How Cultural Awareness Improves Estate Planning Outcomes

“How Cultural Awareness Improves Estate Planning Outcomes,” that is the subject of today’s ACTEC Trust and Estate Talk.

This is ACTEC Fellow Kristin Yokomoto of Costa Mesa, California.

Last week, we began this topic with ACTEC Fellow Reetu Pepoff in our podcast, Planning for a Diverse Family: Cultural Competence within the Model Rules of Professional Conduct. Today we’re taking the next step. Every client brings their own cultural background, family norms, and lived experiences to the estate planning table. Recognizing those influences isn’t optional. It’s key to clear communication, effective guidance, and ethical practice. As families grow more diverse, attorneys must be prepared to meet clients where they are and understand how culture shapes planning decisions.

ACTEC Fellow Terry Franklin from Los Angeles, California joins us to explore practical strategies highlighting the history and impact of the racial wealth gap in America. Welcome, Terry.

Estate Planning Barriers Faced by African American Families

Terry Franklin:  Thank you so much. It’s a pleasure to be here and to be talking with you, Kristin. As a trust and estate litigator who is also African American, I have always been particularly concerned about the ways that we as African Americans, either as clients or as attorneys, are or are not engaging with estate planning as an important part of our, let’s call it, our financial and wealth portfolios.

A few years ago I wrote an article that was published actually in the ACTEC Law Journal (Fall 2021 volume Vol. 47, No. 1) called “Black Deaths Should Matter, Too! Estate Planning as a Tool for Antiracists.” That article, at least from my perspective, speculated on why it is that more African Americans don’t do estate planning as lawyers, why we don’t sort of see that as a possibility, and also about why more African Americans don’t get estate plans or have estate plans done.

And at least in my thinking about it and a little bit of research that I did, I consider the fact that African Americans have traditionally had a number of legal and cultural bars that have prevented them in many cases from being able to own or acquire property. And my theory is that this awareness in our bones that maybe there’s something going on is something that I think we have to recognize and deal with both as trust and estate’s lawyers and particularly as estate planners as well.

I grew up thinking and hearing those things like “make sure that you put something in your head that can’t be taken away,” education being particularly valued as a commodity. And I think the fact that African Americans in this country have had many situations where the property and assets that they’ve acquired were taken away from them legally and through illegal means helps to explain why we might have some of that reluctance to go and have our estate plans done or why it doesn’t seem to come to us naturally.

Lessons From History: How the Racial Wealth Gap Was Create

Well, recently I read a book called The Plunder of Black America: How the Racial Wealth Gap Was Made. It’s by someone named Calvin Schermerhorn. What I thought was really helpful about this particular book is it gives context and framing for the ways that the racial wealth gap has developed in the United States. And it sort of starts from way back in 1619 when the first Africans came to this country along with white settlers to Virginia. And in this book, they talk about different individual families and the experiences that they had.

For example, they talk about the Johnson family who was among those first Africans who arrived and what happened was while they were part of a community, in 1639 Virginia forbade black people from bearing arms. Therefore, they couldn’t serve in militias and therefore they would not be able to have that step to citizenship which was required at the time. And rather than being the watchman that they could have been, this family — the name was Anthony, Anthony Johnson — instead became the people who were watched. Later on in 1643, the assembly of Virginia for the first time made a legal distinction based on race when it made it a law to impose tithes or taxes on workers, compulsory for heads of families, free men and people working the ground, as well as all male youths and black women under 16. So instead of taxing income, households or land values, the Virginia colony instead taxed the workers themselves. And although this kind of law only applied to a handful of families in the colony and probably only provided a limited amount of resources and revenue, sealing out black women for an additional 10 pounds of tobacco and a bushel of corn each per year imposed a special burden on black families. And once any daughter turned 16, the Johnson family — the one that’s highlighted in the book — actually paid twice the annual tax of a white household with the same description.

Now this was just one example of many that have been reflected in our history and our experience throughout this country. There are examples in the book that talk about the fact that it was one gentleman who was in Rhode Island — so in New England, not in a traditional slave state — but in the 1700s. First, he had to pay for his family’s freedom and paid about 40 pounds for his wife’s redemption. And in the end, by purchasing his own freedom and that of his family, it cost him the equivalent of 16 years of an average New England income. But at the same time, enslavers had stolen the equivalent of 50 years of income from this family.

So, I think when we think about the ways that laws and culture and requirements in this country, even into the 20th century, when the federal housing authority imposed redlining standards on black neighborhoods that impacted the mobility of African Americans, as well as creating lending standards that applied to Black people that didn’t apply to others, that therefore put them in neighborhoods that meant that they could not get out of those neighborhoods and they couldn’t get loans to improve the quality of those homes and therefore the houses lost value and perpetuating a decline that had actually been set in motion by the federal government. All of these factors and examples help to describe the ways that African Americans specifically were isolated and chosen to receive less benefits than other Americans in this country.

The Role of Estate Planners in Addressing Generational Wealth Inequities

As a trust and estates lawyer, I think it’s helpful to be aware of these realities of these truths and to contextualize them and to understand that it’s not a failing on the part of these individuals that they haven’t been able to accumulate or acquire more money or more property that they can then pass on to their descendants. And I think shifting this perspective and understanding the history of it allows us to be sort of freed from those feelings of inadequacy or the psychological sense that maybe there’s something that we should be doing more or better.

In the end, I just think it’s incumbent on us to continue to make strides and for us as trust and estate’s lawyers to recognize the realities that our clients bring to us, their experiences, their cultural understanding, perhaps their belief that this racial wealth gap is very much entrenched and will be hard to break free from. But it’s up to us to try to change that and we can do it in little ways as estate planners by making sure that we are making estate planning something that people should expect to do and to have and to have none and to encourage people who are African Americans to get their estate plans done so that they can begin to accumulate and develop wealth that they can pass on from generation to generation and to recognize that all of these factors are important for us as human beings if we want to make the world better. And to know that the history that created this racial wealth gap is a history that we as human beings can change, but it’s up to us to begin to make those changes and to re-imagine the world and a future where we can overcome this issue.

Kristin Yokomoto:  Thank you, Terry, for highlighting these important considerations.

You may also be interested in

• Planning for a Diverse and Equitable Future — Understanding Black History
• Planning for a Diverse Family: Cultural Competence within the Model Rules of Professional Conduct (Jan 2026)
• ACTEC Trust and Estate Talk Diversity, Equity & Inclusivity podcasts

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