How the Wealthy White Family Forbids Wealth Redistribution
Six unspoken rules that haunt our relationship to money
One of the key obstacles to wealth redistribution that I see as a money coach are the ways my wealthy clients are indoctrinated into the unspoken rules about what it means to be a “good family member” or to be “a good steward of wealth.” It is precisely those rules that reinforce endless wealth accumulation and convince people to make financial choices against their own values of social justice and community.
In this post, I’ll explain the rules of the wealthy white family and how they shape the seemingly personal beliefs about money and family that many wealthy people carry. These insidious rules reflect white, Protestant concepts imported from British aristocracy. The degree to which these inherited practices show up in any individual experience likely depends on the family’s racial, ethnic, religious, immigration and class backgrounds. Though this blog focuses on the cultural laws of the white wealthy family, the guidance is applicable to everyone who wants to make more just decisions about their wealth.
And even if a family does not follow these rules, these are also the rules that shape “wealth-defense industries”¹ such as financial planning, investment management, marriage and divorce law, estate planning, tax planners and family offices, so any advice from these professionals will be rooted in these beliefs and rules.
Rule #1: The nuclear family is the only legitimate form of family
The legally privileged and idealized structure of family in the United States is the nuclear family: typically, two married parents and their biological or legally adopted children. Many people in the U.S. are socially pressured to get married and have biological children and to have that specific setup be a measure of “success.”
While BIPOC, poor and working class, immigrant, disabled and queer communities model many different ways of shaping family and resource sharing, the nuclear family teaches us that we only belong to one very tiny unit of people, and we are only financially responsible to them. The expectation that two adults earn enough money and have enough time to run a household and spend sufficient time with their children can cause incredible stress. Leisure time and financial ease are a privilege of the few who can afford to hire others to run their households and raise their children. The nuclear family structure works the easiest for wealthy families and financially benefits wealthy families.
In the 19th century, British male elites narrowed the family structure² to clarify the process of inheriting private property and wealth.³ Because wealth is traditionally passed down through the paternal line, men demanded “fidelity” and monogamy to ensure their heirs would inherit wealth and land.⁴
The legal structure of the family is the key to maintaining privatized wealth and property and denying the rest of the world access to it.
In addition to pressuring people to marry and have children, this rule condemns divorce, polyamory, infertility and the choice to not raise children, all of which make inheritance more complicated.⁵
Rule #2: Do not share money with anyone outside the family
My clients are taught that it’s wrong and unnatural to share money beyond their biological family. Even if the family acquires far more money than it needs, they still shouldn’t let that money leave the family boundaries because supposedly money ruins other relationships. (This rule conveniently ignores the common pattern of money ruining familial relationships!)
Currently, access to education, childcare, healthcare and retirement depend on whether a family can afford it, huge responsibilities that are very difficult for a single family unit to provide. Without the safety nets that everyone ought to have, each individual family becomes its own precarious small business that is blamed if it doesn’t function well.
Questions such as “What if I have a child born with an expensive medical condition?” and “What if I get long Covid and can’t work for years?” can easily turn into an orientation of “I need to set aside enough money for my family to anticipate any possible crisis imaginable, personally or systemically.”
If the limited structure of the family is always burdened with immense financial responsibility, then the endless “what if’s” that justify wealth accumulation will always haunt you.
Beyond that, when money is restricted to the nuclear family, wealthy families become richer. While the class you are born into is a huge predictor of your class as an adult, marriage can be a way to radically change one’s class status. But the majority of wealthy people marry other wealthy people.⁶
When we restrict money to the family, we cause the racial wealth divide to expand. White people own 90%⁷ of the wealth in the United States, and white households on average have about four times as much wealth as Black or Latinx households.⁸ With the vast majority of marriages in the U.S. between people of the same race (in 2019 it was 89%⁹), it is precisely the practice of confining wealth within the family that keeps wealth in the hands of the wealthy and white and deprives others of resources.
Rule #3: You must preserve wealth for future generations of your family
No matter how committed to wealth redistribution my clients may be, they often hit a wall when they begin to give beyond the income of their investments (i.e., giving from the principal or corpus). Whether they have access to one million or fifty million dollars, the response is the same: “It just feels wrong” or “I am afraid I will regret this.” They rarely have a clear explanation for why this is and often feel embarrassed and conflicted about this reaction.
