For Giving Tuesday, the media find no obvious villain: Donating to nonprofits — or, as Giving Tuesday calls it, doing good — counters the overindulgence of Black Friday. However, positioning Giving Tuesday as the antidote to Black Friday is erroneous because both days stem from the same monster: widening disparities in income and wealth.

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The vilification in Black Friday reporting casts shame upon the crowds that wreak havoc on stores in the name of snagging a deal. Take these headlines, for example: “What Turns Black Friday Shoppers Into Raging Hordes?” “The Human Costs of Black Friday, Explained by a Former Amazon Warehouse Manager.” “Why Black Friday Shopping Is Especially Dangerous in Tennessee – And How To Be Safe.”

However, the culprit behind Black Friday hysteria is more systemic than individualistic. Companies intentionally employ misleading tactics, such as creating a sense of faux scarcity and marking up the original price of products so the discount price seems better, to appeal to potential customers. The perception of limited temporality concerning the sales compounds this sense, strengthening the urgency and fear of missing out for many shoppers.

Meanwhile, stagnant wages, expensive health care, student loan debt, the racial wealth gap, and the gender wage gap, in addition to a host of other inequitable institutions, have left the average person in the United States in a state of financial precarity. Blaming these people for taking advantage of one of the few moments they may have to afford a new phone, kitchen appliance, or toy for their child not only ignores their victimization by the system, but fails to acknowledge that wealthier individuals actually spend more on Black Friday than do the people vilified in the day’s popular portrayals.

Giving Tuesday, which the 92nd Street Y and United Nations Foundation launched in 2012 as a Twitter hashtag, is the apparent salve to rampant consumerism. People can absolve their conscience of the post-splurge guilt and regret by donating money or volunteering time to a charitable cause. “When you give, you feel happier, more fulfilled, and empathetic,” wrote Asha Curran, Chief Innovation Officer and Director of the Belfer Center for Innovation and Social Impact at the 92nd Street Y, in 2017.

Centered at the core of Giving Tuesday is “the power of people and organizations to transform their communities and the world.” People give back, ushering “in the holidays’ charitable spirit” and powering a movement that has grown over the years and has the potential to raise half a billion dollars this year.

However, as “a day that encourages people to do good,” Giving Tuesday is not as inclusive as it states. The mean gift size during Giving Tuesday in 2018 was $105, an amount that is not insignificant for a cash-strapped individual. Those who are able to participate in Giving Tuesday, whether that be by donating money or volunteering time, are not representative of the marginalized communities in need of investment. In fact, charitable giving has increased for upper-income households while decreasing for middle- and lower-income households — a trend that tracks the expanding wealth gap.

While donations from individuals and organizations offer relief for nonprofits working in under-resourced communities, a funding system in which groups must vie for the limited goodwill of some benevolent donor does not address the roots of inequity, inequality, and injustice. Similar to how stores promote deals to bring in potential customers for Black Friday, nonprofits market their cause to potential donors for Giving Tuesday.

A quick look at Giving Tuesday pages shows how the campaign plays into this competitive dynamic as nonprofits are listed as products to be filtered and added to an online gift bag and on leaderboards showcasing the most successful fundraising hauls. Donations are transactional: $50 provides shelter for a night, $100 “provides one month of meals” to a sheltered family, $250 “provides a day of therapeutic child care services” for a sheltered child. Giving Tuesday puts a price tag on critical services for marginalized communities, and wealthy donors determine if the price is right.

Expanding inequality in income and wealth has resulted in a society in which the top 1 percent commands more money and political power than the bottom 50 percent. Bemoaning the greed of Black Friday while praising the altruism of Giving Tuesday ignores the structures that give life to both.

For the average person in the United States, uncertainty and instability dictate their experience; faulting them for perpetuating a splurge-heavy holiday season fails to recognize their existence at the mercy of low wages, staggering debt, privileged corporate interests, and more. Nonprofits and community organizations are in a similar position: When the government fails to support them, they become hostage to privatized benevolence.

Instead of congratulatory applause for donors on Giving Tuesday, let’s reevaluate the cruel cycle in which society denies marginalized communities access to comfort and opportunity, denigrates them for attempting to carve out access, expects nonprofits to compete for money that will assist the marginalized communities, and then thanks wealthy donors for their performative generosity.

