Black Success ≠ Black Succession

Lately I've been thinking about succession more than success.

My parents are getting older. My brother is incarcerated. His two daughters and son are growing up. I have daughters of my own. The extended family feels more fragmented with every passing year, and somewhere along the way I realized that I had stopped looking around the room expecting another adult to emerge. Instead, I keep finding myself.

There is a peculiar loneliness in becoming the eldest daughter, especially when you are also the only granddaughter. People imagine inheritance as money changing hands. Sometimes inheritance looks like responsibility. Sometimes it looks like phone calls, doctor's appointments, children's birthdays, family history, difficult conversations, and the invisible labor of making sure everyone still belongs to one another. Somewhere along the way, I stopped asking why this responsibility found me and started asking what it was trying to teach me. That shift changed everything.

There is another tension I have struggled to name.

I am single in the legal sense, but marriage has already taught me what theory could never fully explain. I have been married before, so I understand the exchange intimately. I know what it can mean to be protected and provided for while also having pieces of your autonomy negotiated, softened, delayed, or surrendered in the name of keeping a household intact. That experience gave me clarity.

Rescue that requires me to become smaller in order to be held has lost its appeal.

Many of the women I love have built beautiful lives with their husbands and partners, and I respect those choices. I also recognize what naturally follows. Their labor, attention, and emotional energy become rooted in the households they are building. The larger family, however, still requires someone to hold the center. For much of my life, that center has been waiting for me.

The responsibility continues to grow, but my relationship to it has changed. I experience it as more than weight now. I experience it as information. It tells me what this season of my life requires and, perhaps more importantly, what it will require from other women who find themselves standing where I stand.

As I look ahead, I realize I am inheriting more than responsibility. I am inheriting unfinished work. Aging parents. Children who deserve continuity. Family stories that deserve preservation. Relationships that need tending. The question pressing against me has shifted from whether I am capable of carrying this work to whether one person should ever be expected to.

I also want to be clear that I am building from something. My parents created something solid, and part of my responsibility is learning how to honor what they built while strengthening what has been entrusted to me. Succession, at least as I have come to understand it, is the practice of studying what came before, identifying what deserves to be protected, repairing what became strained, and improving the structure so those who come after me inherit something easier to carry.

That understanding has become deeply personal because I do not see myself as the beginning of my family's story. I see myself as one steward in a much longer line. My parents spent decades building relationships, creating stability, preserving memories, and holding our family together through seasons that demanded extraordinary resilience. Their work deserves more than admiration. It deserves continuation. If my mother and father built the foundation, then my responsibility is to reinforce the beams, document the blueprint, widen the rooms, and make sure the next generation understands how the house is held together before they are asked to live inside it.

That question has led me somewhere unexpected.

Corporations spend years preparing for leadership transitions. They identify future leaders, document institutional knowledge, establish governance structures, and develop succession plans because they understand that continuity is never accidental. Likewise, relay teams practice passing the baton long before race day because the success of the race depends on the exchange as much as the speed of the runners. Family business research reaches the same conclusion: organizations endure when knowledge, leadership, values, and responsibility are intentionally transferred across generations rather than left to chance (Olubiyi, 2022; PwC, n.d.).

Black families rarely approach transition with that same level of intentionality. History required us to become experts at surviving disruption. We learned how to respond to emergencies because emergencies rarely gave us another option. Yet survival leaves little room for designing continuity. Too often, knowledge leaves with the matriarch, relationships drift, property becomes fragmented, and children inherit uncertainty instead of preparation. Researchers studying heirs' property have shown that inadequate estate planning continues to contribute to land and wealth loss in Black communities, making intentional succession an economic issue as much as a relational one (Economic Policy Institute, 2023; Urban Institute, 2024).

Perhaps that is why I keep returning to the idea that Black matriarchs and eldest daughters need one another. Black families have always relied on extended kinship networks that reach beyond the walls of a single household, with women frequently serving as the emotional organizers and caregivers who sustain those relationships across generations (Taylor et al., 2021; Wu et al., 2023). Yet we rarely prepare one another for the responsibilities that accompany those roles. Institutions survive through networks rather than isolated leaders. A corporation depends on executives, advisors, departments, and systems working together toward a shared future. Families deserve that same intentionality. Our governance deserves more than one exhausted woman holding generations together through sheer endurance.

This is especially important because Black families have often inherited patriarchal assumptions that leadership naturally transfers to the eldest son or the nearest man. Yet many of our families have long been organized, sustained, protected, and emotionally governed by women. Leadership is stewardship. Stewardship grows from demonstrated responsibility, earned trust, emotional maturity, and sustained commitment to the collective. Succession deserves to reflect lived stewardship rather than inherited assumptions about gender.

This essay argues for something deeper than partnership alone. I believe in love. I believe in family. I believe men have an essential place in healthy Black communities. I also believe protection loses its integrity when it requires the surrender of autonomy, and leadership loses its legitimacy when it rests on tradition instead of demonstrated stewardship. Healthy partnership should expand a woman's capacity rather than require the surrender of her authorship.

I am writing this because I suspect I am far from the only eldest daughter standing at this crossroads. We spend years preparing for careers, marriages, and retirement. Very few of us receive preparation for the day we become the keepers of a family's memory, relationships, values, and future. That preparation deserves the same level of intention that we give to building businesses, planning estates, or leading organizations.

The goal reaches beyond grief or obligation. The goal is stewardship. The goal is to build families that function with the intentionality of enduring institutions while preserving the love that made them families in the first place. I believe the future of Black communities will increasingly depend on our willingness to imagine something different: networks of matriarchs who share knowledge, prepare one another for succession, distribute responsibility with wisdom, and build continuity that allows every generation to begin a little farther ahead than the one before it.

References

Economic Policy Institute. (2023, July 6). Keeping wealth in the family: The role of “heirs’ property” in Black land loss. https://www.epi.org/blog/heirs-property/

Olubiyi, T. O. (2022). Succession planning and family business continuity: Perspectives from Lagos State, Nigeria. Global Journal of Management and Business Research. https://journalofbusiness.org/index.php/GJMBR/article/view/102240

PricewaterhouseCoopers. (n.d.). Continuity and succession planning. PwC.

Taylor, R. J., Chatters, L. M., Cross, C. J., & Mouzon, D. M. (2022). Fictive kin networks among African Americans, Black Caribbeans, and non-Latino Whites. Journal of Family Issues, 43(1), 20–46. https://doi.org/10.1177/0192513X21993188

Urban Institute. (2024, October 30). To prevent racial wealth and homeownership gaps from widening, break down barriers to estate planning. https://www.urban.org/urban-wire/prevent-racial-wealth-and-homeownership-gaps-widening-break-down-barriers-estate

Wu, Q., Greeson, J. K. P., & Sattler, K. M. P. (2024). Risk and protective factors for African American kinship caregiving: A scoping review. Children and Youth Services Review, 156, 107343. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.childyouth.2023.107343