So here is the part that should not require saying out loud. A grown woman can date whoever she pleases, full stop. Nobody owes an explanation for choosing joy. Besides, some of those same aunties clutching pearls over a younger man were cutting the Electric Slide at somebody’s second wedding last summer. Age gaps are not the crisis. Our community has bigger fish to fry than a birthday certificate.

What deserves real attention runs deeper than the math.

Cole has never hidden her scars. She grew up knowing what addiction could do to a family, and in 2021 it took her mother Frankie for good. Most stars would hand that kind of grief to a publicist and keep it moving, but she said the hard part out loud, more than once. That is why the talk around Skrilla sits heavy for some of us. The rapper has spoken openly about past drug use and the changes he has been trying to make in his life. In a January 2026 interview, he described being more sober than before and taking a more disciplined approach to his music. Give the man credit for being honest and making an effort to grow. His past deserves acknowledgment, but it would be unfair to assume those struggles define where he stands today. Personal growth takes work, and everybody deserves room to show they are doing it.

Two people can enter a relationship carrying painful histories, and healing is not what you automatically get. Sometimes love becomes a place where both people grow stronger. Other times, you get two people drowning in identical water, each convinced they are teaching the other to swim. That is a possibility worth understanding in any relationship, not a judgment about what Keyshia and Skrilla may have going on behind closed doors.

Before Skrilla, there was Hunxho, another young talent who was 24 when she went public with their relationship back in 2024. He is 27 now. Same age gap conversation, different chapter. Folks had jokes then too, and she blocked out the noise the way she always has. No shade to her taste whatsoever. The younger men she has dated are gifted and magnetic, but age alone cannot tell us whether somebody has done the work of growing up. That part shows in how a person treats you, handles responsibility, and carries himself when life stops being fun.

Much of her heart has played out on television and timelines for twenty years now, from the early reality days through every headline since. People watch a woman grow up on camera and start believing her business is theirs to run. The internet hands out that boldness for free. What gets lost in all that shouting is the only part that counts: whether she is happy away from the cameras, feels safe, and can still be herself.

Let me pull up a chair and talk to my Sistas for a minute, because we left the gossip about one singer a ways back.

Here is the truth we keep learning the hard way. Being somebody’s woman should never mean misplacing your own self in the process. You can be head over heels and still hold your line without apology. Caring about him does not mean you go blind to the warning signs waving in your face. Too many of us came up on that old story, the one that swears a good woman just fixes, waits, forgives, and takes whatever is handed to her. That belief has buried too many of our mothers and aunties in situations that drained them bone dry.

Black women give and give. We nurture, we defend, we build brothers up and then watch them stroll the finished product over to somebody new. Our capacity for devotion is a superpower and a snare, depending entirely on who holds the other end.

So the real question for Keyshia, and honestly for every one of us watching, is not whether the age gap matters. It is whether she stays whole, whatever the nature of her connection with Skrilla and wherever it might lead. If romance is part of the picture, does it add to her life or quietly subtract? When the cameras cut and the glow of the timeline fades, is there peace in her world? Does she feel supported and appreciated, or is she carrying burdens that should never have been hers to manage? Those are questions worth asking about love in general, not assumptions about what happens in her private life.

A relationship built on rescuing is not a relationship. It is a job with terrible benefits.

None of this means she belongs alone. Companionship at 45 is beautiful, and a confident sister choosing a vibrant mate can absolutely flourish when both arrive healthy. The concern here reaches beyond Keyshia herself. Skrilla has publicly discussed past substance use, while Cole knows firsthand what addiction can do to a family. Neither fact proves there is trouble between them, and his more recent comments about sobriety deserve to be taken seriously. Still, their experiences remind us that love cannot replace the personal responsibility healing requires. Two people can support each other through difficult seasons, but neither should have to carry the entire weight of the other’s recovery.

Real love tends to be quiet, if we are honest about it. It looks like somebody who keeps his word, shows up consistently, and has already done the work of growing up before entering your life. Anybody can bring fireworks. What almost nobody brings is steadiness, the slow dependable kind that keeps a heart safe long after the spark settles down.

Cole is moving at full speed these days, and that grind is a big reason folks pull for her the way they do. She records, tours, and commands a stage decades into a career that could have folded a dozen times over. You cannot fake that kind of staying power. My hope is that she pours a sliver of that same fire into guarding her own peace the way she guards her setlist.

Sistas, hear me good. Your companion can be fine, talented, and crazy about you, and the thing can still cost more than it hands back. Watch the patterns, not only the chemistry. A rescue project today will need rescuing tomorrow, and the day after, until your whole identity shrinks down to being his lifeguard.

Keyshia Cole owes us nothing in the way of a different choice. What she does owe herself is an honest one. If Skrilla is grounded, growing, and good to her, then God bless the both of them and let the haters stay salty. Nobody watching from the outside knows enough to declare otherwise. But should any woman find herself loving someone through serious personal struggles, she must remember that devotion has limits. Addiction, when it is present, requires more than promises and affection. Recovery belongs to the person doing the recovering, and no measure of loyalty can do that work for him. That particular fight is one nobody wins by caring harder.

Black women deserve people who meet them at their level, not projects dressed up as princes. We have earned the right to be chosen by somebody who takes responsibility for his own growth. Dating younger was never the sin. Disappearing into anybody, at any age, is the thing that quietly steals the shine from strong Black women who hand the world their best and forget to save a little for themselves.

Whatever unfolds next for Keyshia, I am pulling hard for the version of this story where she keeps her name, nerve, and self respect fully intact.

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.

Anika Noni Rose grew up inside that same squeeze. So she went and did something about it.

Most of us met her as Tiana, the voice of Disney’s first Black princess in that 2009 film The Princess and the Frog. Rose has a new picture book out now for the little ones, and what sits inside it could change how a child looks at the face staring out of the mirror. A Princess Is a Princess dropped on September 22, 2026, with art by Jess Gibson, and it passes down the kind of truth our mamas and grandmamas kept trying to tell us, each in her own way.

Now, saying all that is the easy part. Living it is a whole other animal.