Over time, I’ve learned that this extremely common response is not connected to math or reason, but it comes from this rule:
When you come from wealth, you are taught that to be a responsible family member, you must preserve wealth for future generations of your family. Throughout your lineage, your family’s class status should never fall. If you’re not yet a parent, you must prioritize saving money for your unborn children. If you don’t yet have or plan to have children, you are instructed to leave your money to the “next of kin.” This rule also heightens anxiety around infertility or the choice to not raise children because, in the absence of another generation in your own lineage, justifications for wealth accumulation are obviously hollow. In the absence of having children, it is rarely considered a possibility to simply share resources with non-family members who need it now.
The financial industry shapes its advice to wealthy clients around this fundamental rule of wealth preservation for the family. Financial planners tell clients not to touch the corpus and instead to pass it down to future generations. It doesn’t matter how much the corpus is, it should always be preserved.
Corpus is a metaphor. In anatomy, it means “body,” and is often associated with corpses. Consider the grotesqueness of that image: passing down a corpse from generation to generation. A corpus is a sum of money never to be used; and when money is never used or made available to the public it becomes dead — like a corpse. Even though the money circulates through investments, I call it “dead” because the majority of investments are in extractive corporations, not life-giving projects.
Many wealthy people keep the majority of their money dead and expect their children and their future grandchildren to keep it dead and trapped for eternity while not fully understanding why they are doing it. This is part of why so many wealthy people don’t feel like they are actually wealthy. They are beholden to this pressure of legacy and don’t feel free to put all of their resources to use. Instead of a gift, inheritance of a corpus can become a curse.
For those wealthy families that are BIPOC, immigrants, and/or have been targeted for genocide (such as being Indigenous and/or Jewish), the drive to ensure the survival of their heritage, culture, and race is understandable. But how much wealth is necessary to ensure the survival of this heritage/culture/race? To what degree are financial choices shaped by historical trauma versus being rooted in managing present day precarity?¹⁰
Nevertheless, the huge consequences of this rule are especially clear when it comes to billionaires, who collectively own about $11.1 trillion.¹¹ They will likely trap most of this into their corpus, an unfathomably bloated corpse, forever locked away into their lineages, never to be available to the public again.
Rule #4: Anything done in the name of family is an act of love — including tax evasion
In the U.S., the wealthiest 1% are responsible for 28% of the nation’s uncollected taxes, amounting to “an annual shortfall of more than $160 billion.”¹² Wealthy people starve the public of resources through tax loopholes that are available only to the wealthy and based on the legal privileging of the family. Many tax loopholes exist only for spouses and legal descendants and use the language of protecting and supporting family, such as trust funds, family foundations and inheritance tax. Tax evasion is a core strategy for maintaining dynastic wealth.
My clients’ families have endlessly clever ways of upholding time-tested rituals of tax evasion and resource hoarding in the name of supporting the family. Because family represents love, my clients are taught that they can do no wrong if they do it in the name of family. Anything done in the name of family is justified as an act of selflessness and love.
One favorite tax-defying tactic is the institution of the trust fund. While they are ubiquitous among the wealthy and praised as financially savvy, trust funds have a violent history. They were originally created in England so white, Christian men¹³ could temporarily entrust their land to relatives while participating in the Crusades, a war against non-Christians.¹⁴ This ensured that their wealth was legally protected for them, and that if they died, the land would remain within the family. The crusader was the “beneficiary,” and the family member or friend was the “trustee.”¹⁵
This longstanding practice of putting wealth into trust funds to ensure descendants always have wealth is still widely practiced today — currently there is about $5.7 trillion¹⁶ in trust funds. Some of these trust funds exist “in perpetuity,” meaning they are intended to exist forever. Such trusts allow the wealthy to avoid paying taxes. You can even create trust funds for unborn children and grandchildren, ensuring that even your theoretical descendants are born into wealth. At this level of wealth and privilege, the question isn’t “How much is enough for my family?” It’s “How can I keep as much wealth as possible?”
