Trevor Smith in conversation with Anne Price and Jhumpa Bhattacharya of The Maven Collaborative.
The racial wealth gap is not a product of individual behavior but of policy design. Because of this, we must create new frameworks for wealth, inheritance, and family security that sidestep outdated ideas of individualism. At the Maven Collaborative, Anne Price and Jhumpa Bhattacharya are dedicated to using research, advocacy, and narrative to build towards a collective economy that works for all.
In this conversation with BLIS Executive Director Trevor Smith, the Maven Collaborative offers an expanded definition of wealth, debunks myths about how wealth has been built in America, and shares a vision for reshaping our economy.
Trevor Smith: How do you each define and think about wealth?
Anne Price: There is a dominant and simplified definition of wealth, which is what you own, minus what you owe. This definition is just thinking about someone’s financial assets and their debts.
That being said, I think we need to expand that definition. That simplified definition hasn’t served Black people and other people of color. I really think that wealth is what helps us have ease, especially for those of us who have been oppressed and discriminated against. I think wealth looks different for oppressed people of color than it does for white people.
For white people, wealth can function as a tool to gain advantage, to hoard, so that you can keep being advantaged. There’s a toxicity there because it is so individualistic. It’s not really thinking about how everyone can benefit. But that way of living and thinking is deeply baked into the U.S. context.
A lot of people of color think about wealth as finding ways to have relief from oppression, not to gain more, so someone else can be locked out. Many of us don’t separate our community from ourselves. We’re always asking, “How can I be doing well if my brother isn’t? If my community is crumbling?” It’s about having breathing room, being able to make choices, to live out dreams. Being able to take a risk, to roll the dice. To say, “I’ve got something here for my kid for their future.” But what you want for their future is more than just money. What you want for them is peace. What you want for them is health. What you want is for them to live their lives fully. To be able to express themselves and live out their dreams. There are a lot of things that get in the way of that. It’s not only about financial resources.
Jhumpa Bhattacharya: In a capitalistic society there is a relationship between economic wealth and power. I think power is also thought of as individualistic, as in having power over other people. If we had an expanded definition of wealth and lived in a less extractive society, what would power look like? Power isn’t a bad thing. Power can be used in a communal way. Our definition of wealth should help us think about power differently.
Trevor: We’re approaching the 250th anniversary of America, which is the whole premise of this partnership between BLIS and The Forge. When you look back at the first 250 years of United States history, and specifically the economic history, what do you see as the foundational logics that have shaped how we understand wealth?
Jhumpa: You can’t talk about foundational logic and the U.S. without talking about enslavement. The stealing of people’s labor, people’s babies, people’s families, the stealing of land from Indigenous communities. This country created inhumane conditions for both Black folks and Indigenous people as a founding principle.
Our relationships to wealth, money, and land in the U.S. stem from seeing other human beings as inhuman. The systems that we’ve built are all predicated on a dehumanization that is rooted in white supremacy. And we have to bring in the gender lens. Those two forces impact all of our decision-making on the policies that make up our economy. It is not natural. It is literally man-made.
And we could create something different if we had different foundational principles, but those two things, the racism and the sexism, just underpin how we’ve built our entire society, and wealth falls squarely into that.
Anne: You can’t talk about wealth without talking about violence. Wealth for white people was largely accumulated through generations of ill-gotten gains. Period.
We usually think of wealth as this innocent thing that befalls good people who are smart and make great decisions. We think about wealth in relation to goodness and intelligence. We don’t see it as theft. For instance, the Homestead Act stole land from Native people.
Jhumpa: Huge plots of land.
Anne: People from Europe could immigrate and just come over and get stolen Native land for a $10 filing fee. According to historian Keri Leigh Merritt, the Homestead Acts were unquestionably the most extensive, radical, redistributive governmental policy in US history. The number of adult descendants of the original Homestead Act recipients living in the year 2000 was estimated to be around 46 million people, about a quarter of the US adult population.