“She was a single mom with a six-year-old son,” Rushka says, adding, “she was just coming out of an abusive relationship.” So Rushka decided to see if she could organize some of the folks who had offered to help her into helping this woman instead. She ended up with a minivan full of donations — some used, some new — of everything from clothes for mom to toys for her son. Rushka describes the people who met her as coming from a range of social classes, but notes that many were middle class or lower middle class. A lot of them, she says, commented that they were helping because they too had struggled. “The woman was crying when I met her,” Rushka recalls. “I told her honestly, I’m an addict in recovery and a lot of people have helped me out.”

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This kind of story doesn’t end up in the news as often as descriptions of dramatic convenience store robberies or violence-plagued low-income neighborhoods — but it’s a known, common thread within these communities. Poor people hold one another up. For decades, if not forever, poor communities have not been able to count on the government for support. SNAP (formerly known as “food stamps”) only provides about $1.40 per person per meal, and in the poorest states in the country, less than 4 percent of poor families receive TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, often referred to as “welfare”). Perhaps this lack of sufficient government assistance is why a 2010 study by researchers at University of California, Berkeley and University of Toronto discovered that lower-income people are more inclined toward thinking on a community level than people from other classes.

In the study, participants were told to gather as many points as possible. They were given an initial number of points and the option to keep the points for themselves or to give a portion of their points to an unseen partner. Anything they gave to their partner would be tripled, and then their partner would have the option to share a portion of their new, higher total of points with the study participant. Of course, there was no actual partner; the experiment was a measure of prosocial trust. Would participants trust their partner enough to share a sizable portion of their own points so they could both leave with a bigger total payout, or would they keep their points to themselves?

The results showed lower-class participants gave up more of their points in hopes that their partners would share a larger amount of their total, supporting an overall hypothesis that the increased generosity seen in low-income people results from intra-communal reliance. The lower-income participants needed a larger payout than they could get on their own, so they had to trust their partner to support them. As a result, need spurred generosity.

The tendency of low-income people to help others in need is something you can observe in the real world all the time, if you know where to look. You see it in the form of family hand-me-downs, diapers donated to a neighbor in need, or rideshares to the grocery store. Right now in Boston, the National Council for Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls is working to formalize this phenomenon by creating supportive microcommunities within vulnerable neighborhoods. “Our organizing motto is ‘block by block,'” says Executive Director Andrea James. She describes a system in which women reach out to neighbors to find out what they need in order to thrive, whether that’s a food pantry, a bail fund, a community garden, or a ride to the polls. It is a grassroots pushback against the government failure to provide, or at least provide enough, for its most vulnerable citizens. Led by women with criminal backgrounds — the exact kind of people often labeled “underprivileged” — this grassroots welfare project exemplifies that same generosity and trust observed by the researchers at Berkeley in 2010, and by Rushka last Christmas.

These community-focused habits are spreading outside of low-income communities, with mixed results. One of the better-known examples, The Buy Nothing Group, was specifically modeled after a poor community that the founders witnessed while working a relief mission in Nepal. In theory, the tenets of the Buy Nothing Project are simple: nothing is sold or traded. Each item is given freely, with no expectation of reward. Participation spans class, and at times, can work beautifully. I personally owe a lot to my local Buy Nothing Group: Members helped furnish my home, helped me with diapers for my daughters, and even provided food grown in backyard gardens.

It was a beautiful experience — but it was different from the giving and receiving that takes place within the confines of low-income communities. When people gave or received items in my Buy Nothing community, it was not often driven by need. Items are supposed to go to whomever the giver wishes, using whatever criteria she decides. Some people went so far as to state that they would not give to anyone who openly expressed needing something; they found that discussing need was distasteful.

That’s where the appropriation of low-income community tools became problematic.

Some people do need more than others. Pretending otherwise introduces an element of shame that doesn’t exist within low-income giving circles, in which everyone understands what they are providing and why. What’s worse, it introduces the idea that need is a weakness, rather than a normal and reciprocal part of human existence. The expectation that people can take when they need and give when they have plenty is essential to how societies work. If it’s been a long time since you needed something, it’s easy to forget that. But that’s not a luxury that most low-income people have.

Generosity is a beautiful human trait. It’s also a survival tactic. If economically stable communities are going to start implementing the survival tactics of the poor for other reasons — whether it’s to pass the time, meet their neighbors, or just get rid of stuff — they need to recognize that there are still people who rely on community resourcing. And they need to acknowledge that these neighborhood-sharing programs have their roots in low-income communities, whose members have been helping each other stay afloat long before it was trendy.