By Amelia Tait, Photo: Rachel Bujalski/The Observer, The Guardian, June 5, 2022
Morgan Curtis’s life story is the American Dream in reverse. Her great, great, great grandfather was a banker in early 1800s New York – he invested in railroads, while his brother invested in Central American mines. The family wealth grew as it passed through the generations, and Curtis’s father added to the pile as a management consultant for “major” firms. Naturally, Curtis had a gilded childhood: educated in west London private schools; going on annual Swiss ski holidays; her own pony. But today, Curtis, now 30, lives on a farm in California with 40 other people. She lives on $25,000 (£20,000) a year.
Curtis did not make bad investments, or lose the family money in Las Vegas. She has chosen to give up 100% of her inheritance and 50% of the income she earns as a coach, “redistributing” it to grassroots social movements, Black liberation organisations, indigenous land projects and climate justice groups. She has even created a publicly accessible, colour-coded spreadsheet listing her annual donations.
This is because Curtis’s banker ancestor didn’t start with nothing – and Curtis is keenly aware that the American Dream for some means an American nightmare for others. Her great, great, great, great (that’s an extra great) grandfather owned a cotton mill in New York that she says “can’t be disconnected from plantation labour”, while her grandmother’s grandfather had an 11,000-acre sugar plantation in Cuba. “My ancestors made harmful and immoral choices, participating in slavery and colonisation,” she says, “And so I see this money as not mine; as belonging to those communities who had their land and labour stolen from them.”
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