The story keeps circling back to one plain thing. Royalty is an inside job. It is about how you feel when nobody is watching, and how you treat the people standing right in front of you. A fancy gown will not get you there. Neither will a tub of skin cream, or a flat iron, or folding your voice down to a whisper so nobody minds you taking up room. Rose’s message reaches girls of different backgrounds, skin tones, and abilities, reminding each one that she deserves to be celebrated. A girl gets to show up as the exact person she woke up being, chin high, and the crown is hers no matter what.

Picture a young one who keeps hearing, year after year, that her nose is too wide or her laugh too loud. She tucks it away somewhere quiet. And then she grows into one of those grown Sistas who still tense up when somebody raises a phone to take a picture. This book goes straight for that old bruise, gentle about it, but it goes. The actress is slipping the next generation a different script, and doing it early, before the wider world can get its hands on them.

What came before explains a lot about why the message hits harder coming from one of our own. Long before that recording booth for Tiana, there was a Tony, won for a Broadway turn in Caroline, or Change in 2004. Dreamgirls followed in 2006, holding the screen beside Beyoncé and Jennifer Hudson. A career was spent inside rooms not exactly built for faces like hers, and every part of the self stayed intact through all of it. When a sister who has actually walked that road looks at our babies and calls them royal just as they are, the words land with real weight.

What moves me most here, if I’m being honest, is how it flat out refuses the makeover. So many tales aimed at kids still smuggle in a sneaky lesson, the one whispering that you must fix yourself first and the applause will follow. Rose turns that whole thing over. Celebration is there from the beginning. The child hears she is gorgeous and worthy without having to earn it, not as some reward for correcting a flaw that was no flaw at all.

That kind of gift travels well past childhood, believe me. Black women know this ache in our bones. For generations, we’ve had to fight to accept ourselves. Even now, an entire industry gets rich telling us our skin and our coils need fixing. Something like this tilts the scale back the other way, even if only by a touch. Hand it to a four-year-old and you have planted a root that gets awfully difficult to pull up later.

So where is she these days, you might be wondering. Everywhere, basically.

Rest has not been on the agenda. Earlier in 2026, Rose returned to Broadway in Manhattan Theatre Club’s production of The Balusters, playing Kyra Marshall alongside a celebrated ensemble. Voice work has stayed on the calendar too, including her role as Marion in the animated series The Mighty Nein, which premiered in November 2025. Just days ago, on October 22, she returned to her hometown of Bloomfield, Connecticut, to celebrate her new book with children and families at CREC Ana Grace Academy of the Arts. She signed copies, spent time with young readers, and helped remind those children that their stories matter. The woman is clearly in motion, somehow still carving out space to write for the tiniest readers among us, which tells you precisely where the heart sits.

This latest release is really a second journey into children’s publishing. The debut, Tiana’s Perfect Plan, landed on October 22, 2024, and explored the quiet pressure our babies feel to be flawless. It also showed the freedom that comes with finally letting that burden go. A clear thread runs between the two. Both hand a small reader the permission to breathe out.

Here is the part that sits with me long after I close the cover. A whole generation of our daughters is coming up with this type of mirror waiting on the shelf, one that shows them back to themselves without a single edit. Girls with different skin tones, hairstyles, and abilities fill these pages, each celebrated just as she is. A young Black girl can find a brown face that looks an awful lot like the one across her own breakfast table, celebrated as beautiful and more than enough. Nobody asks that face to fix a single thing. Do not treat any of that as small. It is the slow undoing of a lie that so many of us had to unlearn the hard way, years and years too late, long after we should have been at home in our own skin.

Anika Noni Rose seems to have cracked the quiet secret, that the crown was never the actual point. The girl standing underneath it always was. If there is a young one anywhere in your life, or even a grown Sista who could stand to hear it, let this book find its way onto the nightstand. Read it out loud. Let her catch it in your voice, because yours was the very first that ever told her who she is.

We Sistas never needed anybody’s permission to be royalty. Somebody finally just wrote it down for the babies coming up behind us.

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.

A whole lot of people first clocked that young face back in the late 1990s, dropped into teen comedies and buddy cop flicks, tossing off lines with a half smile that already knew too much. Hollywood had a box ready. Narrow, specific, and not open for discussion. Pretty enough to be the love interest, light enough to be palatable, quiet enough to never make anybody at the studio nervous. The game ran on for a good while because that was the cost of admission. A lot of grown women did the very same thing in their own offices and family gatherings, swallowing the real answer so the room would stay comfortable.

What makes this story land so hard for grown sisters now is the turn Gabby took. Somewhere along the way, the shrinking stopped. Those memoirs cracked open the pretty picture and let the world see the grief underneath. The fertility struggles, the first marriage that fell apart, and the assault she survived as a teenager were painful truths she refused to bury in silence. Her writing explored surrogacy with aching honesty, naming the strange pull of watching another woman carry baby Kaavia. None of that was built to look flawless. All of it looked human instead, and somehow that truth became the most magnetic thing going.

These days the quiet parts get spoken out loud on purpose. In a January interview with PEOPLE magazine, Union described how menopause shook her sense of worth. As familiar markers began slipping away, she found herself questioning what she still brought to the table. The words were plain: the change forced a reckoning with everything absorbed about womanhood, and the far side of it arrived steadier than before. That is no small admission from somebody whose face has been studied under a magnifying glass for three decades. To name the fear instead of hiding it, then to tell you solid footing came anyway, is a gift to every one of the Sistas who assumed a shifting body meant the ride was finished.

Union’s relationship to her own skin tells the same story. When folks online decided the actress was too grown to post a bikini photo, no careful statement followed, and no season of silence either. Hit with the idea that fifty-something was past swimwear age, Gabby cracked that they could bury her in a two-piece. You cannot bottle that kind of ease. It only shows up after a person has sat through plenty of criticism and realized the haters were not going to clap no matter what, so you may as well please yourself.

The part I keep circling back to is a philosophy on boundaries that reframes self care as something with teeth. Blunt is the only word for it. Drawing firm lines and learning to say no can feel like turning back the clock. Too many of us run ourselves ragged, sacrifice our rest, and agree to every request because we fear being called selfish. Read that again slowly. Union is naming the exact trap so many of our mothers got raised inside, the one that whispers a woman’s value lives in how much gets poured out for everybody else. Gabby flipped it on its head. Protecting the peace became the whole point, not the apology.

