Intergenerational wealth support within black families creates a multigenerational catch-22

Evidence

Doesn’t this mean that black parents simply need to focus their efforts on supporting their children? To that I’d say, how? If black parents deplete their wealth to support their children, they risk becoming a financial burden to those very same children, leaving them in a catch-22. They can sacrifice a lot to help their children pay for college and graduate with less debt. Later in life, however, those same black parents, having used their own nest egg to help their children, will now need those children to provide financial assistance, leaving them less able to provide for their own children. Remember John, who worried about filling out his sons’ college financial aid applications? He was concerned that the income reported on his tax returns would disqualify his sons for certain financial aid packages—when, in fact, a significant part of that income already goes to support his mother. Which family member should John cut off to ensure the well-being of the other? The black-white wealth gap pits grandparent against grandchild, and no one wins. — Dorothy A. Brown, The Whiteness of Wealth, 480

Categorization

• DEFINE: Concretely illustrates the ‘catch-22’ mechanism of family wealth transfers where helping one generation financially burdens both.
• XREF: Connects to the earlier example of John and his mother’s financial support from the same book.