Wealthy Class Traitors Belong in the Rebellion
Writing from Iimay Ho
A note from Mike
When it comes to organizing the rich, we have to use creative strategies, including leveraging pop culture, to reach a mass audience. The Star Wars spinoff Andor has some of the most relevant content about cross-class organizing under a fascist government that I’ve seen. This piece by Iimay Ho was written after Andor Season 1 was released. I am thrilled to share it with you before Andor Season 2 is released on April 22nd.
Iimay Ho (they/them) is the former Executive Director of Resource Generation, and the current Managing Director, People and Operations for Local Progress, a movement of local elected officials advancing a racial and economic justice agenda through all levels of local government.
Iimay is a dear colleague and the person I first went to when dreaming up this Organize the Rich project in its initial iteration as a book. I went to them because of their experience organizing young wealthy people, their skills as a writer, their commitment to storytelling…and because they’re my favorite combo of high integrity, great sense of humor, and super skilled at what they do.
Iimay wrote this piece last year – but between parenting, work and a full life, hasn’t had the chance to publish it. I am delighted to post it here and share it widely for the first time.
WEALTHY CLASS TRAITORS BELONG IN THE REBELLION
Like many elder Millennials, watching the original Star Wars trilogy on tape is one of my cherished childhood memories. But these days instead of rewinding A New Hope while my mom calls me downstairs to set the table, I open the Disney+ app on my iPad to watch Andor after putting my toddler to bed.
Andor’s nuanced character development, explicit anti-fascist message, and depiction of a cross-class rebellion of ordinary people feels and looks a lot different than the Star Wars I grew up on. It blew me away.
One character in particular, Vel Sartha, caught me by surprise. She is a queer “rich girl running away from her family” who leads the successful heist against The Empire that ignites rebellions from prisons to planets. Vel leads among many in the fight for liberation while navigating what it means to be a rebel from a rich family, just like me. It wasn’t until I was 36 that I’d see a character in mass media who held the complexities of identity that so closely mirrored my own.
One thing Vel and I have in common is that we both hid (intentionally and unintentionally) our wealth from our fellow rebels. Unlike her cousin Mon Mothma who is a liberal in the Imperial Senate, when it comes to supporting the Rebellion, Vel chooses not to embrace her connection to a wealthy and politically powerful family. Amongst all the complex character arcs and reveals in Andor, Vel’s story hooked me the most, because in it, I see my own journey to understanding why honesty about wealth matters, especially when joining forces to take down an empire built on wealth inequality.
That journey begins back in the 90s in the bonus room of my suburban home, sprawled on the couch with my brothers, rewatching A New Hope for the umpteenth time. Not only did Luke’s story introduce me to the idea of scrappy heroes risking it all for justice, it taught me that heroes are Chosen Ones and saviors. For a young queer Chinese kid growing up in the South, it was important to believe that maybe I too could be like Luke Skywalker and have a super important destiny and special powers that would take me to a galaxy far far away from suburban North Carolina.
Growing up in a wealthy enclave in Cary, NC as the child of immigrant parents was full of contradictions and feeling like an outsider in a place where my parents had fought to belong. My parents moved to Cary instead of one of the Asian immigrant hubs in California or New York because my dad found work there as an engineer. His job paid well enough for our upgrade to a new house in an elite neighborhood. So my house was bigger and nicer than most of my white friends at school, but that didn’t stop other white kids from making racist jokes about my name and the shape of my eyes.
However, among the Asian community, I was treated with deference, since my mom was a well-respected figure who started an insurance business to help mostly working-class Chinese immigrants navigate American bureaucracy, get driver's licenses, and purchase homes. As I grew older her clients became wealthier and she started to insure investment homes instead of first cars, and my parents started to buy investment properties of their own.
I inherited my Star Wars fandom from my parents, who immigrated here from Taiwan as grad students in 1977. They came in hope of securing economic stability and as a backup/exit plan for the families they left behind in case war broke out between China and Taiwan. 1977 is also when A New Hope was released and it was their first introduction to an American blockbuster. For an American public reeling and exhausted from the Vietnam War and the impeachment of President Nixon, A New Hope was just the kind of popcorn entertainment they needed - they could once again see a young white American man be a hero, taking down the Empire instead of serving it.