That mindset shows up in how the circle gets trimmed too. Union has spoken about releasing toxic people and refusing to give everybody unlimited access to her time. A woman eventually learns that protecting her peace does not make her cruel. It makes her responsible for her own happiness. Anybody who has finally blocked a number they should have blocked years ago knows the lightness that follows. You quit performing for an audience that was only ever there to judge the show.

None of this suggests any drift into soft retirement. Far from it. The horror comedy Forbidden Fruits, released earlier this year, added another credit to a career that has stretched across television, film, and 30 years of Hollywood change. Then there is Flawless, the hair care line carrying the Union name, offering products for textured hair the beauty industry overlooked for years. Books also. Producing credits. A keynote stage every so often, where the talk turns to innovation and ownership. The woman stays busier as she approaches 54 than most folks half that age, and does it on terms nobody else set.

What I love most is that the freedom is not for show. There is no flawless gospel being sold here, no pitch about manifesting confidence and drinking more water. The version on offer here runs grittier and more honest. She admits the fear came first. Hollywood still leans in close, and the whispers about a face and its choices never quite die down. Doing the thing out loud anyway, that is the point. Chase the joy. Guard the peace. Quit the full time job of babysitting how strangers feel. Black women taking all of this in come away with something like a map, one that does not ask anybody to pretend the rough chapters got skipped.

So another birthday rolls around, and the lesson sitting under all the noise is small enough to tuck in a pocket. Approval from everybody was always going to be impossible, and chasing it quietly robbed us of the single life we actually get. Gabrielle Union figured that out in front of the cameras, on the record, with her whole chest. The grown woman at the center of it is more beautiful than the careful young actress ever was, partly because the years treated her well, though they clearly did, but mostly because the burden of being everyone’s idea of acceptable got handed right back.

That is the invitation, Sistas. Too many Black women got handed a script that pays out for staying small and quiet, and ripping it up is a kind of freedom nobody warns you about. Stop needing applause from folks who were never clapping anyway. Say the no that has been sitting in your throat since spring. Wear the swimsuit. Keep a few secrets. Black women who quit asking permission to take up room tend to age like Gabby does. They carry the confidence of finally belonging to themselves. That right there, more than any cream or filter on the shelf, is the glow the rest of us keep chasing.

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.

Here is what Coco Jones said back, cool as morning water. “I’m Black, and I’m proud.” Then she blew the woman a kiss and got back to work.

Five words and a kiss. That was the whole clapback.

I keep rewatching that footage, and what gets me is how little the heckler actually rattled her. Coco was outside the Tommy Hilfiger show, in her bag, doing her job. Some stranger tried to turn her skin into a punishment, and she just declined the offer. No lecture, no scene, no raised voice. She let the comment die right there on the pavement.

Let me tell you why this hit the way it did.

Dark-skinned girls grow up being measured against a ruler nobody asked for. We catch the comments early, from folks who look like us and folks who do not. Pretty for a dark-skinned girl. You would be gorgeous a shade or two lighter. Stay out the sun. Coco has spoken about this herself, how colorism was not something she picked up so much as something handed to her. The quiet lesson was that certain girls got the jobs and the praise while others waited in the wings. During a 2025 appearance on Sway in the Morning, Coco discussed those experiences and refused to accept the industry’s narrow standards of beauty. You could hear that same conviction in the sidewalk clip.

What struck me was the ease. She did not perform outrage for the camera. There was no breakdown, no venomous comeback, though heaven knows she had the right. Instead she gave the heckler exactly nothing to feed on, and handed the rest of us a master class.

Now I want to be careful here, because there is a trap in praising Black women for staying graceful under fire. We have been applauded for our composure so long that composure started to feel like a job requirement. Smile through it. Rise above. Be the bigger person. Sistas have carried that assignment since forever, and it is bone-tired work. So let me say it plain. Coco did not owe that woman a kiss. She did not owe anybody poise. What makes her response land is not that she suppressed herself. It is that she chose her own peace over a stranger’s chaos, and peace, when you pick it on purpose, is its own kind of power.

That distinction matters for every Black woman reading this. You are allowed to be unbothered because it suits you, not because the world expects you to swallow insults with a grin.

The angle I keep coming back to is simpler than the think pieces will make it. Black women’s beauty was never up for a vote. Somebody else’s prejudice tells you about their small heart, their bad home training, and their need to shrink a stranger just to stand tall for a second. It is not a verdict on us. Coco understood that in real time, which is harder than it sounds when the venom is aimed at your actual face on a public street.

And can we talk about the timing, because this is a sister in full bloom. Coco Jones is not some hopeful waiting for a seat at the table. A Grammy win for “ICU” already proved she belonged there. Her debut album, Why Not More?, arrived in 2025 and debuted in the top ten of Billboard’s Top R&B Albums chart. An expanded edition brought an Alicia Keys collaboration that had folks hollering. Sold-out crowds across the States and Europe showed up for the tour, and this past summer, “Body So Tea” reminded everybody her voice is a whole event. Over on the acting side, Coco appeared in Malcolm D. Lee’s thriller Strung for Peacock and finished her run as Hilary Banks on Bel-Air. The romantic comedy That’s Her added another milestone, with a starring role and an executive producer credit. Earlier in the year, the whole country heard her sing “Lift Every Voice and Sing” during the Super Bowl pregame ceremony.

So picture it. A heckler tried to make a dark-skinned woman feel small during a season when Coco is everywhere, winning. She’s newly married and building the kind of career most people only daydream about. The nerve. Imagine being that pressed over a sister who was minding her business and looking good while she did it.

None of this is new, by the way. Our mothers and grandmothers were telling us the same thing with a look across the kitchen before we had the words for it. Your worth is not up for debate with somebody who already decided to miss it. So keep your eyes on your own plate. Finish the shoot, pack up the lights, move to the next corner, and let that woman holler at the spot where you used to be standing.

I think often about the young ones who will see that clip. The babies already learning to resent their reflection because somebody in the cafeteria made a joke about their color. I hope they watch her and clock what confidence actually looks like. It is quiet. There is no reaching for the last word. It just keeps glowing while the hater runs clean out of breath.

