(ThySistas.com) Somewhere between the record books and the fake quotes strangers keep putting in her mouth, Angel Reese became a mirror. Half of what people say about her is really about them. The Baltimore area native just keeps hooping.
Here is what I keep noticing. This country has never known what to do with a certain type of woman. The one who walks in already sure of herself, who will not make herself smaller so everybody else can relax. She is not waiting on permission to want the ball or the last word, and she is surely not about to say sorry for it. Somewhere back down the line we got taught that this brand of nerve belonged to other people. Not to us. Never to us.
Reese either skipped that lesson or read it and tossed it in the trash.
Notice how the conversation shifts depending on who happens to be strutting. When some athletes talk trash, flex, and celebrate loudly, the commentary reaches for words like fierce, passionate, a born competitor. Let that very same energy pour out of a young sister and suddenly the vocabulary curdles. All at once she becomes arrogant, classless, altogether too much, though the play itself never changed. The eyes doing the watching decided what to call it, and old habits filled in the rest. So the gap is the story. It always was.
Ask any sister who has been the only one who looked like her at the conference table, or up in the pulpit, or working a hospital floor through the night. Sistas know this dance by heart. You learn to sand down the edges of your competence. You hold a smile a beat longer than feels natural. You rehearse the tone of an email three times so nobody misreads assertiveness as attitude. The whole performance drains you, and it is a tax the fellas never get handed, a tax the ones already wrapped in the benefit of the doubt never see on their bill.
Angel decided she was done paying it.
Now look at what that decision has produced. This season she got dealt from Chicago to Atlanta, and the Dream became her stage. On August 24, days before the World Cup break, she yanked down 26 boards against Los Angeles, the most anyone has ever managed in a single WNBA game, and she overtook A’ja Wilson’s mark for the most rebounds in a season too. That same stretch included the first undefeated four game West Coast road trip in Dream franchise history. A few days later came her 29th double double of the year, one clear of the standard Alyssa Thomas had set, another line in the ledger that belongs to nobody but her now. Those record setting weeks also brought Reese consecutive Eastern Conference Player of the Week honors.
Then she boarded a plane to Berlin. As I write this in September, that same competitor is over in Germany with USA stitched across her chest at the FIBA Women’s Basketball World Cup, her first turn on one of the sport’s biggest global stages. Angel opener put her across from 7 foot 3 Zhang Ziyu of China, and she threw her whole frame into slowing that tower, physical and utterly unbothered, pulling a team high 9 boards while the Americans rolled. Coming off the bench, she still left prints all over group play, dropping 13 points and 3 steals in a rout of Czechia as the United States finished the group stage unbeaten and advanced directly to the quarterfinals. There is also a Barbie modeled in her likeness sitting on store shelves right now, a thing she mostly talks about in terms of what it signals to the little girls who finally get to see themselves in her. That last part carries more weight than any highlight reel.
And still, grown people sit around debating whether Reese has truly earned the word superstar, and I need you to sit with that one a second. A player rewriting the ledger for rebounds, moving merchandise and commanding attention on and off the court, and the burning question is whether she is good enough to deserve her own light. Meanwhile athletes with quieter reputations and slimmer stat lines get handed the crown with no hearing at all. The bar keeps floating higher, but only under her feet.
We have all seen this movie, haven’t we. Black women especially know every frame by heart. This is not new, either. Black women have been carrying the same contradiction forever. Be strong, sure, but not so strong that anybody notices. Step up and lead, then watch folks bristle when it turns out leading means giving the orders. Our excellence keeps getting read as some kind of threat. And here is the oldest part of it. Let a man reach for what he wants and the word is ambition. Let a sister reach for the same thing, and now she is difficult, now she needs a signed permission slip.
What Angel keeps showing us, game after game, is that she will not run that gauntlet on anybody’s terms but her own. She cries when it hurts and laughs loud when she is glad. Out there she dances, she poses, she talks her mess, then turns around and grabs 18 rebounds like the noise never landed. That is a whole person on the floor, not some managed brand. There is no act for a crowd that made up its mind ages ago, no shrinking herself down so the uneasy folks can breathe. Took a lot of us until 43 to learn that. She had it at 24.
I think about the young Sistas watching all this, the ones scrolling past the nasty comments and the drama people keep inventing, and I hope they catch what sits underneath it. People will call your confidence a flaw right up until your numbers make that impossible to say, and a good number of them will keep saying it anyway. So go on and produce. Take your space. Let them clutch their pearls.
Here sits the thing almost nobody will say plainly. The discomfort that Black women stir up by simply being certain of themselves was never ours to soothe, not then and not now. This queen seems to have grasped that at an age when plenty of us were still apologizing for taking up air. The cost of her self assurance is real, paid out in ugly headlines and lazy hot takes and the grinding labor of being misread on purpose. Yet the alternative, all that shrinking and softening and endless smoothing of our own beautiful edges, runs a far steeper bill. It costs you the whole of yourself.
That math she worked out early, and the rest of us are still carrying the receipts.
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.