(ThySistas.com) There was an old head in my neighborhood, a Sista who had seen plenty and said whatever she pleased. Told me once that certain women walk into a spot and the spot just bends their way. Said it like a warning, not a compliment. You take up space without asking, folks get twitchy. Have one of us be the one doing it, and twitchy grows teeth real quick.
Been watching it up close since I was a girl myself. The bright girl in class who answered too fast and got labeled a smart mouth before lunch. Then the coworker who wanted the promotion and had the nerve to voice it out loud. A lot of us figured out young how to make ourselves small. Shrink the voice down. Play the wins way off. The world sits easier with us tucked in and agreeable. Nobody says it to your face, but the message still lands, that reaching past whatever they set aside for you means something in you is broken. Foolishness of the highest order. This is the lie I came to pick apart, through somebody specific.
Lately Condoleezza Rice keeps coming to mind. Not the politics. Set the party down for a minute and look hard at the arc of the life.
Birmingham. A little Black girl in what might have been the most segregated city in the country, coming up while bombs went off blocks from where she practiced piano. That child knew Denise McNair, one of the 4 girls killed at Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. Sit with that. Carrying that grief at 8 years old and deciding, somewhere down in the marrow, that you would become so undeniably excellent the world would have no honest excuse left to turn you away.
That is where the drive came from. Not ice. Fire.
French first. Then competitive figure skating before sunrise. A piano studied long enough to consider making it the whole career, until she realized the concert stage would not be her future and discovered another calling in international politics. College finished at 19. By 38 the title read provost at Stanford, running the budget and the academic side of one of the finest universities on the planet, the first Black person and first woman to hold that post. National security adviser after that. Then Secretary of State, only the 2nd woman ever to sit in that chair and the first who looked like my aunties.
Read it back slow and tell me it isn’t remarkable.
Here is the part that gnaws at me, though. When a particular sort of man stacks a resume like that, we hand him words like driven and focused and visionary. We put his name on a library. Let a Sista pull off the identical climb and the vocabulary shifts underfoot. Now the labels arrive. Cold. Calculating. Stiff. Robotic. People still bring up how she never married, like a husband was the last box left blank on her application. They go looking in her face for something warm, and when it does not show up on demand, they count it against her.
We turn on our own too. Sistas at the salon call her hard, dismiss her entire existence in a sentence because of who she worked for, never once pausing on the ceiling she cracked getting there. And listen, you can disagree with every decision she ever signed off on. I do, on plenty. But disagreement and erasure are 2 different animals, and we keep confusing them.
Ambition in a Black woman still gets read as arrogance. Somebody has to explain to me why. A man wants the corner office and we say he has hunger. Let her want the same thing and suddenly the story becomes that she forgot where she came from, got too big for the neighborhood, abandoned the people. The measuring stick changes the second our hands reach for the top rung.
And there is this quieter charge underneath, the one nobody names out loud. That the femininity got surrendered to get this far. Traded the wife, the nurturer, the soft and available version everybody was more comfortable with. Like tenderness and towering competence cannot live in one body. My grandmother raised 9 children on a maid’s wages and could have run a small nation from her kitchen table. Do not tell me strength and womanhood are opposites. That lie was built to keep us small, and too many of us swallowed it whole.
What Rice represents, whatever you make of her ledger, is a certain refusal. A refusal to shrink so other people could feel comfortable. And a refusal to apologize for wanting the top of the mountain. That posture costs Black women something every single time, and the bill got paid in full, in public, for decades.
Now I want to turn the corner and say the thing I really sat down to say.
Somewhere along the way we let politics do to our sisterhood what slavery, redlining, and every other machine built to break us never fully managed. It divided the table. I know women who will not speak to a cousin over a ballot. Grown folks who unfollowed a lifelong friend because of a vote cast in the other direction last November. And I keep asking myself when a party registration became thicker than blood, thicker than the shared knowing that passes between 2 of us who catch each other’s eye across a crowd full of people who will never understand what we carry.
Condoleezza Rice is a Republican. Some of y’all just felt your whole chest tighten reading that, and that reaction right there is exactly what I am poking at. Because she is a Sista through and through. The R next to her name never erased the racial and gender assumptions that follow Black women into rooms of power. It never removed the expectation that she be exceptional just to be treated as capable. Whatever party she belongs to, she still had to navigate a country that has never handed Black women power without making them pay something for it.
So let me ask you plain, Sistas. Do you have a real friend, a genuine one, who votes the opposite of you? Not an acquaintance you tolerate at the reunion. A friend. Somebody you would call at 2 in the morning. If the honest answer is no, I want you to sit with why. Consider what got traded away for the comfort of a table where everybody already agrees.
We do not have to cosign each other’s ballots to protect each other’s dignity. My defense of a sister’s right to reach as high as her arms will stretch does not depend on her checking the box I check. That should be the floor, not the ceiling.
Next time you catch yourself calling an accomplished woman cold, pause. Ask whether you would use that word on a man behaving the identical way. And when party lines tempt you to cut a good one loose, remember the Black women who came up out of Birmingham, out of Mississippi, out of the worst this country could dream up, and decided they would be great anyway.
That greatness belongs to all of us. Even the ones who vote wrong.
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.