Family foundations are another tax evasion strategy common among the wealthy. Foundations are only legally required to give 5% of their assets away annually, meaning they can be up to 95% corpus, kept from the public indefinitely. While some families mean well when they start foundations, these practices mask tax evasion as familial love and serve to preserve the power and status of the family lineage. Today, we’re talking about roughly $264 billion in family foundations.¹⁷ Because they don’t give away the majority of their assets, foundations, like trust funds, can be forms of dead money.
Another tax evasion strategy is the effort on the part of the wealthy to avoid paying estate or inheritance tax, the tax paid upon death when property and wealth are transferred to an heir. Many wealthy families are vehemently opposed to paying this tax — and they wield the language of family to defend this opposition. Donald Trump made this explicit when he argued that we should end this tax “so that when you do pass away, on the assumption that you love your children, you can leave it to them and they won’t have to pay tax.”¹⁸ Who’s going to lobby against parental love?
Wealthy people weaponize the concept of “family” to defend why they evade taxes and are ungenerous with those outside of their family.
Taxes are supposed to ensure wealth is redistributed. When wealthy people undermine that system, equity is impossible.
Rule #5: Money must be a family secret
My clients are told it’s “rude” and “inappropriate” to talk with people outside the family about money. They are taught that if people outside the family knew how wealthy they were, they would be exploited, and that sharing this information destroys relationships.
Keeping money “private” is key to preserving wealth within the family. The truth is, wealthy people don’t want to disclose their wealth because on some level they don’t want to share the money.
Most things labeled “family secrets” are unhealthy, and secrets about money are no different. Secrecy protects the wealthy from having to consider sharing wealth beyond the family and from reckoning with power dynamics in their relationships with those who have less money.
Disclosure forces people to grapple with their own ethics. The more honest and transparent they are, the more they will feel self-conscious and aware of their financial choices, and the more likely they are to make changes to align with their values. Wealthy people wouldn’t need to keep their wealth a secret if they didn’t feel shame about it being unethical. Being honest about and confronting the huge disparities that exist means experiencing the consequences of privilege more than if these disparities are simply ignored.
Rule #6: You must behave properly to inherit the family wealth
The looming threat of disinheritance has long been a tool to control the behavior of descendants. Failure to comply with family norms (which often reflect societal norms) can result in being disinherited. Even as far back as the medieval period, inheritance law dictated that extramarital affairs and criminal activities could warrant disinheritance.¹⁹ It’s still true today that anything the family deems a taint to the family name can result in disinheritance: departing the family religion, coming out as queer, marrying someone of a different race or class, being polyamorous, etc.
It’s not a coincidence that so many of the common reasons for disinheritance are tied to maintaining the integrity of the family structure, as the primary purpose of dynastic wealth is not only to ensure descendants continue to be wealthy but to maintain a specific family legacy.
Over the years, I’ve witnessed the following conditions placed on inheritance by the parents of my clients: choice of partner, choice of career, creating a prenuptial agreement, communicating with their parents at a frequency the parents desire, ceasing engagement with a political organization they find threatening, keeping the inheritance a secret, control over every detail of wedding planning, having a biological child, baptizing their children, promising to not share their inheritance with others, and many more.
When a family member threatens disinheritance because of differing beliefs or identities, or to incentivize relatives to change their beliefs or identities by rewarding them with wealth, it is financial manipulation. In the next article, I’ll offer ways to avoid being financially manipulated by others.
Conclusion:
If you were raised or are presently wealthy, reading about these rules might have brought up emotions: anger, sadness, or even defensiveness. Critically engaging with oppressive rules created so many generations ago can be a difficult process — and that can show up somatically and emotionally.
But focusing on the systemic consequences of these wealthy, white family rules can help us stay connected to the bigger picture. When we follow the rules of the wealthy, white family, this is what happens:
- Wealth and property remain privatized and are denied to everyone else, especially BIPOC communities
- The wealthiest 1% of Americans own over ten times as much wealth as the bottom 50% of Americans²⁰
- Money that could be life-saving and is needed now is locked away in the $5.7 trillion in trust funds and $264 billion in family foundations
- The democratic redistribution of wealth is undermined through tax evasion — $160 billion unpaid taxes to the U.S. government annually by the top 1%
- The wealthy class remains predominantly white, heterosexual, politically conservative, and majority Christian
I hope that, when you begin moving toward wealth redistribution and you have a vague sense of being a bad family member, you remember where these rules come from and whom they benefit and choose to forge ahead.