People’s definition of wealth is overly simplistic because we’ve been told the narrative that this is about someone’s individual hard work and effort. And wealth exists in good families, because good families pass on things to their children. We don’t want to go any further than that.
Trevor: I’m hearing something in here around this narrative of “hard work.”
Jhumpa: It was created to justify stealing and treating human beings like animals. It was a lie that was intentionally implanted so that inequality could exist. How convenient to be able to talk about impoverished groups as not working hard enough, when in reality, enslaved Black folks who had no wealth worked the hardest.
If you’re poor today, it must be because you made bad decisions, or you just didn’t know how to save your money, or you didn’t work hard enough. When in fact we all know that a single mom working two jobs works very, very hard to keep the lights on and food on the table for her kids.
It’s not about hard work; it’s about how we’ve set up systems to ensure that there’s always going to be a top and there’s always going to be a bottom.
Anne: It’s foundational to our dominant American narrative. People describe themselves as hardworking, which we equate with goodness. And in order for you to be supported by tax dollars in this nation, you have to be seen as someone who is good, someone who has a moral center.
Jhumpa: But it’s a very specific type of work. If you’re at home caring for a baby, that’s not work. If you’re a student or an artist, it doesn’t count because work is supposed to have a very specific definition. Labor is valued differently. Care work is valued less than construction work. These notions that are rooted in racism and sexism are always playing out in the way we’ve set up our economy.
Trevor: I want to go deeper on patriarchy. Could you each talk a little bit about how you all understand the relationship between patriarchy and wealth hoarding? What do men have to tap into to actually let go of patriarchy?
Jhumpa: Women, because we do carry life, we aren’t afraid of nurturing. Men seem to be afraid, and in that fear, they turn towards controlling women. Men have to let go of this fear. We’ve been taught that physical strength is valued more than emotional strength. Why is this?
I mean, how do you change patriarchy? It’s a hard question, but ultimately I think it’s about letting go of the need to dominate.
Anne: It’s certainly about control. It’s certainly about power. I don’t think we give enough attention to addressing toxic masculinity and the ways it contributes to economic inequality and harms all of us. Toxic masculinity is far-reaching. There is a study by Equimundo that shows that “man up” stereotypes and behaviors cost our nation almost $16 billion each year from traffic accidents, suicides, depression, sexual violence, bullying, and the list goes on.
When I talk about wealth and power being inextricably connected, we also have to look at who was able to amass that kind of wealth and power, and then amass more wealth from that power. It often feels as though our culture equates excessive wealth accumulation with traits historically coded as masculine, like dominance, control, and competition. And then, as a society, we elevate those traits as something to be celebrated. We see this reflected in who holds extreme wealth. The overwhelming majority of billionaires are men. This tells us something about who has been positioned to accumulate wealth at that scale, and the particular set of values behind it.
Trevor Smith: We have to reorient, reshape our value system entirely. How do we go about doing that?
Anne: I think we need to reorient our economy around a different set of values. At Maven, we talk a lot about communal care as the model for our economy. It’s something that really resonates across communities and demographic groups. It’s not abstract. We see it every day in how people show up for each other, through mutual aid, shared responsibility, and just a real concern for one another. It’s already an embedded way of being for some of us.
But the reality is that way of being runs up against a dominant system in this country that’s rooted in individualism and the pursuit of resources at any cost. Our economy is organized around extraction. So the question isn’t whether communal care matters. It’s how we actually build it into the systems that shape our lives, how we allocate resources, how we design policy, how we regulate the economy. That starts with humanizing people. I know that sounds basic, even a little abstract, but it’s foundational. Because right now, we’re operating within systems that were largely designed to punish and exclude. Most U.S. systems are shaped by dehumanization and anti-blackness. If we’re serious about aligning our systems with communal care, and about treating mutual aid like real infrastructure and making dignity our baseline, then we have to combat the idea that people’s worth has to be earned.
Jhumpa: I think anything can change. We’re witnessing rapid change happen today. I think the pandemic shifted people’s ideas about work, and I think we need to continue to work to change people’s values and hearts and minds.
