Black Americans have been fighting to close the racial wealth gap. In 2019 the median white household had a wealth of 7.8 times that of the typical Black household. Yet, despite lower net worth, the Black community has a culture of charitable giving.
Nearly two-thirds of Black households donate to community-based organizations and causes, according to a joint 2012 study from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation and Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors. Blacks donate $11 billion annually, Forbes reported.
On average, Black households give away 25 percent more of their income per year than whites, the report found.
White families have the highest level of median family wealth, $188,200, compared with Black families’ median wealth of $24,100, according to the 2019 Federal Reserve Survey of Consumer Finances.
While Black people tend to give a lot of money to their churches, they donate to a variety of charitable organizations.
“We have to change the perspective on how we think about Black giving and giving in communities of color,” Alandra Washington, the Kellogg Foundation’s vice president for transformation and organizational effectiveness, told The Washington Post. “We know from historical context that Black communities have been givers from the time of slavery to reconstruction to where we are now.”
Between 2010 and 2016, white philanthropy stayed the same at 2 percent of their median wealth. Black families, however, contributed 6 percent of their median wealth to charity in 2010. The rate increased to 11 percent in 2013 and then fell to 8 percent in 2016, according to a 2018 Urban Institute report.
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“When you’re talking about Black donors, there’s the feeling that we should be doing something different, that our charitable-giving impulses are not the same as every other American’s charitable-giving impulses,” said Shena Ashley, vice president at the Urban Institute, where she leads the Center on Nonprofits and Philanthropy, a policy research organization focused on race and equity in philanthropy.
“It’s a way to disparage our giving as not being strategic. Our religious giving actually represents more than giving to an institution. When we give to the church, we are giving to people who are in that mutual aid society with us who are being served.”
