(ThySistas.com) Something happens to Black women the instant we get loud and certain of our own worth, and Claressa Shields collides with it every single time the sport gets reminded that she is the finest to ever do it.
The woman says she is the greatest, and the hardware backs the claim. Flint raised her, she owns two Olympic gold medals, and undisputed status has been hers across three weight classes. Still, the reaction from certain corners is not applause. It is a raised eyebrow paired with a quiet wish that she would please tone it down. The skill draws no real argument. What bothers people is her mouth, her strut, her flat refusal to shrink so the rest of the room can breathe a little easier.
Sit with that a second.
I have watched this same movie play out my entire life. A sister accomplishes something rare, and almost on cue the talk drifts off her achievement and onto her manner. Too aggressive, they say. A little too much. Could have phrased it nicer. Where is the humility. Why won’t she carry herself like the athlete who smiles sweet, thanks the Lord, and never lets you catch her wanting it. That comparison gives the whole thing away. The demand was never really about greatness. It was about obedience.
We hand our daughters a script before they can spell. Be excellent, but never brag on it. Win, and then apologize for having wanted the win so badly. Take up space, then quickly make yourself small enough that nobody in the room feels the least bit threatened. A grown professional who has bled for every belt gets treated like a girl who forgot her manners at Sunday dinner. And the folks doing the correcting rarely notice they are begging her to be worse at the very confidence that turned her into a champion.
Here is what I keep circling back to. A whole spectrum of human personality exists, yet we behave as though our Sistas only get to live on the sweet, soft, agreeable end of it. A man can be cocky and we call it charisma. He talks reckless and we praise him as a competitor with fire in his belly. Let a woman do the identical thing and suddenly she needs a talking to about class. That double standard is old, it is exhausting, and Claressa did not invent it. Playing along simply is not in her, and the refusal makes certain folks itch.
Let me be honest now. Everything Claressa says does not get a co-sign from me. A few of her interviews had me shaking my head at the television, muttering baby, why. Some of it lands messy. A couple of those beefs, I would have walked a different road entirely. She has growing left. Join the club. Not one of us out here has arrived.
Watch this next part closely, because this is where plenty of us lose the plot.
Disagreeing with a Sista is not the same as degrading her. I can side eye a comment and still refuse to drag anybody’s upbringing into the conversation. I can wish a different word had been picked without ever questioning whether the woman is feminine enough or ladylike enough for somebody’s approval. Her flaws do not make her smaller. They make her human, same as the rest of us who stumbled and kept moving anyway. A woman who laced up gloves, or picked up a pen, or stretched a thin check across a long month, she carries dents. Everybody worth anything does.
Here is where it goes wrong. Somebody says she needs to act right, harmless enough on its face. But wait a beat. Soon that same person is throwing Flint in her face, snickering at her voice, floating the idea that no real lady would carry on this way. That is not feedback anymore. That is disrespect wearing a nicer coat. And our Black women eat it first, on account of us always ending up at the bottom whenever the ugliness starts sliding down.
Flint made her. That city keeps getting used as an insult in these conversations, as though a hard place cannot produce a queen. I reject that notion clean and simple. The grit some people criticize is the identical grit that carried her off those streets and onto an Olympic podium not once but twice. You cannot cherish the medals while despising the hunger that won them. Choose one.
This is the beating heart of the entire matter, so hear me plainly. Sistas do not have to be perfect before we decide they are worth defending. Nobody waits until a sister has scrubbed herself into somebody’s tidy fantasy of grace before saying let her be. We stand up for her messy, mid growth, still learning, still loud. And we do it precisely because the world has never once demanded perfection from the men it showers with love, and we are finished accepting a harsher rule for our own.
Consider who actually profits when we pour our energy into policing each other. Not us. It is never us. While we bicker over whether Claressa came off too brash in a post fight interview, the systems that have historically undervalued women’s boxing and underpaid many of its stars keep humming along, untouched. The respectability trap works exactly like this by design. It keeps us busy grading one another on manners while the real fight goes unfought.
I am not asking anybody to worship her. Worship belongs somewhere higher. What I am asking for is something smaller and far harder, which is the plain decency of letting a person be fully human without making her audition for her own dignity. A woman can be brilliant and abrasive in a single afternoon, then dead right about her talent and flat wrong about her tone inside the very same breath. Both truths fit within one body, because that is simply how anybody actually moves through a life.
Next time you catch yourself about to correct a sister into somebody’s picture of a proper lady, pause and ask who painted that picture, and who it was ever meant to serve. I promise you it was not drawn with her in view. It was not drawn with any of us in view.
Let the champion talk her talk. That microphone got paid for in sweat and busted knuckles. Brash is her right, earned in full. Flawed too, if that is who she happens to be on a given day. And gloriously, unapologetically herself, without some committee signing off first. When the pile on begins, and it always begins, plant your feet on her side. Not because she is spotless. Because she is ours.
So the question is not really about Claressa at all. It is about whether we protect our own before the world says they have earned it. I already know where I stand. The only thing left is where you land.
Staff Writer: Brenda Poole
BP writes about entertainment, relationships, faith, and life in general… She enjoys speaking on things Black women can relate to and hopefully giving a sista something useful along the way…
Feel free to email her at BrendaP@ThySistas.com.