I work with four black men. At lunch the other day, they were telling me that, among their friends (most of whom are also black), most people didn't believe in setting aside "wealth" in the form of your house or savings and passing it on to your children. The idea is that life is short, you never know what tomorrow will bring, and you might as well spend it while you got it.
This makes a great deal of sense when you think about the cultural, social, and economic history here. I mean, if the historical narrative is one where you get shafted, that tomorrow might just be worse than today, etc., then why bother? This is related to something similar I've also observed: a pervasive sense, even among middle and upper middle class blacks, that if you are successful it's against all odds. They will often say, "I was supposed to be a drop out." or "I was supposed to end up on drugs, dead from an overdose, a hustler or gangster."
Which always sounds weird to me, coming from the people it comes from, because by all accounts they have had a much better, more secure life than my folks or I had most of my adult life. They weren't supposed to be drop out. They were people who's parents had college degrees and who worked as professionals: teachers, lawyers, doctors, engineers, career military officers, small business owners (insurance, real estate, etc.) No one in their family expected them to be a drop out or drug dealer and, as far as I can tell, everything they did was an attempt to make sure they didn't even come close to such a life. The expecation in their families was for them to go to college as their parents had gone to college.
So, why the self-understanding, the self-perception, that they were somehow very likely to have been a dope dealer, in jail, dead, pregnant at 16? Of course, this self perception, the narrative of struggle and overcoming odds, makes sense given the history. It's a kind of systematically distorted reading of one's chances and opportunities in life due to an ascribed status.
Anyway, when they were telling me about this spend it all now stuff, and about how people don't buy homes with the idea that they should pass it on to the kids, I was a little slack-jawed in amazement at first. The guys I work with basically said that a lot of their friends think that providing kids with a roof over their head, clothes, etc. and a college education was all that they owed their kids. Passing on an inheritance was out of the question. This would explain why I hear, from workmates, about how so many of their parents and grandparents have reverse mortgages and refis out the wazoo. They're just not feeling compelled to buy a house to be passed to children as wealth. Similarly, they also mentioned that this is how most folks feel about insurance: why bother buying insurance for the spouse and kids. Spend the money now.
I don't hang around white twenty-somethings and thirty-somethings that have expressed this view - the ones who have children anyway. Of course, my workmates have an incentive to portray a cultural other to me in a way that my white friends don't, so there's that.
shag