Black women have always been the standard, long before the industry started catching up and calling our features a trend. Coco Jones just reminded a whole timeline of that truth, on a loud New York corner, with a kiss and five little words. She never shrank. Neither should you. And to every sista who needed to hear it today, your face was never the problem. Their eyes were.

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.

Tiffany is 46 now, and by any scoreboard the woman is winning. Grammy on the shelf. An Emmy earned in 2018 for that Saturday Night Live hosting gig the year before, which happened to be the same year Girls Trip blew her up into somebody your mama knew by name. These days, fall of 2026, she is still performing stand-up shows around the country. Her Peacock series, Tiffany Haddish Goes Off, is available to stream, following the month she spent traveling through Africa with three of her closest girls. There is also talk of a Girls Trip sequel, though the project remains in development. The calendar is stuffed.

Thing is, the jokes did not start as a paycheck. They started as a way to stay alive. Go back far enough and you find a kid in South Central whose mama got into a terrible car wreck that left her with permanent brain damage. Tiffany was barely nine, suddenly the oldest acting like the adult, helping look after four younger brothers and sisters. Foster care came at thirteen. Three foster homes and two group homes followed before her grandmother took her in. Some of those experiences left wounds that would take years to understand. Then picture that same child reaching ninth grade while struggling to read, doing everything she could to keep her classmates from finding out. Heavy is not a strong enough word for it.

Somewhere in there a counselor gave her a fork in the road: therapy, or the comedy camp over at the Laugh Factory. Guess what a wounded teenager chose. For Tiffany, that comedy camp opened a door she desperately needed. A good joke worked like armor back then. Get the bullies cracking up and, just like that, they are not aiming at you anymore. For a minute, nobody can touch the scared girl underneath. That is how making people howl stopped being about showing off and turned into a way of getting through the day in one piece.

Which brings me to the whole point, and it is something a lot of Black women are going to feel right in the chest. Funny and happy do not always travel together. Not even close, some days. A sister can be out here giving away joy by the armful and still drive home with something sitting heavy that nobody at the cookout ever noticed. We get raised on it, plenty of us. Keep it together. Crack the joke at the repast so your auntie can finally exhale. Hold the whole crew up and swallow the question of who exactly is holding you.

That job wears on a body, and Tiffany has not hidden what some of those experiences cost her. She has said a police cadet raped her when she was seventeen, just one more thing piled on a stack that was already too tall. Still the world wants its comic queen switched on, ready with a quote, never off the clock. Think about that for a second. You walk out there to send a room home grinning on the exact night your own insides feel like wet cement. Nobody in those seats has a clue. That is sort of the cruel genius of the whole thing, because they are not supposed to.

Back in 2017 she put a heavy chunk of all this down on paper in her book, The Last Black Unicorn. That title alone says plenty about how isolated the girl felt coming up, like the mold got broken and nobody else came out matching her. Here is the part that gets me though. Tiffany never climbed out of that pain without a scratch, and she has never once claimed otherwise. What she pulled off was sneakier than that. The woman took her ugliest years and chopped them into jokes that could patch up a stranger’s whole day while they sat there doubled over wheezing. For sisters who recognize pieces of their own childhood in those pages, her memoir can feel deeply personal. It is like somebody finally said out loud what they had kept to themselves their entire lives.

There is something worth sitting with here that has not one thing to do with Hollywood. Comedy can be a present and a disguise wrapped in the same box. Most Black women reading this already have somebody in mind. Maybe it is an auntie, a coworker, or the first lady at church who keeps the whole function rolling. Yet she cannot remember the last time a living soul asked how she was really doing. We figure the clowns are fine. Lean on them without blinking. Then we act all shocked when one of them finally buckles.

Give Tiffany her flowers though, because the woman appears to be writing a different kind of chapter for herself. She has spoken about her faith, about counseling, and about learning to protect a little peace she can call hers. Turned into a real advocate too for foster kids, supporting young people facing struggles she remembers from her own childhood. Black women do not always get told it is alright to come apart, so hearing one speak openly about her painful experiences can feel like getting handed a permission slip. Her past is part of her story, but it does not have to be the whole story. Nobody outside her circle knows exactly how she feels behind closed doors. What we can see is a woman using her voice for more than punch lines, and maybe that is worth celebrating all by itself.

So here is where I leave you. Next time that big cackle comes busting out of your TV, go on and enjoy it, just let a second thought ride shotgun. There is a real human being back there who figured out how to be funny so the grief would not pull her all the way under. Sistas, take that as your assignment. Go check on the comedian in your own circle. Actually ask the entertainer how she is holding up, then get quiet and let her answer. Making everybody else happy is a gift and a calling. And making sure that person gets her own turn at happy, that part is on the rest of us.

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.

Let me catch anybody up who got here late. Since her 1990 breakthrough, Mariah Carey has written or co-written eighteen of her nineteen Billboard Hot 100 number-one hits. Not just sang them. Helped create them. The Long Island kid grew into one of the most accomplished songwriters this country has produced, and I say that with paperwork behind me, not fandom. When “Vision of Love” introduced her that first year, most ears caught the acrobatics and missed the architecture underneath. She co-wrote that song with Ben Margulies, shaping a melody and vocal arrangement that announced something special. The phrasing, the way the song builds, the way a bridge lifts you right when your chest needs it. All of it revealed a young woman who understood how to make a record reach people.

Sit with that picture a minute. A girl barely out of high school walks into boardrooms stacked with seasoned men in an industry that often preferred to package young women rather than recognize their creative authority. Yet she arrives with songwriting credits already attached to her work and a clear idea of how she wants her music to sound. Her debut single was produced by Rhett Lawrence, with additional production by Narada Michael Walden, but Carey’s writing was part of the foundation from the beginning. Over time, she would take an increasingly active role in producing her records as well. For a young artist in a business built on other people’s ownership, having that creative voice mattered.

