you’re experienced now you’ve been doing this for five years.

So when you go in there and they’re telling you all this nonsense about you being inexperienced, no. Still ask for what you’re worth because you’re, you’re worth that. I think those two things basically see what people make and then having mentors, it helps. It helps a lot.

Maddy: Yeah. I just wrote down the word transparency. Should employers or people, when they’re trying to hire, write down the salary range? And it’s like, yes, why are we debating this? Like, obviously this should be done.

You know? It’s like, do you guys want the wage gap to be closed or not? Because that’s how it happens, is through transparency because how do people know what to ask for if they don’t know what other people are making or what the range is.

Shanna Bennet: Yeah. And I think even too, if you were going to post a job on a job board, when you don’t post what the person’s going to be making, that job is going to not get as many hits as the job that’s like, listen, the range is from $60,000 to $70,000. Like that’s the range. You know what I mean? When you just have a blanket job, and there’s no compensation, I’m not even going to spend my time looking at it if I don’t know what you’re offering. And I think too, maybe you’ve seen this on TikTok, but there is almost specifically this niche of just openly sharing, how much you make within like the black female community, but just like the female community in general. Like women are sharing what they’re making and what they’re doing, and Nikki and I’ve had countless conversations about that. And she’s been incredibly generous in sharing how much she makes, what her title is, what’s available out there and it’s opened my eyes as to the possibilities. But those are the kind of continued transparent conversations that we need because we’re already behind the eight ball. We’re not making as much as our male counterparts. We’re not making as much as our white male counterparts. So let’s talk about it.

So according to some stats provided by our wonderful producer, Nikki, collectively more than 55 million full-time working women earned an estimated $545 billion less than their male counterparts in 2019. I mean, how disturbing. And we know, we know that these women are caretakers for their families, for their extended families while working, we know that women uphold our communities. So that’s just a really unfortunate stat.

Maddy: Exactly. The average woman loses over $407,000 because of the gender wage gap over her lifetime. And for women of color, the losses are even worse than that. For black women, losses are almost a million dollars. $944,000 for black women. And then over 1 million for Latinx, Latina women.

Shanna Bennet: So basically all that I got from that is all black women should be millionaires. So that’s all. I got somebody owes us millions of dollars.

Maddy: It’s also, it makes you even more furious about student loan debt, because it’s like, you want us to take personal responsibility. Well also as a society, we haven’t fixed the problem of the wage gap and then also the racial, economic gap too, is like a really big problem. I just call it a chasm. I wrote like a rap about it. And I was just like, yeah like it’s not a gap. It’s a chasm. Just to get us to stop using the gap, because the gap seems small to me it’s not small. It’s really big.

Shanna Bennet: That’s really big. I think too, like on average, women are spending two years more paying off their debt than men. And the two years doesn’t sound like that much time, but we’re talking about thousands, thousands of dollars. In some cases we’re paying more for degrees because it’s taking us longer to pay them off or paying more in interest. I don’t understand. Are we not understanding what’s happening?

Maddy: Yeah. And let’s not even go into the fact that like black women gave Biden the vote, like their votes really solidified his presidency. So this is like a very clear way that he could give back to the community.

Shanna Bennet: I know, I think though, that there’s so much meat, there’s so much to build on in terms of getting awareness. That’s why I’m so glad that we’re finding so many different outlets for doing this in terms of things like your videos on TikTok for example. We’re seeing art installations. I mean, you’re rapping about it. You’re rapping about this chasm. Like how cool is that? Whatever it takes, whatever it takes. Do you have anything you want to promote Maddy before we close anything going on?

Maddy: Yeah, I’ve been doing a couple of interesting projects. Well, first of all, you can check out my music. I have an album that I put out, which is the way that I actually found out about the Debt Collective, which is really interesting. I was part of a group of artists called creative wildfire.

And we were actually provided with grants to be able to create art about the climate crisis. So I wrote an entire short-form album about the climate crisis. But within this cohort, we learned about other issues that were all connected, such as the economy. And then I started talking about student debt and, I was like, oh, I want to be part of this organization too now.

So random connection, climate crisis, debt crisis. That was how I first learned. So I have that project called Down Chance and you can find it on all streaming platforms. And then I also composed the musical score for a dance piece called Sorry, Please, No. It’s about abolition and particularly looking at like sexual assault, but it’s dancers. They do an arrow dance where they suspend on the side of buildings and stuff and like to dance, which is really cool. So look out for that. I did a 16-minute musical score for that, but hopefully, it’s going to be 30 minutes.

We’re going to finish it off at the end of the year. So this is the first iteration of that on Saturday, February 26, in San Francisco. And if you go to www.flyawayproductions.com, you can see the link for that.

Shanna Bennet: Well, thank you so much for your time. I loved our conversation. Your responses were so jam-packed full of not only your personal experiences but your perspective on this crisis. And it’s really valuable. So thank you for being with us.

Maddy: Thank you so much for having me. It’s been really amazing to just have this conversation with y’all.

Shanna Bennet: If you liked this episode of Matter of Life and Debt, subscribe and share it with a friend. It really helps people discover us. Matter of Life and Debt is hosted by me, Shanna Bennet. It is produced by Emma Klauber and Nikki Nolan. It is edited by Nikki Nolan, transcripts and writing is done by Emma Klauber. Efe Akmen created the theme music.

Visit our website www.matteroflifeanddeath.com, where you can listen to more episodes, access transcripts, get additional context for the subjects you just heard about. Absolutely for free the website again, www.matteroflifeanddebt.com.

Thanks again for listening.

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