To my parents, the movie that would become a quintessential part of American pop culture was derivative of Chinese martial arts epics, which often featured a band of scrappy heroes with hard-earned powers taking on the corrupt state and military. Luke Skywalker was the American version of the rebels and folk heroes they grew up admiring.
As for me, as a child I identified with Luke’s restlessness, his sense that life was supposed to be different, bigger, more. As an adult, I roll my eyes at his whininess but also see echoes of my parents in his resourceful pragmatism. Like them, he grew up working-class and needed to learn how to fend for himself early on. He knows how to haggle, fix his own droids, bullseye womp rats. He remains true to himself and doesn’t sell out to The Empire.
Luke Skywalker seeped into my childhood psyche of what it means to be “a hero” – someone from humble beginnings, an underdog who through his honor, skill, and alliances takes on and defeats enemies who are much more resourced and powerful than him.
During my high school years, I saw how The Empire doesn’t just exist in the movies; the U.S. declared war against Iraq my senior year and I attended my first protest. This was my first experience of banding together with others around a shared cause, and as we chanted and marched I got a taste of what it might feel like to be part of the Rebellion – and wanted more.
I got involved in social change in college through coursework and student organizing and then moved to DC to pursue jobs at nonprofits focused on social justice. Like Luke, I wanted to be part of changing the world and a movement triumphing over the “bad guys.” I wanted to take down The Empire.
I eagerly got involved in local social justice organizing: registering working-class Asian immigrants to vote, building community with other queer Asian Americans, and starting a giving circle of donors who fundraised and gave small dollar grants to grassroots and community groups. I was feeling and living the possibility of social change, the possibility of racial and economic justice and making a difference in people’s everyday lives.
In a way, it made me feel even prouder of my mom’s business success as an Asian immigrant woman in an industry dominated by old white men. Her success despite all of the racism and sexism she faced was an example of what’s possible when marginalized people have opportunities for self-determination.
But through my social justice work, I was also learning how my family’s small business empire wasn’t just the result of my parents' hard work and determination. My dad had retired early and was building wealth through his stock portfolio, which he then funneled back into buying more rental properties and commercial real estate. Our family money relied on and benefited from the same structures that prop up U.S. empire - namely, racial capitalism and its requisite privatization of housing and real estate speculation.
Like their Star Wars fandom, my parents shared their wealth with me, too. It paid for college and for my unpaid DC internship which landed me my first nonprofit job after I graduated. It subsidized my rent when I first moved to DC so that I could actually afford to take said job. I was 28 when I received my first inheritance check of $28,000 as a wedding gift.
I saw my commitment to social justice as choosing to “do good” with my privilege, but found myself feeling conflicted by my instinct to hide or omit details about my family’s money, and by extension, my own. American culture both glorifies wealth and encourages secrecy about money as part of maintaining the myth of our “class-less” society and “equal opportunity.” Amidst all the mixed messages, it was easier to stay silent.
But working in nonprofits, money comes up a lot. Most, if not all, nonprofits rely on money from foundations and individuals to sustain their work. Back in my early 20s, I once found myself being congratulated for doing a successful fundraising pitch that raised $500 at a grassroots event – an amount I could have easily given myself. But I didn't mention this, nor did I match what was raised. At the time, I rationalized it as not wanting to call attention to myself or flaunt my wealth. Looking back, I can see I felt shame and guilt; I didn’t know what to do about being able to give $500 at an event where giving $10 was a stretch for many.
As I continued my nonprofit and social change work, I kept experiencing the dissonance between asking for money a lot and talking about my personal access to money not at all, and the dynamic felt inauthentic and bordering on hypocritical.
I complained about this enough without doing anything about it that my not-wealthy partner finally handed me the book Classified: How to Stop Hiding Privilege and Use it for Social Change. Flipping through the zine-style comics that illustrated common class privilege patterns, I felt both sheepish (“it me”) and relieved. I was not alone, other people shared my experience and wrestled with the same inner conflicts, and I wanted to meet them IRL.
The book was my entry point into Resource Generation, an organization that connected me with other young wealthy people committed to social justice. In chapter meetings, members normalized being honest about their and their family’s access to wealth and how their money was connected to U.S. empire. These class traitors showed me that being transparent about their wealth and where it comes from was a critical first step to redistributing it in ways that addressed the racism and inequality that created it.
