On Amy Poehler’s podcast over the summer, she put it without flinching. The crying happens alone and on purpose, not to recover after some collapse but as upkeep. Holding room for the tears is the point, a way to carry off stored sadness, some of it fresh and some going back years. A release. Then it was right back to the regularly scheduled madness.

Chaos is the honest word for that calendar. Keke is 32 and moving like the rent is overdue. During 2026 alone she hosted the Billboard Women in Music Awards, starred in I Love Boosters, which premiered at South by Southwest, kept a podcast rolling, and grew her sketch character Lady Miss Jacqueline into a full audio project. The ’Burbs has been renewed for a second season, with filming expected to resume in the fall, and there is a young son at home. Looking at that, you would never picture a person who schedules a real cry. Which is the whole point.

Most of us grew up on the opposite lesson. You keep moving no matter what lands on you, and if the tears come, you let them fall in the shower where the water covers for you. My Aunt Gloria buried a husband on a Saturday and taught Sunday school the next morning like the world had not cracked open, and got nothing but praise for it. That steel had roots I respect. Black women built a way of living out of not flinching, through years that would have folded anyone with softer landings. My problem is not the armor. It is that the stuff fuses to your skin, and one day you cannot recall the last time it came off.

The applause is the sneaky part. Get told enough times that you are the strong one and it becomes an assignment nobody remembers handing you. People quit checking on you because your fine is assumed. Before long you are the family backup plan, the one they call when the lights are about to get cut, while your own needs sit at the bottom of a list you never reach.

What Palmer does cuts against all of that. Rather than wait for the ache to announce itself, she goes looking, in a room set aside for the purpose, and lets it out before it sours into something meaner. Anybody who has ignored a slow leak under the sink knows how that story ends, with a warped cabinet and a bill nobody planned for. Tears read as coming apart to a lot of folks. To me it looks like a woman keeping her own house from rotting underneath.

There is a difference between the toughness that will not bend and the kind that knows how to set the load down at night. The first photographs beautifully. It also wears the body out on the inside while everybody claps. My mama’s generation ran on it because the times left no other choice, and plenty paid the bill in high blood pressure and swallowed words. The other kind is not weaker. It just intends to last.

Rest belongs in the same conversation. So does the word no, which some of us can barely push past our teeth, and getting up from a table where you are always refilling plates and never the one being served. Sistas learn to hear those choices as selfish, like minding yourself betrays the people leaning on you. Palmer even talked about picturing a cord to a draining relationship and cutting it over and over until it quit growing back. Call it cold if you want. That reads to me as a grown woman guarding her peace.

I came to this late. For years I picked up every call on the first ring and drove clear across town for people who would not have crossed the street for me, wearing the tiredness as proof that I mattered. The first time I let a phone buzz itself quiet and stayed put with my book, the guilt sat on me for the better part of a week. What followed the guilt was something a lot closer to relief.

None of it shrinks you. Weeping does not undo the years you held the line, and a nap does not erase the miles already behind you. A well that goes unrefilled runs dry, and then the whole household goes thirsty, you first in line.

What gets me is the timing. This is landing at the height of everything, not as a lesson pulled out of some low season. Younger Black women watching can absorb something their elders mostly learned the hard way, when they got to learn it at all. You are allowed to feel the thing. Coming apart in private and putting yourself back together takes nothing away from you.

I keep thinking about the Sista reading this who cannot recall her last real exhale, the one everybody assumes is good because she always is. Good is a costume, and it gets heavier the longer you keep it zipped. Nobody is handing out a ribbon for suffering the quietest.

Keke decided her tears rated a spot on the calendar, same as a meeting or a workout. If a sister moving at that pace can stop long enough to feel her life, the rest of us can find ten minutes. Holding it all together was never the whole assignment. Setting it down without calling yourself a failure, that is the part most of us are still working on.

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.

Kamala Harris knows this silence now. Stood on the biggest stage this nation offers, reached for the highest seat in the land, came up short in front of the entire planet. Cameras everywhere. Millions studying that face for the crack. What Harris did in the weeks after that November night matters more to me than any speech from the trail, and plenty of us have been slow to notice why.

