Expanding the Face of Wealth: Get As Comfortable With Our Success As You Are With Our Poverty
I’m still reeling from Rihanna’s Super Bowl performance. A black woman, a mother, unwed, billionaire and visibly pregnant—for all the world to see—she performed in a way that strategically honored so many of her identies. She rested, she towered, she danced, she sang…she was surrounded. Before our eyes, she made history in a month that celebrates the accomplishments and greatness of black people.
So Madam CJ Walker wasn’t the first woman millionaire?
And I’m still reeling from learning that Madame C.J. Walker was, in fact, not the first woman millionaire. In his book “Black Fortunes: The Story of the First Six African Americans Who Survived Slavery and Became Millionaires,” author Shomari Willis writes this: “Madam C.J. Walker was memorialized as the first black millionaire not because she was the first to achieve wealth—she was far from the first—but because she was the first one of the first to flaunt and claim her wealth openly and fearlessly. The earliest black millionaires were conditioned not to be so brazen.” For years, I have been very proudly announcing, that Walker was not the first black woman millionaire, she was the first woman millionaire. And while I stand corrected, I am also inspired to learn that other women had come before her. But Walker still remains my biggest inspiration, as she was a teen mom who faced so much adversity and loss before transitioning into adult and becoming a leader in black women’s hair care and business. This brings me to our discussion, today, about wealth creators we fail to imagine.
Madam CJ Walker
Centering us in discussions about wealth
In 2020 and 2021, Infamous Mothers, LLC (IM) piloted a wealth series. While many of the women from IM respect the work of Dave Ramsey and Tony Robbins or Eric Thomas, sometimes it takes a lot of mental acrobatics to see ourselves in the financial shoes of any man, especially a white man. Our journeys and barriers are often very different.
There are black women gurus that quite a few our members and clients follow, women they recognize as financial gurus — Glinda Bridgforth, Kara Stevens…and Tiffany Aliche, to name a few.
…And yet, many still wondered if the lessons taught by even these experts still applied to them. And so, we created our own financial series, one that centers the women in the IM community.
As we designed our pilot, I read and researched. One of the most memorable and provocative messages I encountered came from Dr. Venus Opal Reese — a person who went from experiencing homelessness to becoming a Stanford graduate to becoming a black woman millionaire. She wrote, “As far as I am concerned, becoming a black woman millionaire is a revolutionary act.” And since I am always “with the shenanigans,” I just upped the ante and asked: Can the women we call Infamous Mothers become millionaires? I dedicated an entire season of our upcoming “Books, Bullets and Babies” podcast to answering that question.
Right now, I can hear some of you in my head asking, “But what is an Infamous Mother?” I’ll digress a bit to explain.
But doesn’t “infamous” mean bad?
She (they) is a badass mom who does extraordinary things. She builds a mothering practice that honors her family’s needs (often not concerning herself with the expectations of the world). This means she’s judged. An Infamous Mother is someone who doesn’t give up her life just because she births lives. (How can she teach her children how to dream and be resilient and whole when she’s living as a shell of herself, a shadow?)
Dr. Venus Opal Reese, author of “Black Woman Millionaire: A Revolutionary Act that Defies Impossible”
We—by “we,” I mean a society that upholds racist, sexist, homophobic, classist, ableist, fatphobic..patriarchal standards—call her Infamous, for many reasons. By choosing to not be a martyr, by not striving to meet someone’s idea of what it means to be a “good girl” and then a “good woman” and then a “good mom,” we label her as “bad”—even when being “good” isn’t what’s best for her. We’re angry, frustrated, and resentful at her audacity to define herself in a world that tries to determine who she should be, and so we call her infamous. She’s infamous for choosing to reclaim her power after being violated, disregarded, ignored, disrespected, counted out, underestimated…and worse. Instead of running from the label, she leans into it, capitalizing the “I,” because she understands that in order to be the hero in her own story, others will make her the villain in theirs. And she’s made peace with that.
Can you imagine this woman as a millionaire?
It is a provocative inquiry. Think about it. Ask yourself, “Who do I see when I think of wealth, seven-figure incomes, inheritance, owning property, etc?” What do they look like? If that person isn’t a woman or a mom, why not? If that person doesn’t have five or six children that she cares for without the benefit of a partner, why not? If that person is not a whole woman, living life on her times, why not? What mental acrobatics will you have to go through to include these women in your idea of what wealth could look like? What biases would you have to check? What insecurities would you have to challenge?
For every 1 million dollars white men are raising for their businesses, black women are raising $42,000. Part of the problem lies in all that flipping we have to do in our minds to imagine any woman having access to that much capital — let alone a woman who deviates from our popular understanding of what it means to be a “good mom” or “respectable mom,” especially when she’s black. We see her as a risk. But that’s not the only issue. We struggle because it’s difficult to see the same women that we imagine as “needing to be saved” as people who are solving problems and multiplying solutions.
This isn’t about boots and straps
Doing the work to remove barriers in the banking industry, expanding the face and experiences of venture capital funders, and creating opportunities that intentionally grow more black women millionaires have to be crucial to any program around raising financial awareness. It is equally important to do the work that leads to creating more millionaires whose mothering experiences and circumstances challenge the status quo. These women often have the grit, vision, creativity and stategic planning skills to accomplish the impossible. But they often lack the support and the capital.
While we’ll explore this discussion in more detail in upcoming months, here’s something to think about. Two per cent of all millionaires are women. Why is that? How many are black women? How many are moms? And how many are moms who “mother outside of the lines?” How would the world look different if more of these women earned seven figures? And why does it matter?
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About the blogger
Dr. Sagashus Levingston is an author, entrepreneur and PhD holder. She has two fur babies, Maya and Gracie, six children (three boys and three girls), and they all (including her partner) live in Madison, WI. She loves all things business, is committed to reminding moms of their power, and is dedicated to playing her part in closing the wealth gap for people of color and women. She believes that mothering is a practice, like yoga, and she fights daily to manage her chocolate intake. The struggle is real, y’all…and sometimes it’s beautiful.
Follow her on Instagram and Facebook @drsagashus