We do this by starting with the actual truth. Like, how did this economy come to be? People do not know how white privilege props them up in many ways. They don’t know what the Homestead Act was or understand what the GI Bill did. They haven’t heard of redlining. We don’t teach it in schools. We avoid talking about race. We have not had any kind of truth-telling process on any of the major misgivings that this country was founded on, whether it be enslavement, or what we did to Indigenous people, or how we treated Chinese, South Asian, and Latino labor workers when they first came here. There has never been a process of acknowledgment, let alone reconciliation.
We also need to break down all of the mythology that’s been sold to us and let people dream into something else. We can actually live very differently from the way we do today. And there is a role for all of us in moving from the individualistic lifestyle to the communal.
Trevor, you talk about this all the time, but we need to get people to viscerally imagine what a different world looks like. What does it taste like? What does it feel like? What does it smell like?
And remember, we don’t need everybody on board to do this work to change our value system. We really only need to change the minds of 25% of the population to change a narrative.
Trevor: So then let’s talk about some models, some examples.
I presented at this undergrad class two weeks ago, and I have this chart of different examples where reparations have happened, in the U.S. and globally. When I broke it down for the students, they were like, oh, I just always felt like this was, like, a crazy pie-in-the-sky thing. Suddenly, they could approach this large topic and start to consider how reparations can become possible.
Similarly, could we break it down for our readers? What does a communal, a collective economy that’s not rooted in individualism look like? Are there any examples we can point folks to that we can replicate and scale?
Jhumpa: Whenever there’s a disaster in America, like a tornado, a flood, or the fires last year in LA, people donate. People showed up during the pandemic, and with what’s happening with ICE on the streets today. People have been fighting back. These are very beautiful examples of mutual aid, of people showing up to offer protection and support.
Immigrant communities do this all the time. They pool funds. There have always been ways that people have ensured that everybody has food on the table and has their lights on. It’s deeply human to have mutual aid.
In our work with Black and brown women, we see them already living this principle of collective well-being. Black women have been subjected to a direct attack in the labor market and have extremely high levels of unemployment right now. We see how they are forming their own networks to help find jobs or start businesses, caring for one another, and strategizing to ensure that they can survive this time. Some folks are finding plots of land to build communal housing together as they age. The mindset is to lift as they climb, because we intrinsically understand that our fates are linked.
We have an upcoming paper on care, highlighting our work on how Black women define care and offer a blueprint on how a care infrastructure should be built in the U.S. We asked Black women what becomes possible when they feel truly cared for, and the burden of care is lifted through a structural, communal response. Their answers were expansive, bold, and deeply rooted in collective possibility. They see care as communal, reciprocal, and liberatory. Just another example of how Black women think collectively.
Anne: Communities of color have always banded together because we’ve had to survive. It’s also deeply cultural. You don’t let anyone be hungry. Someone would scrape up something.
Trevor: I took one of my calls by the water today, and my apartment is on the street of a woman’s shelter. I’ve made friends with one of the women, and she and three other women were out barbecuing. They had chicken, ribs, hot dogs. And my friend, Tata, is her name, comes over asking, “Trevor, you want some?” They gave me food, beer, and these are women who are struggling. But with our communities, we could be on our last slice of pizza, and we’ll cut it in half if we see anyone hungry.
Jhumpa: I think what we have to do is show folks that the way the economy is currently set up is a disaster. Every day, people understand this through lived experience.
And people are practicing other ways of living all the time. People are living communally all over the place. There are lots of examples, particularly in the millennial generation of folks who can’t afford to buy homes, buying plots of land together, which makes it much more affordable. We also see older women who are unpartnered, or whose partners have passed, buying plots of land together. We did a project with Mia Birdsong at Next River around how Black women, in particular, are looking for communal housing and ownership. It’s instinctual. The project was called Finding Home, and it considered the capital, community, and climate needed to create possibilities for marginalized people to secure their futures. The work began with a research and design phase to create a collective home ownership pilot for a group of Black women.
Trevor: What have we done right as it relates to helping people understand the racial wealth gap? And where does this conversation need to evolve?
