What Is Wealth, Really?

What does it take for us to get on the same page?

Not just aligned in goals, but aligned in language. We talk about wealth constantly, in business spaces, healing spaces, nonprofit spaces, and community spaces, yet I often wonder if we are even talking about the same thing. Without a shared definition, we move around the subject, mistaking activity for understanding.

bell hooks wrote about love this way: when we don’t define it clearly, we orbit the idea without ever touching the truth. I believe the same is true about wealth.

Before we talk about how to build it, protect it, or pass it down, we have to ask a deeper question: what is wealth and who taught us that answer?

To talk honestly about wealth, we must talk about the systems shaping it: capitalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy. These systems do not only structure our access to money; they shape our beliefs about worth, safety, and success.

White supremacy teaches a specific relationship to wealth, rooted in patterns like right to comfort, either/or thinking, quantity over quality, and fear of open conflict. These patterns show up when comfort is prioritized over accountability, when accumulation replaces care, and when hard conversations about power and redistribution are avoided.

And this is not only a white people problem. White supremacy is a system we are all conditioned inside of. If we do not actively choose differently, it will live through us, through our scarcity, our competition, and even our dreams.

So if we define wealth using the logic of systems that were never designed for collective thriving, then no matter how much we accumulate, we will still be moving toward harm.

This is where I offer a different definition.

We are often taught to value generational wealth (assets passed down within families, protected and accumulated over time). But I believe we must lean more deeply into collective or cultivated wealth: resources intentionally built, held, and governed by communities for the benefit of all, now and for future generations.

If wealth does not contribute to our collective well-being, our healing, and our safety, then it is not wealth, it is extraction.

Money, after all, is only a tool. It is not the full story.

What about health? Time? Rest? Belonging? Emotional capacity? The ability to imagine a future?

Health is wealth. Rest is wealth. Community is wealth. A system that makes us rich but exhausted, resourceful but disconnected, successful but unwell is not a system of wealth, it is a system of survival.

This is why financial literacy alone is not enough.

Financial literacy without money healing just teaches us how to survive inside systems that are still harming us.

Money healing invites us to examine our nervous systems, our family histories, and the beliefs we inherited about safety and scarcity. Scarcity is not just financial, it is psychological and spiritual. It lives in our bodies as fear, overwork, competition, and mistrust.

Scarcity itself is a product of white supremacist logic: the belief that there is never enough, that someone must lose for someone else to win, that safety is individual rather than collective. Learning to recognize when we are moving in scarcity is part of liberation.

If we are serious about community, then we must also be honest about our roles within it. Not everyone will lead the same way. Not everyone will carry the same capacity. And that is not failure, that is design.

If we cannot tell the truth about our capacity, our needs, and our limits, we cannot build systems that last.

This is where radicalism comes in. Radicalism is root work. It is the willingness to question what we were taught, to challenge what harms us, and to redesign what no longer serves life.

Healing is radical when it challenges what harms us and makes space for what sustains us.

Our ancestors understood this. Harriet Tubman, Octavia Butler, Malcolm X, bell hooks, Cesar Chavez, they dreamed boldly and showed up fully. They remind us that transformation is not only imagined, it is embodied.

So I return to the questions that guides me:

What would our relationship to money look like if we were truly free?

What would our communities feel like if wealth meant wholeness instead of accumulation?

And what are we willing to unlearn, individually and collectively, to get there?

Because the future of wealth is not just about what we own. It is about how we belong.