Rewind a minute, though. That fall means nothing unless you clock the height she dropped from. Prosecutor in Alameda County to start, then San Francisco. District attorney of San Francisco came next, followed by attorney general of California, a statewide seat with real teeth. A spot in the United States Senate by 2017. None of it held her, so in 2019 she reached for the presidency, and the run fell apart before Iowa even voted. Money ran dry. Polls sagged. Quit the race before the early states could embarrass her. Plenty of folks would have read that as the ceiling and made peace with it. Not her.

Then Biden tapped her for the number two slot, and she spent four years riding shotgun, doing the kind of work that stays invisible until the day somebody needs a scapegoat. Summer of 2024 wrecked the plan. One debate went sideways on the president, bad enough that his own side quit pretending, and the knives came out fast. Within a few weeks the old man was out and she was the pick. No new primary vote from Democratic voters, none of the usual runway or ceremony. Suddenly the nominee inherited a machine already rolling and had just 107 days to convince a divided country she should be running it.

Sit with the size of that. Just 107 days to do what usually eats up 2 years. Money poured in at a record breaking pace, arenas filled, a coalition took shape, and for a stretch there it looked as if history might actually turn. First woman president. First Black woman president. A daughter of immigrants reaching for a place no woman had ever held. Sistas across the country felt it in their chest, that maybe, just maybe.

And then November came, and it broke the other way.

We love a climbing story. Give us a sister on the rise and we will shout her name until our throats give out. Corner office. Book deal. A ring, finally. That clean scan after the scare, a diploma with her name in script. We know how to celebrate ascent because it feels good and it feels safe. Nobody ever taught us the harder lesson, though. Few people sat us down and walked us through what to do when the thing simply does not come. When the job goes to someone else. Or a marriage folds, or a business you bled for shuts its doors on a Tuesday like it meant nothing.

That silence is where Kamala has been living, out in the open where all of us can see.

Here is what pulls me back. Kamala did not vanish. Refused to paste on some phony grin for the cameras either, pretending nothing had cracked underneath. Made it real instead. Turns out you can carry grief and steel in the same body. Flattened by a defeat on a Tuesday, then standing up straight in a packed room by Wednesday, both true at once. Watching that play out has schooled me harder than any lecture ever did.

Alpha Kappa Alpha claimed her back at Howard, the first Black Greek letter sorority among the Divine Nine, founded there in 1908. She was barely grown, still sorting out the woman she wanted to become. A bond like that leaves marks a person carries for life. Pledging those letters was never about the parties and the pretty colors. Sisters get in your business. They do not let you fold in on yourself when the load turns heavy, and they will not stand for you skipping the work on the mornings you would rather stay buried under the covers. A vote count going against you does not touch a bit of that. If anything, it hands you a floor to stand on when the rest gives way.

I have watched too many of my own girlfriends come apart after a setback and confuse the event with a verdict on their entire existence. Divorce papers arrive and a friend decides she is unlovable. A promotion skips past her a third go round, and doubt creeps in that the talent was ever there. One closed door, and a whole identity caves in. That collapse is the real tragedy.

Kamala is modeling another road, whether by design or not. You can lose the race and refuse to lose yourself. Two separate things, and mixing them up has swallowed more brilliant Black women than I could count in a sitting.

Consider what people expected once the votes were counted. Vanish. Go write your memoir, teach somewhere far from the cameras, watch the whole mess curdle into a cautionary tale folks whisper at dinner parties. Instead the candidate keeps her name in the conversation, keeps talking, keeps refusing the smallness others tried to hand over. Has not begged a soul for sympathy, which I respect down to my bones. Pity is a trap dressed up as kindness, and that trap got sidestepped clean.

A particular pressure rides on Black women in these moments, and I would be lying to skip past it. When one of us stumbles on a big stage, some corner of the world treats it as evidence about all of us. See, they were not ready. Told you it was too much. So the demand to be flawless turns suffocating, and the room to simply be human in your disappointment gets stolen right out of your hands. Watching her reclaim that space, a person who lost something enormous and kept breathing anyway, felt like air to me.

