(ThySistas.com) For a great many Black women, professional advancement arrives bundled with a quiet tax that has nothing to do with competence and everything to do with the hair growing from their own scalp. A particular fatigue settles into the shoulders after years of explaining oneself to colleagues who were never asked to account for the same. I know that weight well. Most of us Sistas carry a version of it.
Nobody warned me when I was young. You assume the hard part will be the styling, the wash days, the long evenings in somebody’s kitchen with a hot comb hissing over the stove. Then you grow up, earn the degree, land the position you studied half your life for, and discover the actual labor has almost nothing to do with product or patience. It has to do with translation. You spend years turning an ordinary morning into something a room will accept without a flicker of surprise.
Think about what that costs. A colleague reaches toward my twists like I am a petting zoo, fingers already moving before the question forms, and I am supposed to smile. One manager calls my locs a bold choice during a review where nobody mentioned my numbers, which were good. Somebody in orientation slides me a dress code that says neat and polished, and everybody in the room understands, without a single honest word passing between us, whose texture the sentence was written to police.
Straight becomes the quiet standard. Nobody announces it. There is no memo declaring bone-straight the official look of competence, yet the message arrives anyway, through raised eyebrows and careful compliments and the promotions that seem to favor women whose edges lie flat. You learn the grammar of it fast. Blow it out for the interview. Bun it up for the big presentation. Save the Afro for a Friday when the executives are traveling and only your work friends will see.
I earned my seat through the same grind everyone respects on paper. Late nights. Student loans. A master’s I am still paying off. And still, a slice of every week goes to managing how my scalp reads to strangers who assume their own reflects nothing at all, no history, no politics, no announcement. Their ponytail is just a ponytail. My cornrows are a whole conversation I did not ask to start.
Here is what wears on you. It is not one comment. A single remark you can shrug off, laugh past, file away for the group chat. What grinds is the accumulation, the daily arithmetic of deciding whether today holds enough energy to be a curiosity. Some mornings you do. Plenty of mornings you would rather just work.
CROWN Act protections exist because this is real and measurable, not a feeling a few sensitive women invented. Thirty states have now enacted protections against race-based hair discrimination, including bias involving natural texture and protective styles, precisely because Sistas have lost jobs, lost offers and been sent home from school over braids, puffs and Bantu knots that grow from our heads the way they always have. When a thing needs a law, you can quit pretending it lives only in somebody’s imagination.
And notice the framing baked into all of it. My roots get called a statement. A declaration. Something loaded, deliberate, meant to provoke. But I did not wake up choosing a manifesto. I woke and my curls did what curls do. The politics were assigned to me, handed over at the door of every building where somebody decided that the way hair grows from my scalp is a position I am obligated to defend.
You will notice who never has to mount that defense. The lady with the sleek blowout is simply well-groomed. Her straightness reads as effort, as care, as a person who has her life together. My coils read as a mood the room must interpret. Same time in the mirror, wildly different verdicts, and the gap between those verdicts is the whole rotten point.
I have watched younger women in the office learn the choreography I learned. A brilliant analyst, sharp as anybody on the floor, quietly retired her Afro after a season of jokes the office let slide. Week by week the flattening set in, until her reflection matched the picture. And I felt something close to grief, because I recognized the trade. Peace, bought with a piece of herself, and the register never stops ringing.
Here is the plain thing. A texture is not an argument. My protective style is no debate I owe my coworkers before lunch. Locs don’t lecture anybody. Braids aren’t a petition. They are simply the way a great many of us walk through the world, cared for and chosen and entirely ours, and the demand that we keep justifying them is the actual imposition, the real disruption, the thing somebody else ought to be explaining.
Being asked to hold a seminar about my own reflection has worn me down. Some of that weariness I carry for my nieces, who deserve to walk into their first real office without the choreography already loaded in their bones. The rest belongs to the young mother two cubicles over who imagines nobody notices the price she pays to look acceptable by four in the afternoon.
None of this begs for special treatment. What it asks is the ordinary courtesy already extended to everybody else, the freedom to show up as grown and fully capable without a footnote stapled to your scalp. Let the flat iron and the wash-and-go stand as equals. Treat neither as a cause. Retire the assumption that one look is the human default and the rest are variations somebody has to squint at and forgive.
My grandmother pressed her edges before church and softened her voice before white folks and swallowed a hundred small indignities so mine would be fewer. They are fewer. I will grant the years that much. But fewer is not gone, and too many Sistas my age still spend their Sundays coaching daughters through the same hush. I refuse to hand it down.
Some call it gorgeous. Others see nothing worth a second thought. Fine. It grew from this head of mine, on its own terms, and it was never yours to approve. Save the questions for something that truly needs one, and let a grown woman get back to work.
Staff Writer; Raven Jones
Raven writes about music, relationships, and the everyday ups and downs of Black women… She keeps it honest, encourages other sistas, and can be reached at RavenJ@ThySistas.com.