Supported by this community, I started to unpack my own family’s wealth origins. I broke the “don’t talk about money” taboo by telling my story, both in my personal relationships and publicly. I stopped hiding my access to money, which meant I had to be accountable to doing something about it. So I took steps to increase my giving to 10% of my net assets, tell my family’s story in ways that debunk the model minority myth, and participate in social change as a wealthy person, now bringing signs like “rich person for wealth redistribution” to rallies and marches.
As I was integrating my class identity into my activism, I also became more aware of how embedded class messages are in American pop culture and media, shaping how we understand good vs. evil.
Rewatching A New Hope before the Star Wars sequels came out, I saw how the Rebels with their blaster-scorched helmets and piece-of-junk ships are contrasted with the Stormtroopers in their gleaming uniforms and pristine Star Destroyers. Good guys don’t get nice stuff; it’s part of what makes their eventual victory so heroic. And bad guys have everything handed to them, which makes them arrogant jerks up to the second the Death Star blows up. But where are all the rich Rebels?
Cue Andor. Having been disappointed by the sequels’ insistence on rehashing the same old Chosen One narrative, as I binge watched the show I experienced the unadulterated joy of a fan who sees a struggling franchise suddenly back in the championship league. Underdog, underfunded heroes are, of course, still fighting The Empire. But this time, there’s a rich class traitor among them: Vel.
Of course, Andor works up to revealing Vel’s family background. For the initial part of the series, Vel is only seen roughing it on the Empire-occupied planet Aldhani, and as she describes, “eating roots and sleeping on rocks for the Rebellion.” However, her journey eventually brings her strolling, adorned with fancy sumptuous robes, into the inner sanctum of a mansion. She’s meeting her cousin (a Senator, naturally) to discuss ways to continue funding the rebellion.
I gasped at this reveal: she’s a secret rich kid!
A dozen different thoughts flashed through my head: does she feel conflicted about hiding her wealth, like I did? Does she feel like she has something to prove? Does her old money family know she’s a Rebel (and gay??)
Was Vel hiding her wealth from others because she, like I did, thought she would be less credible or trustworthy if the other Rebels knew she was rich?
After all, we see her spending most of her time among the footsoldiers of the Rebellion, the majority of whom are enduring material scarcity of some sort while she has abundance at her fingertips. Cinta’s (Vel’s partner) scathing indictment of Vel as a “rich girl running away from her family” landed a little too close to home. As a younger person, I wanted to emphasize the parts of my activist identity that aligned with experiencing hardship – miles walked and hours spent outdoors in harsh weather in actions and rallies, and not acknowledging how I got to return to my cushy home.
How often had I, like Vel, downplayed my access to wealth, emphasizing the hardships that my parents experienced as immigrants while neglecting to mention the multiple investment properties they own?
I imagine that Vel felt, like me, she needed to obscure (and therefore not fully leverage) wealth and privilege in order to belong, to be good, to be a hero.
But what I love about Andor is that there are no individual saviors. The “good” guys do terrible things and the “bad” guys aren’t always terrible. The Rebellion is made up of smugglers, thieves, ex-Imperial officers, Senators, and droids – surely it has room for Vel to be a rich revolutionary who isn’t hiding her wealth.
After all, I found that I became more trustworthy when I was accountable and honest about my wealth, and less prone to saviorism or romanticizing poverty, which Vel seems to struggle with. But I also need a community of other rich class traitors to make sure I stay honest, and committed to fighting the Empire for the long haul, since for those of us with money, running away (to our second homes…on Mars??) is so much easier.
I hope in Season 2 Vel finds her cadre of class traitors to help her bring all of herself to the Rebellion, because saying “yes” to wealth transparency is in its own way an act of insurrection, both here and in a galaxy far far away. And as her comrade Nemik writes in his manifesto, “even the smallest act of insurrection pushes our lines forward.”
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Big Andor fan here. Mon Mothma and Vel are definitely inspiring figures. Still thinking about Luthen too. What a speech.
Thank you for sharing! I started watching Andor thanks to you and it feels so inspiring!