White wealth compounds through interlocking gains across education, gifts, and housing.

Evidence

In the life cycle of white wealth, sometimes a single gain leads to the next, and the next, and the next. Take Susan, who started out with a debt-free education and a connection to a stockbroker, and has built it into a multimillion-dollar portfolio. Or Kathy, another white Atlantan, who used an inheritance of 30,000 from her mother, plus a loan from her husband's brother, to buy a Manhattan apartment in the early 1990s. When she and her husband sold the apartment for a profit a few years later, they used the money to buy a larger home in less expensive Atlanta. That home, which is located in a largely white neighborhood, has seen its value multiply by a factor of six in the last two decades, from 146,700 in 2000 to $955,000 in 2019. — Dorothy A. Brown, The Whiteness of Wealth, 476