By Regina Moorer, Sr. Policy Analyst | Hope Policy Institute
Generational wealth influences a family’s economic mobility as financial assets provide a head start, while their absence can lock a person into cycles of limited progress. Generational wealth refers to the assets, resources, and advantages that families can pass down from one generation to the next. It includes money, land, homes, and businesses, as well as access to education, social networks, and political influence. Who inherits opportunity and who inherits challenges often depends on the presence or absence of generational wealth.
For many White families in the South, they benefit from wealth that has been accumulated and reinforced over centuries through property ownership, inheritances, and preferential access to credit and capital.[1] For Black families, however, those same opportunities were often blocked or lost due to slavery, Jim Crow laws, heirs’ property loopholes, redlining, and ongoing discrimination in housing and lending.[2] Even today, for many Black families in the South, that foundation remains fragile, eroded by systemic barriers and impacted by policy decisions.