The Dells’ $250 ‘Investment’ Accounts Won’t Fix Centuries Of Divestment From Black Children

A $6.25 billion pledge by Michael and Susan Dell to create investment accounts for American children has drawn national attention as a bold financial intervention and a head start to long-term opportunity that children can access at age 18 to help pay for college, start a business, or put money toward buying a home.

But for Black children, who have faced generations of systemic divestment in education, housing, and employment, the modest per-child payouts raise doubts about whether this policy addresses inequity or merely repackages it. And this so-called investment raises a much darker question: What exactly is America investing in here, and who is this really for?

Because when you strip away the applause and all the financial jargon, what this pledge amounts to is just $250 per child for roughly 25 million kids. A few hundred dollars in a country where housing, education, healthcare, and survival costs move like compound interest in the opposite direction.

Let’s talk about scale.

About 14 percent of children under age 10 in the United States are Black, according to U.S. Census data showing that roughly 13–14 percent of the nation’s child population (ages 0–17) identifies as Black or African American, with similar proportions among younger age cohorts. 

If this pledge reaches children proportionally, and that’s a generous assumption, you’re talking about roughly 3.5 million Black children receiving $250 each. That’s about $875 million earmarked for Black children inside a system that has extracted trillions from Black families across generations through redlining, school segregation, predatory lending, wage theft, mass incarceration, and student-loan debt.

Put another way, this doesn’t even come close to repairing what was stolen from Black futures.

Black children today are still more likely to grow up in neighborhoods with underfunded schools, fewer healthcare providers, higher exposure to environmental toxins, higher food insecurity rates, and more economic instability. They are more likely to experience housing insecurity. More likely to have parents burdened by medical debt. More likely to attend colleges that receive fewer public dollars. More likely to borrow more to stay enrolled.

Black students make up about 12% of college enrollment nationwide, yet they carry a disproportionately high share of student loan debt. On average, Black borrowers graduate with significantly more debt than their white peers and are far more likely to struggle with repayment years later. Many Black students leave college without a degree but still carry the loans, placing them in the worst possible position, which is debt without the credential that is supposed to justify it. In this way, student debt has functioned less as a pathway to mobility and more as a racial wealth destroyer, deepening inequity rather than narrowing it.

In 2025, the average cost of attending a public four-year college, including housing and basic living expenses, runs roughly $27,000 to $30,000 per year. A single semester easily costs $13,000 or more. Against that reality, $250 doesn’t cover tuition, books, or fees. It doesn’t meaningfully reduce borrowing. It doesn’t alter enrollment or persistence decisions.

It barely registers.

And projecting forward makes the insult worse. Eight years from now, when today’s 10-year-old Black children could access these accounts, college costs could run closer to $35,000 to $40,000 a year. Eighteen years from now, a four-year degree could cost $200,000 or more. Against that trajectory, this “seed” becomes invisible.

Housing tells an even clearer story.

Black homeownership rates in the U.S. remain nearly 30 percentage points lower than white homeownership rates, a gap that has existed since the Fair Housing Act was passed in 1968. That gap isn’t accidental; it’s policy-built. Redlining may be illegal, but its legacy lives on in appraisal bias, lending discrimination, and housing scarcity.

In 2025, the median home price in the U.S. is about $410,000. A modest 10 percent down payment still runs around $41,000. For Black families, who typically have far less intergenerational wealth, homeownership remains elusive. Against this backdrop, a $250 account doesn’t function as a bridge to ownership. It doesn’t meaningfully move the needle. It doesn’t even acknowledge the depth of exclusion Black families face in the housing market. Project that forward a decade or two, and the gap widens further. Home prices could easily exceed $500,000 to $700,000. Down payments scale upward accordingly.

Which brings us to the broader political context, because this pledge does not exist in a vacuum.

At the same time that billionaires are parading $250 “investments” as child-focused policy, the federal government is quietly normalizing 50-year mortgages, loosening credit standards, and extending debt timelines. Not because housing will become more affordable, but because the country has accepted that young people, especially Black and brown children, will never truly catch up.

Put plainly, this racist capitalist system is adapting to permanent inequality and debt as social control. And this is happening under an administration openly hostile to Black, brown, poor, and immigrant children, the very demographic future of the country. Hostile to their schools through censorship and defunding. Hostile to student debt relief. Hostile to workers’ wages. Hostile to housing protections. Hostile to public health. Hostile to even naming structural racism.