This is where the songwriting deserves its flowers. Take “Hero.” Underneath all the vocal gymnastics sits a flat, plainspoken pep talk about finding your own backbone, the sort of thing an auntie tells you while you are falling apart. “We Belong Together” gets at something trickier. The words move the way heartbreak really moves, circling around memories, songs playing on the radio, and the painful realization of what has been lost. Specifics are the whole difference between somebody who sings and somebody who writes, and Carey loads her best records with them. Think of it as a diary slipped inside a radio single. More than twenty years later, people still turn to those cuts for comfort, celebration, and remembrance. That tells you plenty about what she was really making.

Then comes her ear for where the culture was heading. Back in 1995, the remix of “Fantasy” paired that honeyed hook with Ol’ Dirty Bastard, and the gatekeepers clutched their pearls. She pushed anyway. The collaboration helped establish a blueprint for the marriage of hip-hop and pop melody that we now treat as a regular part of popular music. Plenty of stars topping charts today, the ones who sing sweet over a hard drum and drop a rapper into verse two, are walking a road she helped pave. Praise rarely travels backward to the architect, though, especially when the architect happens to be a Sista.

Listen to what younger artists keep saying about the singers who shaped them. Ariana Grande has openly acknowledged Mariah Carey as a major influence, and you can hear echoes of that approach across generations of pop and R&B performers. Those careful runs, layered harmonies, and moments when a soft phrase suddenly opens into something enormous do not happen by accident. Study the phrasing on a tender slow jam and you will hear her fingerprints pressed into the top line. Younger Sistas study those techniques, practice them, and build their own sounds from what they have learned. That is part of how R&B keeps growing. Call it what it is. Black women keep getting waved off as just naturally gifted, when the truer story is hard, deliberate labor, the kind you grind at until it changes what the genre sounds like.

Now stack the mogul brain on top, because this is the piece that stays buried. “The Emancipation of Mimi” was no cute title. Mimi chose that word deliberately after reclaiming a stronger sense of creative freedom following a brutal public stretch, and the project became one of the defining comebacks the charts have ever seen. She understood the importance of songwriting credits, publishing rights, and having a meaningful say in the music released under her name. That does not mean she owned every master recording in her catalog. Her songwriting gave her a financial and creative stake beyond performing somebody else’s material. Our Sistas in this business have been shorted for generations, their work lifted and their checks clipped, so an artist who fought for greater creative control and recognition belongs in business school case studies, not just karaoke bars.

In 2022 the Songwriters Hall of Fame finally put it in writing, bringing her in alongside the Neptunes and the Isley Brothers. Understand what that room is. It honors the pen, not merely the performance, and its membership represents a select company of writers whose compositions have left a lasting mark on music. Carey entered that room with eighteen self-written or co-written number-one singles already to her credit. That is a remarkable achievement by any standard. The honor put an official stamp on something her songwriting credits had been saying for decades. An elite writer had been tucked inside that famous throat the whole time.

Which brings us to the present, because the lady has not slowed down one bit. In September 2025 she dropped her sixteenth studio album, “Here For It All,” her first since 2018’s “Caution.” This past July she released an expanded anniversary edition of “Daydream,” packed with previously unreleased material, live performances, and remixes. Additional physical editions arrived in October. On October 30 she marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of “Glitter” with a deluxe reissue, reclaiming an era the press once mocked her over. Come winter she carries her holiday spectacle to UK arenas, with Birmingham on November 27, London on November 30, and Manchester on December 2. She has even hinted that more music could arrive in 2027, although no official release date has been announced. Rest, apparently, is nowhere on the agenda.

I need the young folks reading this to catch the real lesson underneath. Black women are not the scenery in American music. We write the songs, we run the sessions, we sign the checks and sketch the blueprint everybody after us borrows from. So when a culture hollers about the bodies of Black women and goes mute on their minds, it is telling you flat out what it actually values. Clapping for the high notes is fine, pretty even. That part is only the paint, though. Under it sits a mind that built a catalog, fought for what it was worth, and helped drag a whole industry around to her own taste.

So this December, when a certain holiday record comes on and your cousin starts carrying on about the big note, go ahead and cut in. Tell them she co-wrote that. Add that she co-produced it with Walter Afanasieff, too. The real gift was never just the sound. It was a woman thinking three or four moves ahead, helping create something that would still be standing once the tinsel came down. Anybody can entertain a room for a night. Mimi helped build something that has lasted for generations, and her name is written all over it.

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.

On October 22, 2025, inside the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center, she took her final bow with American Ballet Theatre. Golden glitter rained down over her. Oprah Winfrey rose to speak. Debbie Allen did too. At forty-three, after twenty-five years with the company, this ballerina chose that night to close the chapter on the institution that made her a household name. “It’s been 25 years at ABT, and I think it’s time,” she had told the Associated Press that summer. She had already made peace with her decision. No tremble, no apology.

Let me ask my Sistas to sit with something for a minute. Most of what we hear, from the time we are girls, tells a grown sister to keep holding on. Hold the title. Keep the paycheck, the applause, the name they call you when they walk you up to the microphone at the banquet. Leaving gets painted as losing. Step off and folks figure you ran out of gas, or that the young ones finally caught you. So it rattles a room when a sister at the top of her craft looks around and says, “I’m done with this chapter.” And means it. That kind of honesty takes more courage than most people realize.

Think about where she started. A little girl who found the barre at thirteen, which in that unforgiving world is practically ancient. Raised without much money, sleeping some nights in a motel room with her siblings, she climbed anyway. In June 2015, she became the first African American woman promoted to principal dancer in American Ballet Theatre’s seventy-five-year history. Just days earlier, she had danced the lead in Swan Lake before a packed, gloriously mixed audience. That promotion reached past the personal. For Black women who had been told, in a thousand small ways, that certain rooms were not built for us, her presence under those lights rewrote the blueprint.

And yet the thing I keep turning over is not the climbing. It is the letting go.

Because walking away from a celebrated life is not surrender. Hear me clearly on that. Surrender is quitting something you still believe in because the fight got too hard. Copeland did the opposite of quit. For twenty-five years, she poured herself into American Ballet Theatre. Leaving the company did not mean abandoning her love of dance. The applause was never what made her somebody. A woman who understands that no longer needs the crowd to remind her of her worth.