Now that we’ve explored the consequences of the rules of the white, wealthy family, what do we do?
Next week I’ll share my liberatory guide on how to break free from these rules and explore strategies for sharing wealth beyond the family. Subscribe to my newsletter or to my Medium account so that you get alerted when it’s published.
Iris Brilliant is an anti-capitalist money coach based in Minneapolis, MN. She offers private coaching for wealthy couples, families and individuals who want to align their money with their values of social justice and community. She also offers group programs such as Adult Children of Rich, Emotionally Immature Parents, and Overcoming Conflicting Feelings about Wealth Redistribution. She is available for public speaking, interviews and writing opportunities. Read more about her here.
Acknowledgements:
This article series was deeply informed and inspired by the following writers and thinkers. Even if they weren’t directly quoted, their messages and ideas were most certainly woven into my writing: Edgar Villanueva, Sophie Lewis, Cyndi Suarez, Zach Norris, David Graeber, Sarah Jaffe, Chuck Collins, Michele Barrett, Zach Norris, Isabel Wilkerson, Angela Davis, Friedrich Engels, and more.
Thank you to my colleagues, mentors, friends and editors for helping me grapple with these concepts more eloquently: Matthew Carlson, Candida Hadley, Lucy Morris, Helen Rubinstein, Rachel Sherman, Damon Azali, Jessie Spector, Chanelle Gallant, Mike Gast.
Footnotes:
¹ Chuck Collins, The Wealth Hoarders (New York: Polity Press, 2021), 15
² Michelle Barrett and Mary McIntosh, The Anti-Social Family (New York: Verso Publishing, 2015), 36.
³ “Supremacy of the man in the family and generation of children that could be his offspring alone and were destined to be heirs of his wealth — these were openly avowed by the Greeks to be the sole objects of monogamy.” — Freidrich Engels, The Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State, trans. Alick West (USA, 1942), 80, https://gutenberg.org/cache/epub/33111/pg33111-images.html.
⁴ Engels, Origins of the Family, 76.
⁵ Engels, Origins of the Family, 76.
⁶ Deirdre Bloom and Shannon Ang, “Marriage and Union Formation in the United States: Trends Across Racial Groups and Economic Backgrounds.” Demography 57, no. 5 (October 2020), https://doi.org/10.1007/s13524-020-00910-7.
⁷ “White people own 86% of wealth and make up 60% of the population,” USA Facts, last updated September 23, 2020, https://usafacts.org/articles/white-people-own-86-wealth-despite-making-60-population/.
⁸ Christian Weller, “Racial Wealth Inequality Gradually Declines, But That Is No Reason To Celebrate,” Forbes, Jan. 18th, 2023, https://www.forbes.com/sites/christianweller/2023/01/18/racial-wealth-inequality-gradually-declines-but-that-is-no-reason-to-celebrate/?sh=6b2e32664d76.
⁹ Kim Parker and Amanda Barroso, “In Vice President Kamala Harris, we can see how America has changed,” Pew Research Center, Feb. 25th, 2021, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/02/25/in-vice-president-kamala-harris-we-can-see-how-america-has-changed/
¹⁰ This is where working with healers informed by cultural trauma can be immensely helpful
¹¹ Breck Dumas, “Number of billionaires worldwide falls, collective wealth dips,” Fox News, May 31st, 2023, https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/number-of-billionaires-worldwide-falls-collective-wealth-dips/ar-AA1bXjSu.
¹² Evan Osnos, “The Getty Family’s Trust Issues,” The New Yorker, January 16th, 2023, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/01/23/the-getty-familys-trust-issues.
¹³ Osnos, “The Getty Family.”
¹⁴ Oliver Bullough, “The great American tax haven: why the super-rich love South Dakota,” The Guardian, November 14th, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/nov/14/the-great-american-tax-haven-why-the-super-rich-love-south-dakota-trust-laws.
¹⁵ The Sheppard Law Firm, “How The Crusades Created Estate Planning,” Sheppard Law Firm, June 16th, 2020, https://www.sbshlaw.com/how-the-crusades-created-estate-planning/#:~:text=The%20Crusader%20was%20the%20%E2%80%9Cbeneficiary,now%20as%20a%20%E2%80%9Ctrust.%E2%80%9D.