Yet suddenly we’re supposed to believe America just discovered “concern for children” because a billionaire cut a check?

Let’s be honest about what’s being attempted here. On one side of its mouth, this country treats Black children as problems who are over-represented in social indices of failure, overly punished, too assertive, too loud, too costly; on the other, it quietly panics about declining white birthrates and attempts to coax white families into reproducing through nostalgia, nationalism, and soft-focus policy gestures.

On its face, the Dell pledge is being sold as race-neutral, benevolent, and technocratic. But it does not exist outside the political environment that produced it. Part of this initiative is directly tied to a federal program branded as “Trump Accounts,” which specifically promises $1,000 seed deposits for babies born between 2025 and 2028. That detail matters, not just economically, but ideologically, because it situates this so-called concern for children inside a broader political panic about racial demographics.

For years, Donald Trump and figures aligned with his movement have openly lamented declining birthrates, frequently framing the issue in racialized and nationalist terms. That anxiety has primarily centered on white population decline, not on the material conditions facing children already here. Instead of addressing why families are choosing not to have children because of housing costs, healthcare, wages, childcare, and student debt, the response has been to incentivize births symbolically, while refusing to make parenting materially sustainable.

That’s where this pledge fits.

The emphasis on newborns, the timing window, and the future-only framing mirrors a pronatalist logic that prioritizes who is being born over how children are actually living. It creates a hierarchy of concern. Meaning, babies yet to arrive are framed as investments in “the future,” while millions of children, disproportionately Black children, already living with hunger, debt, unstable housing, and underfunded schools, are told to practice patience.

This is not accidental.

Pronatalist policy, historically, has often carried the residue of eugenic thinking, even when stripped of overt racial language. Not eugenics in its most explicit, 20th-century form with forced sterilization or racial purity laws, but in its modern, sanitized variant with policies that elevate certain births as economically or nationally desirable while refusing to adequately support the children of populations already deemed “excess,” “costly,” or “burdensome.”

And so when the state and its wealthy partners like Michael and Susan Dell prioritize symbolic incentives for future births while withholding real investment from children of color already alive, it reproduces the same moral sorting. Some children are framed as hope. Others are framed as liabilities.

So when supporters point to the Dell pledge as evidence that “America cares about children,” it’s worth asking: which children, and at what stage? Because concern that only activates at birth but disappears when children need food, healthcare, safe schools, and housing is not care. It is demographic management dressed up as generosity.

That’s why this initiative feels so unsettling at its core. It doesn’t ask what children need now. It asks what kind of population the country wants later, and whether a small financial promise can paper over the refusal to build a society where all children are allowed to thrive.

A real investment in Black children would not look like a locked brokerage account they can’t touch for 18 years while their families struggle now. It would look like fully funded public schools with librarians, not book bans. It would look like universal healthcare that isn’t tied to employment. It would look like housing stability, food security, affordable childcare, wages that keep pace with life, and debt relief that removes boulders rather than pebbles.

Instead, Black families are being handed a receipt for virtue.

And the media is playing right along. Major outlets framed this pledge as a financial fairytale: head start, nest egg, building wealth early. It just sits there—earning interest in a system that’s extracting interest everywhere else. And then there’s the fine-print insult: if families continue to contribute to these investment accounts.

Contribute with what?

With wages that don’t match inflation? With jobs that vanish? With rent that behaves like an auction? With childcare bills that eclipse paychecks? The promise is quiet and cruel: if you’re already struggling, the investment won’t grow for you. Which means this isn’t an equalizer. It’s an inequality amplifier.

Black families with fewer resources will receive their $250 and a headline. Families with stability will receive a compounding asset. That’s how policy reproduces hierarchy while pretending to interrupt it.

So what does this “investment” mean for Black children?

It means another reminder that America prefers symbolism over repair. Headlines over housing. Theater over justice. A future-facing gesture that avoids confronting the present-day realities Black children actually live with.

Because real investments don’t fit in headlines, they show up as homes, schools, doctors, libraries, and dignity. Everything else is performance. And generations of Black children have seen this show before.

Dr. Stacey Patton is an award-winning journalist and author of “Spare The Kids: Why Whupping Children Won’t Save Black America” and the forthcoming “Strung Up: The Lynching of Black Children In Jim Crow America.” Read her Substack here.

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