(ThySistas.com) The numbers coming out of the labor market this past year tell a story a lot of us carried in our bodies long before any economist bothered to chart it.
Here is what the data says out loud. We opened 2025 with a jobless figure sitting around 5.4 percent. By December that same measure had climbed to 7.3, a level that exposed how sharply the labor market had turned against us. Diplomas did not save anybody. Among Black women, sisters holding bachelor’s degrees watched their footing slip more sharply than every other education group, and the federal government by itself shed 277,000 roles, with an estimated 95,000 of those losses falling on Black women. By early summer of this year, the headline had eased toward 5.7. Good news, supposedly. Except that softer number did not necessarily mean more of us were bringing home a check. The labor force itself had shrunk, leaving fewer Black women counted as working or actively looking for work. Some likely got tired and stopped searching. Others stepped away for reasons the headline rate cannot tell us.
I want to sit inside that stillness for a moment, because that is where the ache actually lives.
Think about who tends to give up the search. Not the one who never tried. No, the one who wore herself down to the nub trying. She rewrote that resume until the words stopped meaning anything. Sat through a webinar on personal branding during her lunch break. Rehearsed answers at six in the morning to a bathroom mirror, half of which never got asked. Bought the ring light because somebody’s cousin swore it read more professional on camera. And after the fourth no, or the twelfth, or the interviews that just went silent, which somehow cut deeper, something in her clicked off. That closing does not register anywhere official. There is no line item on a government spreadsheet for a spirit that got tired.
So let me name what I keep watching happen to grown, accomplished women I love and respect.
A friend of mine, fifty-one, twenty years in nonprofit management, got walked out of her building on a Tuesday. Nine years at that organization. She had a corner desk, a plant she named, a reputation people trusted. The travel got frozen first. Then her email login stopped working. Then a stranger from HR read her a paragraph off a laptop. By Thursday it was finished. A master’s degree, a kid in the fourth grade, and that whole weekend she spent apologizing to me, to her mama, to herself, like she had done something wrong. She hadn’t. The floor moved. She only happened to be standing on it.
That is the piece the charts miss.
When the paycheck vanishes and you did nothing to cause it, the brain goes looking for a reason inside you anyway. Strange as it sounds, that hurts less than the alternative. Own the mistake and at least there is a lever to pull, something to correct by Monday. Accept that the whole floor tilted under everybody at once and there is nothing to grab, and that thought will keep you up at two in the morning. So we reach for the version that hands us a lever. We tell ourselves we should have networked harder, spoken up less, spoken up more, worn the other blazer, stayed later, smiled bigger. We audit ourselves into the ground.
And the promotions. Lord, the ones that never come.
Here is a cruelty nobody warns you about. Do everything they told you to do. Earn the credential. Mentor the young ones. Volunteer for the committee nobody wants. Make your manager look brilliant in the meeting. Wait your turn, patiently, professionally, and then watch the title go to somebody who golfs with the director. Not once. Over and over, across years, until patience curdles into something quieter and more corrosive. Then the wondering starts, whether maybe the problem is you. Your voice. Your hair. The way you push back in a room. That wondering is expensive. It taxes a woman in a currency that never shows up on any pay stub, and she pays it every single day.
Economists and labor analysts keep using a phrase for us. Canary in the coal mine. Bellwether. They mean that when the wider economy begins to rot, Black women buckle first, because we sit stacked at the exact intersection of everything fragile. Public sector employment. Care work. Retail and service floors. Households where one income holds up a lot of people. When the system catches a cold, we get pneumonia, and we get it early. Research has estimated that more than one in five Black women in the labor force work somewhere in health care, another field where policy shifts and budget pressure can hit hard. So the pressure is not slowing down. It is loading up.
I need the Black women reading this to hear the next part plainly.
A layoff is not a verdict on your value. A stalled title is not proof you fell short. Ninety applications out, three replies back. That math is the market breaking down, not some hidden truth about you finally surfacing. Whatever is squeezing us got set in motion way before your name ever showed up on a layoff spreadsheet, and it grinds on no matter how clean your last review looked. A person can be excellent at the work and still land on the wrong side of the cut. Both are true at once, ugly as that sits.
The joblessness itself is not the part that scares me. We have survived lean stretches before. Our grandmothers wrote the book on it. What gnaws at me is the quiet shame underneath, how a sharp, qualified woman slowly trims her dreams down to fit whatever scraps are left, and calls it being realistic. That is not wisdom. It is a slow surrender with better manners. I have watched brilliant Sistas take themselves out of the running for jobs they had every right to chase, because one more no felt like one more than they had left in them. That is the wound that outlasts any recession. It keeps bleeding long after the economy technically recovers.
So what do we do, sitting here in the middle of it. Tell the truth to each other, for one. Quit performing fine over brunch. When a friend loses her post, nobody should rush to fix it or spin it bright. Let her be furious. Remind her, more than once if she needs it, that the ground moved and it was not her doing. Hold onto your own records too, the emails, the wins, the receipts, so that on the bad mornings there is something solid to press against the lie in your head.
And we carry two truths at once, which is a thing our people have practiced for generations. Yes, this economy is taking more than it gives, and that is real, and naming it out loud matters. And also, no market on earth gets to decide what we are worth. Our value was never up for a vote, never printed on a stub, never contingent on some director’s mood in a budget meeting.
The figure will rise again, or fall again, and the papers will make a fuss either way. Meanwhile we stay breathing and hold each other. Staying ready is the move, not because the door is fair, but because when it finally cracks open, I intend for us to be right there, degrees in hand, unbroken, and still entirely our own.
Staff Writer; Jada Williams
This sister writes about politics, money, family, and the issues that shape everyday life… Her work looks at how decisions made in government, changes in the economy, and challenges within our communities affect Black women and their families…
Feel free to email her at: JadaW@ThySistas.com.