Generational Poverty: How Caribbean families dilute instead of building their wealth. Part 1

Much is said about families building generational wealth. Although the term is usually used in reference to the ultra rich European dynasties and descendants of super wealthy American businessmen, building generational wealth can occur at any scale. Indeed many families in the Caribbean have built small empires over successive generations.

The conversation on generational wealth also can’t escape two dark facets. The first is that in the western hemisphere the legacy of slavery and colonialism have given the descendants of white aristocrats and slaveowners a significant boost in amassing great wealth while simultaneously throwing millions of black families in deep trenches of poverty that are near impossible to escape from, much less build wealth in.

The second is the age old saying that the rich get richer while the poor get poorer. The businessmen able to make a small fortune one hundred years ago and provide his children with a good education to carry on the family business likely still has a business named after them today. In contrast the descendant of his underpaid employees are likely struggling employees themselves today.

The Caribbean is not immune to this dark cycle. In fact in my native Dominica although there are a few wealthy indigenous families, interestingly many others are immigrant families that came here with very little but were able to gain advantages that some of their darker skinned counterparts could not.

However there are significant differences between the dynamics of post slavery/post Jim Crow United States, and post the post-colonial Caribbean. Like the Americas, wealth a century ago was dependent on the accumulation of vast amounts of fertile land. Towards the end of the plantation era, and when island colonies began gaining more autonomy, several local families were able to purchase or otherwise gain ownership of large swarths of land. This gave these families significant sources of wealth, which manifested most prominently if they were able to convert their once farm land into housing development communities.

However the source of this wealth is ironically also the cause of a type of generational poverty occurring in the region. The reason is simple. Generational wealth is acquired by the family collectively accumulating more assets that benefit the entire family over successive generations. The slaveowners of old worked the land, or rather had their slaves work the land under their control, selling the produced crops and used this to gain more wealth, gain political favour, acquire more land, and purchase more slaves.

By contrast much of the land acquired by Caribbean families in the post slavery or post colonial period has sat largely unutilized, only of value when it is sold. Large scale housing developments may net the members of the family that owns the land significant amounts of cash, but this does not necessarily increase the family’s wealth, nor does it accumulate from one generation to the next.

But apart from depleting the family’s asset by these land sales, the biggest problem is how these vast plots of land are continuously divided and sectioned off so that each member of the family in each generation can have their own share, their own piece of silver. Add to the fact that many of these first generation land owners had many different children, sometimes with multiple mothers, and those children and their countless grandchildren are all clamoring for their own portion, and that vast piece of land is no longer so vast.

The land does nothing to collectively enrich the entire family. Instead it is often the cause of family division and infighting, bad blood, and even court battles. The wealth of the family dilutes and decreases with each generation, each member looking for their share so they can build on or sell a portion, only to have to divide their piece among their children.

In the end instead of one massive asset that the family uses to acquire more assets you are left with a collection of persons, each with their own small, individual plots of land that they must somehow find a way to divide even further to pass on to the next generation.