My great aunt buried 2 husbands and a son. Lost the little house she had scraped and saved for when the bank did what banks do. And that old girl rose every single morning, put on good earrings for no reason on earth, and brewed coffee like the day owed her something worth savoring. I did not understand it back then. Figured denial had set in. Now I know better. My aunt had worked out the very thing Harris is showing the rest of us on a national scale. Your circumstances can crumble without any permission to crumble you along with them.

Grief is allowed. Let me say that plainly, since some of us try to skip it. You are permitted to be furious about what you did not get. Cry in your car in the Kroger lot. Go quiet for a stretch and let the people who love you sit in it with you. What you cannot do, what will cost you everything you have, is hand your sense of self to a single bad outcome. A setback gets to visit. It does not get to move in and rearrange your furniture.

Where these politics travel from here, I honestly cannot say, and that is not the part I keep chewing on anyway. What she left us, with no press release at all, is a picture of dignity after the fall. A woman standing in the wreckage of the biggest disappointment of a long career, not crushed, not faking, just present and upright and still herself. That picture is worth more to my nieces than any office a ballot could have handed over.

So the next time life slams something shut on you, and it will, hold onto the distinction on display here. Losing a thing is not the same as being a loss. Grieve hard. Make it honest. Then wash your face, fasten those good earrings, and let the world watch you keep moving.

Sistas, look at what she is showing us, the chapter nobody ever wanted to narrate. And thank God the telling is out loud, because a whole lot of us needed to hear exactly this.

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.

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.

Her path ran through the University of Oklahoma law program, degree in hand by 2015. Early on, security guards at team hotels mistook her for somebody’s girlfriend and asked her to leave. Think about that. A trained attorney, sharp enough to read the fine print buried in these agreements, and grown men treated her like a lost fan. Returning anyway became the whole answer.

The year 2019 brought a milestone, as Lynn became the first Black woman to represent a top-three NFL draft pick when Quinnen Williams went third overall to the New York Jets. Four years after that came a $255 million extension for Jalen Hurts that briefly made him the highest-paid player in NFL history by average annual value. Lynn later became the first Black woman to represent a quarterback in the Super Bowl, and Hurts eventually went on to win a championship and Super Bowl MVP honors. Now look at 2026. Across one offseason she stacked up 4 major agreements worth nearly $377 million in reported contract value for her clients. Bijan Robinson briefly reset the running back market as the highest-paid player at his position. Quinnen Williams pulled down roughly $106 million from Dallas. After each victory the same grinning note lands online, asking whether anybody happens to have a Brinks truck handy.

Here is the part I want us to actually chew on.

Lynn does not succeed by asking nicely. Victory comes because she enters the room already certain of what her client is owed, homework finished, proof in the folder. Market comparisons. Timing. Leverage nobody else bothered to notice. Hoping the other side feels generous is not the strategy. Building a case they cannot easily refuse is.

Now let me talk to my Sistas for a second.

How many of us were raised on the gospel of keep your head down and grind? Do the job, do it twice as well as everybody else, and eventually somebody up top will see you and reward you. Our mothers meant well. Their world sometimes ran that way, or at least they needed it to. That quiet approach has cost too many of us real income, real promotions, real years we will never get back.

I have watched brilliant women accept the first figure thrown at them because pushing felt rude. I have watched them thank a boss for a 2% bump while a less qualified coworker cleared 15% by simply opening his mouth. Nobody hands you your value on a silver tray. You have to name it, out loud, in a space where the temperature might drop the second you do.

That is the lesson sitting inside her climb. Study the market thoroughly enough and confidence stops being a performance. Hers rested on facts. When the claim was 9 figures, the receipts behind every dollar were already lined up.

Most of us are not haggling over football salaries. We are teachers, nurses, analysts, shop owners, managers, freelancers trying to raise a rate we set 3 years ago and never touched since. The scale differs. The principle does not.

Begin with knowing what you bring. Really knowing it. Sit down and list every skill you carry, every problem you solve that would cost the company dearly if you walked out tomorrow. Put it on paper. Read it back to yourself until you stop flinching.

Then go find out what that talent actually pays. Ask around. Comb the salary sites. Reach out to a former colleague who left for greener grass and ask, gently, what greener looked like on the paycheck. Information is the whole ballgame here. You cannot bargain for a number you never learned existed.

