SANAA’S ESSAY

Wealth refers to the sum of resources available to a family at a point in time. While household income contributes to wealth formation, two households with similar incomes and expenditures may have significantly different levels of wealth depending on accumulated assets or inherited resources from previous generations (McIntosh et al., 2020). This essay explores the historical origins of the Black–White wealth gap, the structural inequalities that sustain it despite improvements in income and asset ownership, and how the family unit can be mobilised to strengthen intergenerational wealth-building.

Racial wealth inequalities cannot only be explained by differences in income or asset ownership; they are rooted in the historical exclusion of Black Americans from the institutions that enable wealth accumulation. Until the 1860s most Black Americans were enslaved, contributing to the economic development of the United States while being legally prevented from accumulating wealth themselves (Derenoncourt et al., 2022, p.1). Consequently, the racial wealth gap can be traced to the vastly unequal starting conditions that existed at emancipation. While white families were able to pass down property, assets and capital across generations, formerly enslaved Black Americans began their pursuit of economic mobility with little wealth and limited access to the resources necessary for long-term accumulation.

While slavery helps to reveal the origins of the racial wealth gap, it does not fully explain why it persists. Since emancipation, Black Americans have pursued many pathways to economic advancement — education, entrepreneurship, property ownership. However, these efforts have repeatedly been undermined by policies and practices that restrict Black wealth accumulation. As Darrick Hamilton and William Darity argue, restrictions on Black economic advancement have existed since emancipation, including the failure to provide freed people with their promised “forty acres and a mule,” and the systematic deprivation of Black-owned property through government action, fraud and seizures by white terrorists (Hamilton and Darity, 2010, p.212). Prosperous Black communities were also targeted by racial violence — most famously in Tulsa, Oklahoma — and Black people were excluded from post-Depression and Second World War policy programmes, which were largely responsible for the asset development of the modern American middle class.

These barriers persist into the twenty-first century. A 2009 study found that Black residents in the Twin Cities earning over $150,000 were twice as likely to be denied a mortgage as white applicants earning less than $40,000 (Darity and Hamilton, 2010, p.212). Even when approved, high-income Black borrowers were far more likely to receive subprime loans than lower-income white borrowers. The gap does not persist because Black Americans have failed to pursue economic mobility, but because access to wealth-building institutions is still shaped by racial inequality — as reflected in the experiences of Black Caribbean immigrant families, who, despite earnings gains over time, do not reach parity with white Americans (Hamilton, 2020, p.309).

Strengthening the family unit as a mechanism for reducing the wealth gap is particularly effective, as wealth is accumulated over time through shared financial decision-making, intergenerational transfers of capital and collective asset ownership rather than individual upward mobility. The family can operate as an important alternative economic unit, particularly when structural inequalities restrict access to mainstream opportunities. This role is especially significant in higher education, where family-funded scholarships can reduce student debt and strengthen intergenerational mobility by preserving future earnings within the family unit.

Evidence suggests that inheritances, bequests and intra-family transfers are the most significant drivers of racial wealth inequality (Hamilton and Darity, 2010, p.212). This highlights that strengthening family-based systems of savings, education funding and asset transfer is central to reducing inequality. For Black Caribbean diaspora families, these practices already operate informally through remittances, pooled financial support, and shared investment in property and business. Formalising these systems could enable family contributions to move beyond survival support and towards a coordinated collective financial network that transforms pooled resources into productive capital.

However, it is essential to recognise that dominant wealth systems have been historically produced through exclusion and exploitation, and should not be uncritically replicated (Bhattacharyya, 2018, p. 101). Relying on established models without adaptation risks reproducing the very inequalities we are trying to address as a family. Instead, financial education, collective investment strategies and intergenerational support should be used to build ethically grounded forms of generational wealth that prioritise stability and ownership within our family — including diaspora-led investment into Caribbean development, such as land, housing and Jamaican businesses, ensuring that wealth creation is retained and reinvested in our country of origin.

In conclusion, the Black–White wealth gap persists as a condition of a fundamentally unequal society, which explains its continuation despite gains in income and asset ownership. Strengthening the family unit is central to narrowing the gap, because wealth is most effectively accumulated through the preservation and transfer of wealth across generations. However, addressing racial wealth inequality also requires reimagining wealth-building practices at the family level, rather than replicating the existing racialised wealth system.