When you’re a woman of color and a white man divorces you, you don’t just lose your relationship, your marriage, and your best friend. You don’t just lose your home, like I did, something most men don’t do to their wives, at least not publicly. You lose your place in society. You lose your entire future and in some cases your career or a way into your career.

Wealth allows women with white male partners to enter fields like writing, music, and art. 47% of single Latina women and 46% of single Black women live in poverty. According to a 2007 study, Black women and Latinas had a median wealth of $100 and $120, respectively. White women had a median wealth of $45,400.

It remains true today in 2015 that a college degree is less likely to help a woman of color out of poverty than partnering with a white man. With such huge wealth discrepancies, it makes it possible for white men to literally buy us. We can’t leave these relationships easily, and if we are abandoned it is very easy for us to be left destitute in a few years time tops. They can threaten us and wield power that allows us to easily be taken advantage of and abused.

Single black women and latinas are the least likely to own a homeor have retirement funds. We are the most likely to be divorced or abandoned by white male partners, and in fact, partners of all races. We are also the most likely to bear them children and become mothers. This, a world where dark women are the most likely to both offer reproductive and emotional labor, and the most likely to be abandoned or kicked out of their homes and divorced against their own desires, replicates slavery and colonialism.

If you are a white man who attacks or abandons a woman of color who has created a home for you, paved a path at any level to advance your career, supported you emotionally, physically, or psychologically, you aren’t just an ex, you’re a colonizer, and participating in the same system that allowed for white men to rape, purchase, kill, and abandon slaves and native women. Money cannot replace or begin to address the damage white men do to women of color they abandon, especially young mothers of color or women without other family.