Here's one reason why America's racial wealth gap persists across generations
Angela Chevaux and her husband have made a good living in
"We were able to buy the property — the other half — out from his brother at a decent price," Chevaux says.
She figures they paid about half what the appraised value would have been.
They're renovating the farmhouse to live in and are selling their own home, saying goodbye to 11 more years of payments.
"We'll be mortgage-free at [ages] 50 and 59!" she says with a laugh.
Her father-in-law also left Chevaux's 24-year-old son a money market account.
"He had given our son some money towards college before he passed," she says. "So then this allowed him to pay off the rest of his college debt."
Her son is a financial adviser and has invested the rest of his inheritance, with plans to use it to help buy a house.
The family's financial fortunes show one way that America's stark racial wealth gap has persisted — and even widened — over generations. White adults are more than twice as likely as Black and Latino households to get sizable financial help from parents or other elders. That's according to a new poll by
"Because you have Black Americans who are doing everything they were told is right and not getting ahead," she says. "And they're scratching their heads wondering, 'How come I'm not doing better than I am? How come I'm not doing better than the guy in the cubicle next to me?' "
The new poll finds 38% of white adults say they've gotten at least
Brown says this divide reflects generations of segregation and racism, especially in housing policies. Racially restrictive covenants barred white people from selling or renting their homes to African Americans or other minority groups. And
"So if your grandparent got a home that was FHA insured, it was a result of their being white," she says. "You don't think about that, but it was."
The racial wealth gap is also evident in lots of other questions in the poll.
"When people talk about the American dream, it's here," says
A large number of Black, Latino and Native American adults say they want to move to better housing and expect their children to go to college, but they don't have the money to pay for those things.
"These minority communities are ... going to have to borrow everything in a very risky environment for that," Blendon says, "and they don't have anything to at least help defray some of the costs."
What's at stake, he says, is the ability to make the choices that can help families, and future generations, move ahead.
For Black Americans, wealth is more likely to flow up
For African Americans, especially, tax expert Brown says the generational wealth transfer is actually more likely to go the other way — children helping parents who suffered under Jim Crow.
That's the story of
"My father died when I was 3 years old," he says. "My mother was a single mother with four sons."
His dad died while he was a military cook in World War II, which led to a major break for Bailey. As a war orphan he was able to go to college on the GI Bill, and that launched a successful career as an engineer and missile designer. From early on, Bailey sent money to help his mother get by.
"I knew she was struggling, you know. And at the time, I didn't have a whole lot to spare, but I'd send her whatever I could," he says.
Now retired in
"Oh," he says with a chuckle, "there's always cousins and nephews and things that want to borrow money, and a lot of times they don't pay back."
Research shows family help like this seriously depletes the wealth of college-educated Black Americans. Bailey says he's now having to cash out more of his IRA than he'd like to in this bad market, to meet his own expenses.
He's not sure how much there will be left to pass on to his children and grandchildren.
"I invested in them, putting them through college and so forth," he says. "I'm hoping they can take care of themselves."
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