Some people call that maturity. Maybe. What I can tell you is this cannot be rushed and cannot be bought. It tends to arrive the day you stop sizing yourself up by the one thing that made your name and start wondering what else life might have waiting for you.

So what does a life look like nearly a year after a woman takes her final bow with the company that helped make her name?

For her, busier than you’d guess. The former American Ballet Theatre star, now forty-four, has been recovering from a hip replacement, and she does not pretty up the changes her body has been through. In interviews, Copeland has spoken openly about perimenopause. Aches, brain fog, and shifting rhythms are things many of us discuss only with our closest girlfriends, if we bring them up at all. Candor like that is a real gift for Black women, so many of us raised to look unbothered while our bodies are changing in ways we barely understand. And anybody who assumed her retirement meant she would never dance again got a surprise in March. Copeland appeared on the Academy Awards stage during a musical tribute to Sinners, wearing a historic Firebird costume and moving before millions of viewers. She was still dancing, only now on terms that looked different from the demands of a full ballet company schedule. That is a different kind of freedom.

The foundation she established back in 2021 keeps widening its reach. Its flagship afterschool program, BE BOLD, now operates at twenty-two sites across Harlem and the Bronx, bringing free ballet lessons to hundreds of children who might otherwise never have that opportunity. For a whole generation of Black women who remember looking for themselves in the world of classical dance, that kind of access is long, long overdue. Alongside the original program, she developed BE BOLD Next Steps, helping promising young dancers pursue more serious training, plus BE BOLDER, a wellness offering built for folks fifty and up. That alone tells you she understands something important about who gets to move and who gets invited into the room.

This spring the organization held its first major benefit to support its work. Beyond all of it, Copeland served on the host committee for the 2026 Met Gala and sits on the boards of Lincoln Center and The Shed. In October, she was elected a Civic Trustee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, another seat at a table where important decisions get made. And on October 19, she received the Michael Kors Award for Inspiring Philanthropy at the Golden Heart Awards. Think about that, Sistas. A woman once celebrated for what she could do under a spotlight is now being honored for what she helps other people accomplish. The stage has changed, but the impact keeps growing.

Then there are the books. Her children’s series continued last year with Bunheads, Act 2: The Dance of Courage, a story about friendship, disappointment, and finding the nerve to keep moving when plans fall apart. In August, she released Firebird Waltz, the first novel in her Star Fire Academy fantasy series, opening another imaginative world for young readers. Through those pages, she keeps returning to an idea worth carrying into our own lives. Joy, not perfection, ought to have a place in whatever we choose to become. Read that again, Sistas. Joy over perfection. That is grown woman wisdom, hard won and worth repeating.

A lot of us carry a quiet terror about this exact moment in our own stories. The job that defined us. That role everybody praises us for. An identity we have carried so long we forgot we were carrying it. Who would I even be without this? That one question has kept more than one of us stuck in the same chair for years, doing work that quit fitting ages ago.

Misty hands us another way to see it. An ending chosen on purpose is not a loss. It is a door. Today, she is raising her son Jackson and building programs that open doors for others. Copeland also speaks plainly about the changes a woman’s body goes through. And yes, she’s still the barrier breaker who changed the face of an entire art form. A return to the stage can happen on her own terms, without the demands of a full ballet company schedule. None of that requires her to keep proving she belongs in a place where she already made history. Loving something deeply does not mean you must hold on to it in exactly the same way forever.

Starting over takes its own brand of guts. If you have ever lain awake asking whether you missed your window, whether the next thing is silly at your age or just more than you can carry, look at this woman and take some of that nerve for yourself. You get to shut one book and crack open the next. Nobody has to sign off on that but you.

A last bow, done right, does not have to close everything. Copeland stepped into the light of everything she had accomplished, gave the crowd its due, and walked toward the next chapter of her story. Nearly a year later, that story is still unfolding. New stages and responsibilities have opened up, along with opportunities to change lives through the work she continues to build. Copeland just showed the rest of us how it looks. The applause was never what made us worthy. Our worth remains long after the cheering fades.

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.

Most of us met her as Gina, the glamorous, quick-mouthed woman on Martin, back when the nineties felt like they belonged to us. Then came Jay on My Wife and Kids, plus House Party, School Daze, and Little Shop of Horrors, a body of work so deep that younger folks keep stumbling onto it like she arrived yesterday. That’s more than five decades in show business, believe it or not. She started performing as a little girl. You would think a résumé that full earns somebody the right to sit down. Resting was never really her thing.

Comedy from a cold start was not on the agenda. By her own account, she had never done stand-up before taking that leap in 2025. A lifetime around the funniest people in the business, including Martin Lawrence and Damon Wayans, gave her a front-row seat to how comedy works. Building an act of her own was the part she had always avoided. Standing in front of a paying crowd with nothing but a mic is a different animal entirely. Everybody is waiting to see if the funny lady from TV can actually hang. Tisha took that leap anyway. She joined comedian Finesse Mitchell for the “Dayum Gina” tour, taking her jokes and personal stories to audiences around the country. A performer who spent decades making folks laugh through a screen wanted, finally, to feel the room laughing back.

Understand how bold that is. Think about what it actually costs. There is no script to hide behind, and nobody in the next chair to bail you out when a joke dies on the floor. Half the room already knows your face, which is no help at all. It just means more folks get to watch if the whole thing goes south. Campbell did it anyway. That willingness to be new at something, to risk looking foolish at an age when ego usually hardens, is the entire ballgame.

Here is what I love about the timing. This season of boldness arrived alongside some of the most vulnerable work of her long career. Her first book arrived in September 2026, titled The A Word: A Mother’s Journey Through Autism and Love, and Tisha wrote it herself, without a ghostwriter carrying the load. It tells the story of raising her son, Xen, who is autistic, and she does not shy away from the difficulties her family faced. Rough stretches share the same page as the laughter, which is how it goes in any home doing this for real. Behind the gloss she wore on all those sets, a mama was navigating challenges the crowd never saw. Now those experiences live on the page, and the rest of us get to understand a little more of her journey.

You see the same heart in the company she keeps and the fights she takes on. Colored My Mind came together years ago when she and four other mothers raising children on the autism spectrum decided the silence needed breaking, well ahead of the culture catching up. Their work helped bring attention to families whose experiences were too often overlooked. The actress has also lent her voice to supporting women healing from domestic abuse. Advocacy, for her, is not a press release. It is stitched into how she moves.

