Financial gifts to parents shrink black household wealth by over a quarter.

Evidence

Proportionately, almost three times as many college-educated black households provide financial support for their parents as their white college-educated peers, and those transfers have a significant impact on net worth. Researchers have found that “financial transfers to parents (much more common among Black college-educated households) significantly decrease household net wealth by more than 25 percent.” — Dorothy A. Brown, The Whiteness of Wealth, 465

Categorization

• SEED: A potential essay angle: the direction of tax-free transfers—downward versus upward—as a hidden mechanism of wealth stratification that race-neutral tax policy silently encodes.