And when the moment arrives, resist the urge to soften yourself into nothing. So many of us apologize before the request even leaves our mouths. The ask shrinks. A nervous laugh sneaks in. We hand them an exit before anybody thought to say no. Lynn refuses that reflex. Silence does the labor. The figure gets named, and then comes the wait.

I am not pretending any of this feels natural. For women who look like we do, assertiveness gets read differently, and we all know it. Confident becomes difficult. Direct becomes cold. That double standard is real, and I will not insult anyone by acting like it isn’t. But letting it mute you only guarantees the outcome you already feared. You end up underpaid and still misjudged. So you might as well be paid correctly and let them adjust their assumptions on their own time.

There is something else worth sitting with. Nicole built her reputation representing men, operating in spaces where nobody expected her to hold the pen. Permission to belong was never something she waited on. Acting as though it already existed did the work, and eventually the room caught up to reality.

Black women have been the safety net of families, churches, and jobs forever. Showing up early is the norm. Staying late comes standard too. We repair what other people broke and rarely send an invoice for it. Somewhere along the line, a lot of us learned to measure ourselves by how much we could haul for free. Nicole reverses that arrangement completely. Her entire livelihood is making sure talent gets compensated fully, and her own fee carries the exact same seriousness.

So what does knowing your value look like on an ordinary Tuesday, for a sister who will never sit across from a team owner?

On an ordinary Tuesday it might mean sending the full bill instead of the discounted friend price. Maybe the moment calls for telling a client, I can start that project once we settle my rate. Sometimes the move is declining a promotion that piles on responsibility while the pay stays frozen. Other times the answer is walking out on an employer who keeps promising to appreciate you next quarter, next year, next never.

None of that is ego. Ego is claiming what you did not earn. What I am describing is accuracy. You are allowed to be accurate about your own price.

My beautiful Sistas, hear me clearly. The professional who negotiated all those millions was once escorted out of a hotel because a stranger could not picture her power. Convincing him was never where her energy went. Becoming undeniable is what got the investment instead.

Do the homework. Learn the market. Rehearse the ask until your voice quits shaking. Then walk in like the figure you deserve is already yours, because on paper, if you truly did the work, it is.

Somebody out there needs your particular brilliance badly enough to pay for it. Go and make them.

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.

She did not fold.

The Omaha native bought WOL 1450 with her then-husband, Dewey Hughes, a struggling outfit that had been through a payola mess and was going for close to a million dollars they absolutely did not have lying around. Bank after bank refused to finance the deal. It took a Puerto Rican woman at Chemical Bank, the 33rd institution they approached, to finally look at the plan and say yes. And even then, the thing nearly ate her alive.

Here is the part I want my Sistas to really absorb.

That station struggled financially for nearly 7 straight years. Cathy lost her house. The car went too. At one point she and her boy were sleeping on the floor of the very office she had risked nearly everything to purchase. Picture that. An accomplished professional who had already run somebody else’s station with real success, now curled up on studio carpet because the dream cost more than the bank account could carry. By her own telling, she was willing to let almost everything go except two things, her child and her company, in that order.

Most people hear a story like this and skip straight to the trophy at the end. Urban One today. The empire. A media company that reaches around 80 million unique consumers every single month across radio, television, and digital. Radio One now operates 74 broadcast stations in 13 major Black consumer markets. TV One came in 2004. In 1999 the founder became the first Black woman in this nation to head a publicly traded corporation, and she has been widely described as the second richest Black woman in America, sitting behind only Oprah. Fine. Worth celebrating.

But that is not the lesson.

The lesson lives inside that cold little building where she started with one signal and a tank full of stubborn faith. See, before WOL, Hughes had already proven she could work. In 1969 she landed her first radio job in her hometown. Then Howard called her to teach. Somewhere in there she wound up running sales at the campus station, and in her first year as general sales manager, revenue jumped from about $250,000 to $3 million. That slow, grown, late night sound folks still call the Quiet Storm? She helped create and develop the format at WHUR, with Melvin Lindsey becoming its defining on-air voice. So this was not somebody who lacked talent or a track record. Both were already in the bag.