Anne: Over the past decade, we’ve made real progress in how people understand racial wealth inequities. When I first began this work 12 years ago, there was far less public conversation about the historical and structural forces that created the racial wealth gap. Up until a year ago, we saw more mainstream recognition of how policies like the New Deal and the GI Bill helped build wealth for white Americans while systematically excluding Black families. And yet, even with that progress, our understanding of how wealth is accumulated is limited by the very narratives we are still up against. The age-old “bootstraps” narrative actively prevents us from seeing how wealth is structured and distributed. It makes inequality feel like a personal failure rather than the predictable outcome of public policy.
But I think a big part of the challenge we continue to face in people understanding the racial wealth gap is that the wealth that white people own is often invisible to them. And that’s no accident. Wealth owned by white people is embedded in homeownership, neighborhood access, and intergenerational transfers that are often taken for granted rather than recognized as the result of deliberate advantage through policy. And then, on the other hand, there are these tropes about Black people as bad parents, as not valuing education, as “lacking financial literacy,” that are repeated over and over and used to explain away why Black people have some of the lowest levels of wealth. It’s bogus.
Given where we are right now in this country around race, we’ve got to find new and creative ways to keep showing why racial wealth inequities exist and how we got here. And honestly, I think white folks need to do a lot more storytelling work here. They need to bring more personal stories to connect the dots and show how wealth was built in their own families and their hometowns.
Jhumpa: We assume Black and Brown folks can build wealth in the same ways that white people build wealth. We often see solutions to the wealth gap presented as homeownership, entrepreneurship, and education, because that is how white people built wealth in this country. However, because the economy is rooted in anti-Blackness and designed specifically for the gain of white men, Black homeowners are not going to gain wealth in the same way that a white homeowner will because of racism in the economy. Due to redlining and systemic racism within housing laws and policies, Black neighborhoods are not valued in the same way as white neighborhoods are. Their home will never be worth the same amount. Because of racism within the job market and occupational segregation, a Black woman with a college degree or higher will not get paid the same nor have the same opportunities as a white man with the same level of education. These are facts. The economy is not built for Black prosperity.
So, this idea that the solutions that work for white folks are going to work for Black people is absurd. Because they’re not working. They’re not going to be treated the same in the same systems. I think we have to let go of those notions. I believe in reparations, not because I think it’s going to close a wealth gap, but because it’s about healing, it’s about repairing harm. This is money that’s owed to people.
But we also need to ask, “What do we want the money for?” And, ”What are we working to create?” We have to be careful not to replicate old systems. I don’t know if the field is thinking enough about how we can use reparations to build something new.
Trevor: When you think about your future descendants 250 years from now, what conversation do you want them to be having? What do you want to look back and say that we did?
Jhumpa: I hope things do change in the next 250 years and that we can have some honest conversations about what has happened in this country. What systems have worked? Who have they worked for and why? Who should they work for in the next 250 years?
Hopefully, in 250 years we’ll be living in harmony with nature and with one another. I don’t know what the problems will be 250 years from now, but I hope they’re very different. Like, maybe we’re trying to figure out what to do with an abundance of resources instead of hoarding them.
I do believe another world is possible. The portal for change will open again.
Anne: I’m hoping that every generation can continue planting seeds for the next. Every generation has fought for freedom and liberation in its own way, shaped by the circumstances it inherited. One generation contended with the aftermath of Reconstruction, one with the violence of lynching, and another fought through Jim Crow and the Civil Rights Movement. This generation has already experienced backlash and tremendous loss. The question is: how will we meet this moment and dream into the future?
In terms of what do I want to be remembered for? I’m like, I hope not for a policy paper. There’s more we can do to utilize our collective imagination to plant a seed for a better society that another generation can pick up and take even further. That’s what we’re working towards.
We need a new North Star. I think that focusing on wealth expansively could lead us toward the society we’re trying to create. We’ve studied other generations; now we have to be a generation that goes out and does something we’ve never seen. I believe that anything is possible.
Jhumpa: Anything is possible!
