Research

The question of how trauma - historical, intergenerational, vicarious, and insidious - and wealth are related to one another has organized and compelled my work until this point. It’s driven me to lead research in what I call financial trauma and ask the following questions: how much does financial trauma influence a person’s wealth-building capability? To what extent can you maximize a person’s wealth-building capability by healing financial trauma? Can healing financial trauma close the gender and racial wealth gap? I became a financial trauma researcher as an effort to create a new lexicon that more adequately captures the multi-layered texture of Black women’s unique and intractable struggles against wealth inequality. To advance wealth justice, we must acknowledge and honor in our work that Black women are structurally positioned to experience financial trauma, abuse, and shame at greater levels and frequencies than any other demographic. My work is meant to explore these questions and advance wealth justice for Black women and other purposely ignored populations.