What she did not have was permission. Or capital. Or anybody in a suit telling her the vision was reasonable.

And that gap right there, between the scale of the calling and the size of the resources, is exactly where so many of us get stuck and stay stuck. We look at the one thing we can afford to start with and we decide the whole idea must be too big for our tiny bank balance. We shrink the dream down to match the checking account. Cathy did the opposite. She kept the vision enormous and let the resources catch up.

I keep coming back to that single station. One. Not a network. Not a portfolio. A modest, wounded, unglamorous AM frequency that plenty of smarter money had already given up on. Hughes looked at that and saw a whole future in it, a place where our politics and our money and our own unfiltered voices could finally run the board. She eventually transformed WOL around talk from a Black perspective, with “Information is Power” becoming the theme. For 11 years she hosted the morning show herself, on air, in the trenches, learning the whole operation from the inside out because she had no choice but to live at the office anyway.

There is something in that willingness that I wish more of us carried. Not the suffering. Nobody is glorifying the empty refrigerator or the repossessed car. The point is the refusal to let a small starting line define the finish. Sistas, hear me on this. Your beginning does not get to write your ending unless you hand it the pen.

I think about the sister with one folding table at the flea market who keeps picturing a real storefront. The auntie doing hair in her kitchen who can already smell the salon. There is a teacher out there scribbling curriculum on her lunch break, dead sure it belongs in schools she may never even visit. A nurse somewhere is drawing up an app on the back of a patient chart between rounds. All of them are sitting right where Cathy sat, hands wrapped around something that looks way too small for the thing tugging at them.

The world will absolutely tell you the math does not work. The world told her 32 times.

What made the difference was not that Cathy Hughes had more than the rest of us. Early on she had less than a lot of folks reading this. A former teen mother, married young and later divorced, raising a son while the industry treated her ownership dreams like a cute little hobby. What she refused to do was let the modesty of her resources shrink the scope of her ambition. That is the entire secret, if you even want to call it a secret.

And notice she did not wait to feel ready. There was no pause for 5 stations worth of confidence before buying the first. She grabbed what was in front of her and guarded it like air. Then came the grind, one brutal year stacked on the next, until that little AM signal turned into a national voice for our people.

So when your own beginning looks too small and that old embarrassment starts creeping in, when the voice pipes up asking who do you think you are, go back to the carpet Cathy slept on. Remember that the largest Black owned multimedia company in this country eventually became publicly traded because one exhausted mama would not quit a station that was bleeding her dry.

Black women have always been asked to make cathedrals out of scraps. Cathy Hughes just did it out loud, on the radio, where all of us could eventually hear it.

And here is what gets me in 2026. That woman is 79 years old and remains Chairwoman of Urban One. This past July, Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser handed her a Key to the City, the District’s highest civic honor, recognizing a career spanning more than five decades of creating jobs, opening doors and amplifying Black voices. Cathy stood there with the same message that has followed her through this entire journey. The opportunity Washington gave her allowed a belief in the value of Black voices, Black music and Black stories to become her life’s work. At an age when nobody would question her decision to disappear into retirement, she remains connected to the company and the mission she started with one struggling AM station.

So begin with whatever is sitting in front of you right now. That one wounded little thing nobody else wanted might turn out to be the exact foundation you were praying for. Just don’t you dare talk yourself into shrinking the dream down until it fits.

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.

By her own account, this decade opened a bigger world rather than a smaller one, and these 60s belong to no one else, in a way nothing before them ever did. Hear how radical that sounds coming from a working actress in a business that treats its female stars like produce, stamped with a date telling you when to toss them. Hollywood spends fortunes deciding that a performer goes invisible right around the moment she finally turns interesting, and Viola looks that whole bargain in the eye and refuses it flat.

What she describes is not denial. Nobody out here pretends the body stays the same or the calendar quits turning. The freedom runs deeper than that. It is the relief of setting down a bag you have hauled since girlhood, the sack packed with everybody else’s verdicts on whether you are pretty enough, thin enough, accomplished enough to earn a seat at the good table. Plainly put, that noise barely lands anymore. Life now centers on the people she loves, the ones who love her back, and what gets left behind when the final curtain falls. Read that again slowly, because the whole sermon sits right there.

