Former Stanford Dean Says Internalized Racism Led to Credit Card Debt

• Julie Lythcott-Haims was a student at Stanford University in the 1980s.
• Credit cards became a tool for proving her “worthiness” at the mainly white college.
• Her debt topped $3,900, and was later paid off by her parents. It taught her to ask for help sooner.
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Most people get their first credit card in college. It can seem like a financial rite of passage.

As a student at Stanford University in the 1980s, Julie Lythcott-Haims added not one, but two credit cards to her wallet, she told financial planner Bobbi Rebell on an episode of her “Financial Grownup” podcast.

Lythcott-Haims, author of the new release “Your Turn: How to be an Adult,” said she put everything from groceries to coffee and meals on her credit cards without having the money in her bank account to make payments in full. (Lythcott-Haims later returned to Stanford and spent a decade as dean of freshman and undergraduate advising between 2002 and 2012.)

“I was spending money without having really learned the habits of how you keep track of your expenses and the whole interest part with credit cards,” she said. Her debt peaked at $3,900 (nearly $8,000 in today’s dollars) around age 22.

How racism played a role in her spending

Looking back, Lythcott-Haims, who is a Black and biracial woman, remembered using credit cards as a way to fit into white spaces after a childhood spent “internaliz[ing] the hate” directed towards her through “microaggressions and outright racism.”

“I am using the credit cards when I’m in a store, in a fancy store, at the Stanford Shopping Center or in a nice restaurant as a way to demonstrate I have credit, I am capable,” Lythcott-Haims told Rebell of her experience in the predominantly white town surrounding the college.

“I was really deep in my internalized oppression that I was trying to not be the stereotypical Black person,” she continued. “I was trying to be the model ‘Negro,’ if you will — I’m using terms of stereotype. I have long since grown out of that behavior, but I will say, the credit card was like an appendage that was proving my ability or my worthiness or my right to be in these white environments.”

Her parents later paid off the debt, which taught her a big lesson

Lythcott-Haims got a job earning $20,000 a year after college and struggled to make a dent in her credit-card balance, she told Rebell.

Then she moved in with her parents the summer before starting as a student at Harvard Law School. They intercepted her credit-card bill in the mail and handed her a check for the full amount. She was getting married, they said, and wanted her to start with a clean slate.

“I felt so shamed and so just embarrassed,” Lythcott-Haims remembered. “Here I am, highly educated, a fancy degree from a fancy college, and I’d managed to get so far in the hole and I just cried. I just cried. Tears just rolled down my face. They weren’t judgmental. They weren’t scolding me. They were offering me this gift.”

To Lythcott-Haims, the lesson is now clear: Ask for help when you need it.

“If I had reached out to my parents six months earlier,” she said, “or a year before, or two years before, I would probably never have gotten into such bad debt to start with.”