Acting has not slowed, either. The Newark-raised actress appeared alongside Ethan Hawke and Keith David in the 2025 series The Lowdown and guest-starred on The Ms. Pat Show in 2026. From 2018 through 2021, she also co-hosted and co-produced the Soul Train Awards alongside her forever sister Tichina Arnold. Her move into stand-up added another dimension to a career already filled with memorable performances. So the comedy clubs are only one room in a house she keeps adding onto. At 58, she is still sketching what the next chapter can look like, refusing to let anybody else hold the pencil.

Let me pull up a chair with my Sistas for a second, because this runs deeper than one famous name. Somewhere down the line, plenty of us started believing the clock runs out on us around forty. The message to Black women is usually some version of sit down, be grateful for what you already have, and let the young ones take their turn. Tisha Campbell keeps answering that noise with her whole life.

What her stand-up journey really preaches is permission. Nobody hands it to you, not a boss, not a network. You grant it to yourself. Being new at something at this age makes your stomach flip, and that never fully quits, so you go ahead and do the thing scared. Plenty of grown folks are sitting on a dream they shelved years ago, convinced they missed their shot. Who told you that, though?

None of this needs a stage or a spotlight. One Sista finally goes back for the degree she left behind. Another digs out a business plan that’s been sitting in a notebook for years. Somebody else picks up the paintbrush she put down when the kids came. Then there’s the woman who finally finds the nerve to say no to a life that no longer fits. Black women have been turning nothing into something since forever. We come from women who stretched a little into enough, every single time. That gift is already ours, Sistas, and no birthday takes it off the table.

Starting fresh in a body that has already given this much is its own kind of brave. The knees complain. Your patience isn’t quite what it used to be. None of that means the dream expired. A woman can be deep into her fifties and still have the best work waiting out ahead, not behind.

So take the comedy for what it really is. The applause is not the point. What she is doing up there is refusing to get smaller just because the world expects a woman her age to. She is choosing to take up more space, out loud, where everybody can see. Fifty-eight looks like reinvention on her. It can look like whatever you name it on you.

Pick up the mic, Sista. Whatever your age, it is not a closing door. The room is waiting, and the only wrong move is believing the best of you already happened.

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.

This past September, Vanity Fair confirmed the news: Knowles is fronting the creative relaunch of St. John, the American luxury house born in California during the 1960s. A first solo fashion campaign. Finally. It arrives after a career spent turning Destiny’s Child into style icons and building House of Deréon. She also designed the gown Beyoncé wore to the Oscars in 2009 and contributed costume designs to films such as Dreamgirls and Cadillac Records. The industry took its sweet time honoring what this designer created with two hands and a sewing machine. Mama Tina strolled through the door regardless, chin lifted, lipstick fresh.

Let all of that settle for a minute, Sistas. A grandmother many times over, the type who could easily spend the golden season posted on somebody’s porch sipping sweet tea, instead chose to begin again. Not out of anything left to prove. Rather, because that fire still had somewhere to burn.

The culture sold us a tired lie about getting older, and plenty of us with a few decades under our belts bought it on credit. This lie goes like so: the spotlight belongs to the young, ambition keeps a shelf life, and the main assignment after a certain birthday is to get quiet and clear the lane for whoever comes next. Tell that to a 72-year-old matriarch dressed in luxury fashion for a national campaign. This grandmother is out here proving the expiration date was somebody else’s invention, stamped on us without our consent.

Confidence like that does not fall from the sky. It gets built slowly, across seasons of being underestimated and plain overlooked. This designer knew the value of the work long before any magazine cosigned it. She dressed superstars while raising daughters, swallowed disappointments the public never witnessed, and kept the bar sky high while a room assumed the only title that fit was somebody’s mother. Years of hearing “no” can either break a grown spirit or build a backbone of steel, and we all know which outcome won out. That certainty, earned in private, resembles freedom now that it has gone public.

Make no mistake, our girl stays busy. Cécred, the hair brand built with daughter Beyoncé, keeps the business mind sharp. The memoir “Matriarch,” released in 2025, let readers into the private and public battles behind the glamour, from a hard marriage to health scares to the slow rebuilding of a shaken spirit. She even brought her famous Creole gumbo to the Houston Rodeo in 2026, proving the Texas child inside the icon still knows how to make folks feel at home. This elder is not coasting on a legacy. The point now is to keep adding to one, which is its own brand of independence, the stubborn refusal to be done.

Now I know what a few of you are thinking. That is Beyoncé’s mother, with money and access most never touch, so of course the doors swing open. Fair enough. The principle still holds for the rest of us who clock in at regular jobs and come home tired. Reinvention does not demand a famous last name or a stylist on call. It asks for one honest decision, made on an ordinary Tuesday, that the person you are becoming matters more than the comfort of who you have been. Some of our boldest second acts happen far from any camera, in night classes and small business loans and first dates at 55.

Here is what your girl wants every sister in the thick of middle age to truly hear. Your second act does not require anybody’s permission slip. Maybe you put a dream on layaway to raise the kids or cover a mortgage. Could be you stuck it out at a job that paid fine and starved the part of you wanting more all the while. Point is, whatever got shelved can still come back down. Knowles waited until the back half of life for a spotlight that should have arrived decades sooner, then accepted it with zero apology.

Black women rarely get the opportunity to enjoy a glamorous new chapter later in life. Our mothers and grandmothers worked themselves weary so the generation behind them could climb, often vanishing into the background of their own remarkable stories. Watching one of our own celebrated and photographed as the treasure she has always been does something medicinal for everybody paying attention. Representation stops being a buzzword once you have spent decades feeling invisible. It becomes oxygen.

Fashion in particular has a cruel habit of treating maturity as a flaw to airbrush away. Runways chase teenagers while the aunties who actually buy the clothes get ignored at the register. For a label like St. John to center a 72-year-old face is not charity, understand. It is good sense finally catching up with an audience that has been loyal and spending all along. Black women deserve to see themselves on those glossy pages too, not only in the photo albums.

