I’m a Black founder and this is my different approach to generational wealth
As the owner of a creative media business that I founded a couple of decades ago, I consider myself “unemployable.” I have spent years building my brand and my company Birk Creative while being a mother of three, a wife, and a daughter. I no longer know how to be an employee who receives a W2.
I have learned that the best way to create financial independence and wealth is through self-determination, which leads to ownership. I’ve followed some great American business ancestors—you know the ones—who built railroads, energy companies, automobile giants and consumer packaged goods companies. These business tycoons are consistently highlighted in our history books, financial news outlets, and self-help books that shout “Create Your Own Wealth TODAY!”
These are the people celebrated and copied by non-childbearing thought leaders like Gary Vaynerchuk, Ray Dalio, Mark Cuban, Tony Robbins, Robert Kiyosaki and others. The incredible narrative that you too (!) can create your own sustainable and personal wealth is intoxicating. It’s like watching food porn shows: Gentle fingertips rolling out pasta dough or maybe a spoonful of delicious glistening sauce which then enters the chef’s mouth and they groan with delight. Through it all, you begin to feel as if you’ve accomplished making the meal yourself.
Creating your own wealth is a particularly enduring concept for a Black American like me. I was raised in the American tradition with a recycled narrative that told me I would be held back from success, opportunity, and money for a multitude of reasons, including that I was the heir of enslaved people dragged from the desert or the bush, thrown into wooden ships in chains like animals.
While many perished at sea, those who made it became my ancestors with a survivor gene, fighting and persisting against all odds. Almost every day I can feel it, even walking down the street looking inside at others’ success from the outside.
Here I am, my Black mind with a skeleton key, trying to unlock the mental chains of slavery holding me back. My visions of accomplishment fight for oxygen amidst a murky river of tweets showing the police brutality served daily to Black men, endless streams of corporate diversity and inclusion nonsense, Hollywood’s sexless portrayal of our natural hair and fat-lipped, big-bottomed beauty (but only if it’s on our Black skin though—Kim Kardashian suffers no rejection), and redlining at all levels of society.
Some of us are trapped in a visual narrative where we see race on every corner and mining of our ideas, thoughts, passions, creativity, art, music, brilliance, and genius that provides no diamonds for too many of us—other than the seven American Black billionaires we champion as if they represent completed success for all Black Americans.
Who has distracted us with this professionally designed and branded generational wealth toolkit while we remain enslaved and trapped in a Black people’s Pandora’s box?
The selling of the possibility of generational wealth is the ugly baby of the American dream—repackaged, reformulated, and re-messaged to keep us running toward an inedible 3-D–printed neon carrot.
Like artificial intelligence and automated processes, the “dream” recycles, repopulates, regurgitates, and scales powered by social media and finance gurus. In the meantime, we all continue to listen to celebrities, reveling in their success, amplifying and promoting their products and services and ideas, using their likeness and images to validate our own work in our own efforts, even though our own work and efforts are going unnoticed, unrealized and definitely not executed on.
What is generational wealth exactly? For sure the meaning is cultural. Some East Indian, Mexican, and Nigerian families possess visible generational wealth not only because their homegrown culture is filled with merchants and entrepreneurs, but also because of the generations of families that often live together, stay together and raise children and grandchildren together.
In the United States I see other evidence of generational wealth in brands such as Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, Apple, General Motors, and JP Morgan Chase. Yet these brands don’t teach American families how to build the kind of generational wealth that could fundamentally sustain them.
Instead, for these brands, generational wealth is built, bottled up, packaged, driven, and created year after year by consumers, by billions of dollars of customer value, with nothing left over for American families except unrecyclable plastics.
I love watching the penny-pushing social media influencers who tell us to buy a stock and hold it for the long term, who tell us to stop spending (but buy their books).
But even the idea of future generational wealth is too distant for a community that struggles to stay alive on the streets (or one that believes that climate change threatens our long-term existence). Maybe we should all stop consuming—everything. Immediately cease to buy tickets to events and coaching classes, no more branded shoes and branded phones, end all streaming services platforms and for sure, stop succumbing to processed foods. None of these things contributes to teaching you how to feed your mind, to build and create so you can actually achieve the brand package we call “generational wealth.”
I was speaking with my 83-year-old mother the other day, and I told her it was numero uno important for me to make big money at the end of the day because I needed to ensure that my children could go to college. And she said, “JinJa, at the end of the day, what really matters is family.”
Does generational wealth create the bonds in a family? Does generational wealth respect the enriching friendships developed over time? Does generational wealth share knowledge and demonstrate to others how to be an authentic real person and live life as who they really are? Or will it demonstrate who they’re striving to be as they reach for the crypto-carrot of this so-called generational wealth?
There are a lot of lies being told by false prophets to make people believe they can experience the American dream through so-called generational wealth. Sure, we all need money right now, but we need family even more.
I’m going to start a journey back to the simple fundamentals: investing a little bit here, saving a little bit there on the side, putting some cash away for a family emergency.
Instead of letting Brand Generational Wealth grab my brain and make me anxious and immobile, I’m just going to think about “the now” and work hard for the money. I’ll do what I can to save and not spend. I’ll read real books and sit in nature too, even if it’s in my backyard.
Building generational wealth is going to mean expanding my tent for my family. People I’ve loved and believed in my whole life, who are important to me, who I can relax with, have conversations with, talk about movies and books with, explore nature with hold hands, and feel connected to.
Even though my teenagers are well beyond the phase where I can still mold them, I’d like to model this new vision for them, to show them their mom hasn’t given up. They too can strive for an authentic and more-connected-to-real-life experience of the world and model it for their children.
That is a more sound strategy for building real generational wealth, and that’s the kind of brand value that you can pass down that will last lifetimes and make the world a better place.
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