The Who, What, and Why of the Racial and Gender Wealth Gap

The Who, What, and Why of the Racial and Gender Wealth Gap

As part of our Women’s History Month series, Cinneah (the founder of Flynanced) and I co-hosted a series of incredible roundtable discussions with some of our favorite women in the personal finance space with the goal of fostering rich intersectional conversations around money.

Dasha Kennedy, an award-winning financial activist for Black women, educator, and creator of The Broke Black Girl, is an advocate for economic justice, cultural competence, and equity in financial education. She spoke about the wealth gaps that exist in the United States, why they exist, and how they impact the entire economy. As a solution-based activist, she also shared some ways that we can start to think about combating these gaps and serve as allies, particularly for Black and Brown women. Here’s what she had to share. (You can watch the full recording of the roundtable discussion, Closing the Gaps, here).


A Depiction of the Racial and Gender Wealth Gap

I don't think people understand just how wide the wealth gap is. Let me paint a picture. America's richest 400 people have more wealth than all Black households in the United States. 

The wealth gap is the unfair distribution of assets between the people in the United States. When I say assets, I'm referring to home ownership, businesses, savings and investments. These are things that have allowed other people to build wealth - wealth that Black and Brown people have not always had access to. Even today, we are still struggling to get access to those things. 

The wealth gap exists as a result of discrimination, racism, and prejudice. What we are seeing is the result of slavery. The consequences of that happening. People may think, “Oh, that happened so long ago,” but we had Black people working for centuries receiving zero compensation. Even when we were out of slavery, we still did not receive compensation for the time that we worked. While we were not being paid, White people (primarily white men) were able to build wealth off of our unpaid labor.

What we have now is a gap that exists because other people have had access to build wealth, to make money, to pass down generational assets to their family that they can build from. We have not had that. That has created the wealth gap. 

Financial Literacy Programs Alone are not Enough.

When we think about ways we can combat the wealth gap, there are a lot of people doing a lot of things, like creating programs that help people on an individual basis. However, individual programs or things that work for individual behavior are not going to be enough to close the wealth gap. 

Yes, we have people that are creating businesses and we’re seeing more Black millionaires, but sometimes that acts as a distraction because it’s on an individual level but not for Black and Brown people as a whole. 

To combat this, we need a complete overhaul of our structural systemic policies because the policies and laws that have worked to discriminate against Black and Brown people are actually what has upheld the racial and gender wealth gap.

Combating the Racial and Gender Wealth Gaps

To combat the wealth gap, we have to go outside of creating programs for the Black and Brown communities and then thinking we've done enough. That’s equality - we’re saying “Hey, I’ve created something. You have it. Now use it.” We have to go a step further than that - equity. 

We need to give Black and Brown people exactly what they need. That starts with policy change. That's us holding our government officials accountable. That's us being involved in social and political change. That's us actually knowing what laws and bills are being passed right up under our nose. 

Even if it doesn't impact you as a non-person of color, it impacts other women which in turn impacts the other women and other Black and Brown people in general. That impacts the entire economy because we can’t put money back into the economy. The economy is not going to grow as fast as it would if we all had access to the same things.

Next Steps


About Dasha:

Dasha Kennedy is an award-winning financial activist for Black Womxn, educator, and creator of The Broke Black Girl, a digital community that provides culturally relevant financial literacy tools to 70,000 black women to help combat the racial and gender wealth gap. Dasha is an advocate for economic justice, cultural competence, and equity in financial education and raises awareness on how systemic oppression affects black women's ability to generate adequate wealth. After quickly climbing the finance industry ranks at 19 and becoming a Senior Accountant by 24, she is backed with over a decade of experience in accounting, personal finance, and debt management that shares through free and paid resources.