In psychology, they say that no human being can truly remember anything before the age of 4. If think you have a memory before that, then they say that memory is just a reflection of stories other people have told you about your childhood; they are not coming from your own memory but instead, from other people recounting their own memories of you. If that’s true then the following events will shock you.

Since she was a little girl, Emelia could vaguely remember a very specific memory. Whenever she thought back to it, she couldn’t remember it completely, but she could visualize it in flashes. In one flash, her mother was dressing her in a pink dress with white shoes. In the next flash, she was in a van with some of her family members and she had a toy baby doll on her lap. In the next flash, she was in a shopping mall with her family, pushing a toy stroller with her baby doll in it. The last flash she remembers is one where she stops in front of a store, and gets her picture taken. As the years went by and Emelia grew into an adult, she began to think that memory was probably a dream. Her mother didn’t remember it, and she couldn’t ask the family members she remembered being around because they permanently moved out of the country. She decided that it was just something she imagined.

A few years later, Emelia and her mother went to visit their grandmothers home in Jamaica after 15 years of being away. The  house is full of memories and images. Emelia and her mother decided to go through old photo albums that were stored in the house. Their eyes filled up with tears as they say their great grandparents wedding photos, pregnancy pictures, and baby pictures of everyone in the family. At the end of the last photo album, there was a picture of a brown little girl in a shopping mall. She was wearing a pink dress and white shoes and was pushing around a stroller with a small plastic baby sitting in it. On the bottom right corner of the image was a date: 05/26/2002. The little girl would’ve been two years old when that photo was taken. That little girl was Emelia, and Emelia is me. Maybe psychologists don’t know everything.

For as long as I can remember, my grandmother has been knitting a quilt. To the point that every holiday, she required us to gift her different colors of yarn instead of presents. I counted in total how many balls of yarn we’d gift her a year between my mother, my brother, and myself; in total, she’d receive 12 balls of yarn every year. But despite her being very “yarn-rich”, none of us have ever seen the quilt she’s been knitting. Nor have we ever been gifted so much as a sweater from all her balls of yarn. Whenever I’d ask her how her quilt is coming along, she’d put her wrinkled hand in the air and wave me away while saying “almost done, almost done”. I’ve heard her say that for the past 22 years of my life and still, no quilt. My brother and I used to always joke around and place bets on how old we’d be before we ever saw one of her quilts finished. One time we went as high as 50 years old before our mother told us it’s not nice to make fun of old women. That’s classic mom though; she hasn’t really been into jokes since our father left. One winter, we got a call saying that our grandmother was sick and in the hospital. When we went to go visit her I couldn’t believe my eyes; on her lap, was a pink and white quilt. I watched as she struggled to catch her breath, while at the same time, her fingers moved with a graceful speed. Two weeks later, we found out that she passed away. As we drove up to her house to empty out her things, I wondered about the pink and white quilt. As we were cleaning out her bedroom later that day, there were three cardboard boxes with my mothers, my brothers, and my name scribbled on top. When we opened each box, our eyes welled up with tears. Each box had an array of sweaters, mittens, and the most beautiful quilts I’ve ever seen. That’s when I knew, our grandmother was knitting the ultimate present for us, throughout all these years.

There once was a butterfly without wings

She’d never seen them before

So she knew they weren’t there

She fluttered around and always wondered

Why they pointed and smiled at her bare body

She felt wingless and ashamed

Until one day she had a child

Who was as wingless as can be

But said she wanted wings as beautiful as her mothers

And so the butterfly wept

That’s when she knew that things were only true

If you believed them to be

Earlier this month, it was announced that Rihanna is now a billionaire. As any Gen-Z Black woman, who loves to see other women of color breaking the barriers of white supremacy, I instantly saw this as a huge win. When the news broke, I immediately reposted it on social media and commented on how inspirational it was. Little girls of color everywhere will finally have a self-made billionaire to see themselves in. However, after sitting with the news for a while, and following the “Rihanna’s a Billionaire” discourse on twitter, my outlook on the situation quickly shifted. It’s no secret that the capitalistic society we live in thrives off of hoarding wealth, and flaunting it’s inaccessiblity to the public. While they keep people wanting what they can’t have, there will always be a market of supply and demand that benefits larger corporations. The issue is that the large profit obtained, usually comes at the expense of the employees that work for these corporations, and from the exploitation of the people and resources in vulnerable countries. So how does this connect to our girl Rihanna? Well, no billionaire can obtain their status without part-taking in said exploitation in some way, shape, or form. In order to become a billionaire in a capitalistic society, you have to get your hands dirty; or at least exploit some people to get theirs dirty for you. A large part of Rihanna’s billionaire status can be attributed to her well-known Fenty clothing and makeup company. One key ingredient that is included in many of her makeup products is Mica: a mineral mined from the eastern hemisphere of the world. Most of the Mica in makeup products is unethically sourced and is obtained through child labor mines in places like Jharkhand, India. Many people– including myself at one point– can argue that Rihanna is not more harmful than the centuries of white billionaire men that came before her, and that if there are going to be billionaires in the world, she might as well be one of them. The issue with this argument is that it supports the idea that it doesn’t matter what people of color do, just as long as they’re the first ones to do it. Rihanna being the first Black female billionaire in the makeup industry doesn’t take away from the fact that she obtained that title in some unethical way. The children who are forced into labor for the ingredients in those makeup products will not suffer any less just because she is a woman of color. It’s very easy to romanticize billionaires when you don’t have to directly suffer as a result of their existence. If we don’t start placing a microscope over these people now, then the question becomes: when is the right time to hold billionaires accountable?