Conventional wealth-building advice fails for black families who follow it

Evidence

In contrast, a single setback can eliminate the possibility of generational wealth for black families—and often, that setback occurs when these families are trying to conform to conventional wisdom about how to close the black-white wealth gap. Whether it’s pursuing an advanced degree and ending up with debilitating student debt, or buying a starter home that ends up selling at a loss, the white paths to wealth don’t work the same way for black families. A 2015 Brookings Institution report titled “Five Bleak Facts on Black Opportunity” found that not only did most black American families fail to rise out of the middle class but their children were actually more likely to fall out of the middle class than they were to remain there. — Dorothy A. Brown, The Whiteness of Wealth, 478

Categorization

• XREF: Directly instantiates the book’s thesis that facially neutral advice and policy yields engineered disparity given unequal starting conditions. — connects to: Baby bonds fail because income and wealth are not the same — Dorothy A. Brown, The Whiteness of Wealth: How the Tax…, 487