¹⁶ “Trust Funds and Federal Funds,” The White House, accessed August 15, 2023, https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/ap_23_funds_fy2023.pdf.
¹⁷ “Family Foundations,” Council on Foundations, accessed August 15th, 2023, https://cof.org/foundation-type/family-foundations.
¹⁸ Kimberly Nordyke, “John Oliver Mocks Trump’s ‘If You Don’t Love Your Children” Campaign Aimed at Farmers,” Yahoo Finance, March 20th, 2023, https://finance.yahoo.com/news/john-oliver-mocks-trump-don-040444931.html.
¹⁹ Anne-Marie Rhodes, “On Inheritance and Disinheritance,” Real Property, Trust and Estate Law Journal, 43, no. 3 (Fall 2008), 435–37, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23802629.
²⁰ “Distribution of Household Wealth in the U.S. since 1989,” Distributional Financial Accounts, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, accessed August 21st, 2023, https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/distribute/table/
Sources:
Barrett, Michelle and McIntosh, Mary. The Anti-Social Family. New York: Verso Publishing, 2015.
Bloom, Deirdre and Ang, Shannon. “Marriage and Union Formation in the United States: Trends Across Racial Groups and Economic Backgrounds.” Demography 57, no. 5 (October 2020): 1753–86. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13524-020-00910-7.
Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. “Distribution of Household Wealth in the U.S. since 1989.” Distributional Financial Accounts. Accessed August 21st, 2023, https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/distribute/table/.
Bullough, Oliver. “The great American tax haven: why the super-rich love South Dakota.” The Guardian, November 14th, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/nov/14/the-great-american-tax-haven-why-the-super-rich-love-south-dakota-trust-laws.
Collins, Chuck. The Wealth Hoarders. New York: Polity Press, 2021.
Council on Foundations. “Family Foundations.” Accessed August 15th, 2023, https://cof.org/foundation-type/family-foundations.
Dumas, Breck. “Number of billionaires worldwide falls, collective wealth dips.” Fox News, May 31st, 2023, https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/number-of-billionaires-worldwide-falls-collective-wealth-dips/ar-AA1bXjSu
Engels, Friedrich. The Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State. Translated by Alick West. USA, 1942. https://gutenberg.org/cache/epub/33111/pg33111-images.html.
Nordyke, Kimberly. “John Oliver Mocks Trump’s ‘If You Don’t Love Your Children” Campaign Aimed at Farmers,” Yahoo Finance, March 20th, 2023, https://finance.yahoo.com/news/john-oliver-mocks-trump-don-040444931.html.
Osnos, Evan. “The Getty Family’s Trust Issues.” The New Yorker, January 16th, 2023, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/01/23/the-getty-familys-trust-issues
Parker, Kim and Barroso, Amanda. “In Vice President Kamala Harris, we can see how America has changed.” Pew Research Center, Feb. 25th, 2021. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/02/25/in-vice-president-kamala-harris-we-can-see-how-america-has-changed/.
Rhodes, Anne-Marie. “On Inheritance and Disinheritance.” Real Property, Trust and Estate Law Journal 43, no. 3 (2008): 433–45. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23802629.
The Sheppard Law Firm. “How The Crusades Created Estate Planning.” Sheppard Law Firm, June 16th, 2020. https://www.sbshlaw.com/how-the-crusades-created-estate-planning/#:~:text=The%20Crusader%20was%20the%20%E2%80%9Cbeneficiary,now%20as%20a%20%E2%80%9Ctrust.%E2%80%9D.
The White House. “Trust Funds and Federal Funds.” Accessed August 15, 2023, https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/ap_23_funds_fy2023.pdf.
USA Facts. “White people own 86% of wealth and make up 60% of the population.” Last updated September 23, 2020, https://usafacts.org/articles/white-people-own-86-wealth-despite-making-60-population/.
Weller, Christian. “Racial Wealth Inequality Gradually Declines, But That Is No Reason To Celebrate.” Forbes, Jan. 18th, 2023, https://www.forbes.com/sites/christianweller/2023/01/18/racial-wealth-inequality-gradually-declines-but-that-is-no-reason-to-celebrate/?sh=6b2e32664d76.
