To African Americans, Harriet Tubman was our Moses, guiding the enslaved to freedom by faith and the light of the North Star. Why cheapen her by putting her on the face on the 20 dollar bill – the very symbol of the racialized capitalism she was fleeing?

When I first heard about Women on $20s, the unofficial contest to get a woman’s face on a $20 bill, I thought it sounded great: dudes have occupied greenbacks for centuries in the US. The female visages of Sacagawea and Susan B Anthony have been relegated to dollar coins no one gives two cents about.

But now that Harriet Tubman has won the unofficial vote for which woman should replace Andrew Jackson, I am less thrilled. I don’t want to see an abolitionist icon as the face of American money. I am quite content with my mental image of her conducting the Underground Railroad, that secret antebellum network of other former slaves and abolitionists who risked their lives to smuggle slaves out of the United States and into Canada.

I don’t want to see Tubman commodified with a price, as she once was as a slave. I don’t need to see hers as the face of the US treasury, being passed in transactions to underpaid retail workers and appearing in print ads for transnational banks.

It’s not that I object to genocidist Andrew Jackson getting sidelined from daily sight. But there’s something frank and honest about him occupying the 20 dollar bill. I mean, who better to represent what the US treasury has bought, and for whom it has amassed its tremendous wealth, than Andrew “trail of tears” Jackson? Maybe only the Founding Pappy on our dollar bill, slaveowner and “slave catcher” George Washington? Or Jefferson (on our $2 bill) who built his wealth at Monticello with the 175 slaves he owned?

Despite what Republican presidential hopeful Marco Rubio says, America is not “the first power in history motivated by a desire to expand freedom rather than its own territory.” But America was the first power in history to use chattel slavery to develop modern capitalism. Indeed, the US decreased freedom from black people in Africa (when it needed to bring ‘em over to work the land), and the US took territory from native and brown people (when it needed more land for white settlers). American empire was birthed in the exploitation of people of color and American capitalism is especially rooted in the enslavement of black people.

The roots of capitalist American slavery are not just found in long shuttered tobacco and cotton plantations, but in the entire business structure of the modern US economy. As historian Greg Grandin recently wrote: “Banks capitalized the slave trade and insurance companies underwrote it.” And while a still existing company like Aetna insurance was built on insuring slaves’ bodies, it has apologized but won’t pay reparations.

This is the shit Tubman was escaping: the enslaved exploitation of black bodies for white profit. And it still happens today. White people still have 12 times the wealth of black people. White people still have more access to wage labor. White people still simply live longer.

And white people, via the prison industrial complex, can still profit mightily off the legal slavery of imprisoned black bodies.

I am getting tired of the whitewashing of racial exploitation with brown faces. Enough with bullshit like McDonald’s slapping MLK’s face on their predatory and poverty creating labor practices. Putting Tubman’s face on the fiscal system which undergirds the likes of Aetna (and its hundreds of millions in annual profits) would be dismaying.

NPR pointed out that putting Tubman on the $20 bill would be poetic because of “a special historical resonance: that’s the same amount she eventually received from the US government as her monthly pension for her service as a nurse, scout, cook and spy during the Civil War, as well as for her status as the widow of a veteran.”

But Tubman wasn’t a sentimentalist, or an incrementalist. She was an abolitionist. Until they’re willing to talk reparations, leave the white guys on the money as a reminder that they created a national economy where men still get paid more than women and Tubman’s black and brown descendant daughters are hit the worst.

“I freed a thousand slaves”, Tubman is believed to have said. “I could have freed a thousand more if only they knew they were slaves.”

Putting Tubman’s face on the $20 would only obfuscate how much exploitation there is still left to fight in America, among those in prison, nail salons – and those exchanging twenties daily who don’t even know it. We should not let her be used to distract black and brown people from our present economic bondage every time we pay for something.