So what are you waiting on, Sistas? Maybe it’s a business plan gathering dust in a drawer. Perhaps it’s that classroom you keep meaning to walk into or a dream you talk yourself out of every January. That kind of list does not expire when the gray shows up at your temples. Nobody is coming to hand you the second chance, so quit standing by the door and go get it. The truth is the years behind you are not baggage. They are receipts, proof you can walk in and ask for exactly what you are owed. Call it wisdom if the word suits you. Mostly it is just knowing better, and knowing better is the quiet superpower nobody tells you comes with age.

Back in 2001, those unforgettable Grammy outfits were not the peak, and House of Deréon was not the finish line either. The climbing never stopped, season after season. This fall brings another milestone: a St. John campaign reminding the world that style does not clock out at a certain age. Take that and run with it, baby. Our best chances are not sitting behind us gathering memories. Some of them have not even shown up yet, waiting on the precise moment we decide we are worth getting dressed for. One matriarch just demonstrated how it is done. Now go on and be magnificent.

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.

Plenty of outlets ran it as a reunion story, two old friends grinning for the cameras, cue the nostalgia. They missed the whole thing. What happened on that church campus had little to do with who used to sing beside whom. It had everything to do with what a woman owes the place that first believed in her.

Some history matters here. The building at the center of all this opened in 1999 as the Knowles-Rowland Center for Youth, a gymnasium and gathering space funded in part by earnings from “No, No, No,” the debut single that put Destiny’s Child on the map in 1997. With support from the Knowles family, two teenage girls from Houston helped turn their first taste of success into a safe place for neighborhood kids to run and play. Then Harvey came through in 2017 and battered it, and a fire in 2021 finished what the storm started. Pastors Rudy and Juanita Rasmus and their people at Bread of Life, the nonprofit connected to St. John’s Downtown Church, refused to let that history disappear. Working with community and financial partners, they began asking what the damaged building could still become.

Soon it will hold people. Folks with names, with whole histories, who have spent years without a steady place to lay their heads. Residents are scheduled to begin moving in on November 1, giving them something that too many people take for granted. They will have a permanent address, a door that locks, and the comfort of knowing where they will sleep each night. That is the detail that ought to sit heavy on anybody who understands what a neighborhood can mean to the people who call it home.

You learn plenty about a person from a choice like this one. She could’ve stayed away and let her name on the building speak for itself. Instead she showed up, got on that stage, and stood beside a project whose work will continue long after everybody else has moved on. Through Temenos Community Development Corporation, residents will have access to mental health counseling, substance use treatment, and life skills training, the kind of steady support that helps a person stay housed and not just sheltered for a night. Writing a check is one thing. Lending your name and presence to a cause that serves people long after the cameras leave is another kind of commitment.

This is the part that stays with me. A whole lot of Black women fight their way up out of nothing, finally build something solid, and then two voices start arguing in their heads. One says guard what you earned, you bled for it. The other reminds them that none of it was ever meant to stop with you. Kelendria’s return to Houston speaks to that second voice, and her old city is richer for the connection she helped establish years ago.

We don’t talk enough about this responsibility. Sistas who make it tend to carry the names of entire blocks on their backs, whether they asked for that weight or not. Little cousins watching. Church mothers praying. The corner store owner who extended you credit when your mama was short on cash. She could have let Los Angeles or New York claim her completely. One foot stayed planted firmly in Texas soil instead, and that connection ripples outward in ways a microphone never could.

What strikes me is how unglamorous the actual work tends to be. Permanent supportive housing is not a flashy cause. It rarely gets the attention that celebrity appearances do. There are no viral moments in the years it takes to secure financing, coordinate construction, and turn a damaged building into homes. Harris County committed roughly $7.2 million in pandemic recovery funds toward the redevelopment, while Bread of Life and its public and private partners worked to bring the project to completion. That is slow, bureaucratic, unsexy labor. Her presence brought a personal connection to years of work led by Bread of Life and its community partners. Kelly continued connection to the place where the original center began reminds people that community investment can outlast the first celebration.

Speaking of the artist herself, she is not sitting still these days. Earlier this year Kelly appeared on Prime Video in “Relationship Goals,” a romantic comedy opposite Method Man that she also helped produce. Across the Atlantic, British viewers are getting to know her as a coach on The Voice UK, a role she will continue when the next series arrives in 2027. At 45, the singer is more creatively adventurous than performers half her age.

None of that professional momentum pulled her away from the celebration. Think about that for a second. Somebody balancing acting, producing, and a coaching chair on British television still made her way home for a housing opening tied to her own history. She had plenty of other places she could have been, yet Houston was where she chose to stand that day. Priorities reveal themselves in moments like that, especially when the occasion offers something more meaningful than another red carpet.

The deeper lesson here belongs to every woman reading who grew up somewhere the world wrote off. Your old block does not need you to be perfect or to have all the answers. It needs you to come back, stay connected to the people who remember you, show up at community meetings, and put your resources toward problems that existed long before your success. Black women have always held communities together through prayer, casseroles, and sheer stubbornness. Now the Sistas with means have a chance to turn that same commitment into brick and mortar.

Beyoncé brought her daughters, Blue Ivy and Rumi, into the ribbon-cutting celebration, and the symbolism was not subtle. With Tina Knowles standing alongside them, three generations of one family gathered to witness what community investment can become. Young Rumi even helped cut the ribbon, taking part in a moment that connected her family’s past to somebody else’s future. That is how a real inheritance survives. Not simply through records sold or trophies collected, though Beyoncé has plenty of both, but through what you build for people who may never know your face.

So here is the question I want to leave sitting with us, the one I keep turning over as I watch famous daughters return to the cities that made them. What are the rest of us doing for the ones coming up behind? Not the celebrities. Us. The teachers and nurses and barbers and aunties with a little saved up.

Kelendria helped plant the seeds of something that has grown into 31 front doors, each one offering somebody a chance at a better life. Beyoncé has spent decades supporting the same city that helped shape her, through disaster relief, charitable giving, and other community efforts. Mother Tina raised children who understood the assignment and grandbabies who are learning it now.

The next generation is watching every one of us. What they end up seeing is still ours to decide.

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.