For Sistas who have spent decades measured against a ruler that was never built with us in mind, that kind of talk lands like cool water. We got told early that our hair was wrong, our skin ran too deep, our bodies were too much or not enough depending on the day and the room. Countless among us learned to shrink, to code switch, to soften ourselves into something the culture might finally bless. Then somebody seasoned, entering her 60s, stands up and announces that the blessing was never the prize, and a knot in the chest loosens. Your shoulders drop without asking permission.

The trouble with the youth worship we grew up inside is that it robs us twice. First it convinces a young girl the whole value lives in a face and a figure held on loan for a couple of decades. Later it convinces that same grown-up girl that the loan has come due and she owes the planet an apology for aging at all. That con runs so old and so profitable that we quit questioning it. Look at who actually holds the wisdom in most families. Notice who the young ones sprint toward when the money runs short or the marriage cracks or the newborn refuses to sleep. Rarely the 22 year old with the flawless selfie. Usually the auntie, the grandmother, the matriarch who already survived the exact storm you are drowning in.

Value, the real kind, compounds. It refuses to evaporate at 40 or 50 or 60. A grown Sista at this age has buried people and rebuilt herself from the studs up. Rooms tried to erase her, and she planted herself in the seat anyway. Time and again the woman failed at things and learned to fail forward. None of that registers on a beauty scorecard, and none of it depreciates. If anything, all those years stack in her favor. Not a soul warns you about that part when you are twenty and scared of every birthday.

Black women have known this forever, even back when nobody outside our own kitchens and church pews bothered to say it out loud. In many of our families, elders were not treated as expired goods. They got consulted. The church mother, the neighborhood matriarch, the sista whose porch became the unofficial town hall, these were stations you grew into rather than out of. Somewhere the mainstream lost the plot and decided a female’s peak season was the thinnest slice of it, and too many of us absorbed that poison against everything our grandmothers modeled for us.

So when Viola talks about becoming, present tense, at this age, the language belongs to our foremothers, who knew it by heart. Coming home to herself at last, she says, the ruby slippers worn the entire time. That is not decline. Call it arrival. The stereotype claims the story winds down right about here; she insists the finest chapter only cracked open once she stopped auditioning for a life and simply started living one.

I want the Sistas reading this to sit with a hard question. How much of your fire goes toward staying acceptable to folks who will not even be at your funeral? Ask yourself how many mirrors have seized command of your whole morning. A different version of your days waits on the far side of that anxiety, and the elders who crossed over keep reporting back that the water is fine. You do not shrink into less. Instead you expand into more of yourself, the only becoming that ever counted.

None of this knocks youth, Sistas, and it is no call to stop tending the temple you live in. Move your body, feed it well, wear the lipstick that turns an ordinary Tuesday into an event. The message runs simpler and stronger than any beauty routine. Your worth never came as a coupon with a redeem-by date. It arrived standard, it arrived whole, and it shipped without a warranty set to expire when the birthday candles multiply.

At 61, she reads as clarity and mischief and appetite, plus a fearless calm that shows up only after you survive season upon season and learn to trust yourself. If that is what waits past all the pressure, then aging is not the thing to dread. The thing to dread is burning your good years believing the lie.

Viola is out here as living proof that letting go and giving up are not the same thing. The choice sits with the rest of us now, Black women right alongside everybody else, whether to take the lesson she keeps teaching. Count me all the way in.

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.

I want us to sit with that for a minute, Sistas, because plenty of us have lived some flavor of the same thing.

Maybe yours did not happen on national television. Perhaps it showed up in a conference room where you got passed over for a promotion you trained the other person to eventually receive. Could have been a marriage, or a friendship, or a church home that suddenly felt colder than it used to. The setting changes. That gut punch, the moment it becomes plain you are not in the plan anymore, most folks recognize it cold. And for grown Black women who have spent years, decades even, proving we belong in spaces somebody built without us in mind, it cuts even deeper.

Here is what makes Tamron’s story worth telling one more time. She had put in ten years at that company. Anchoring, reporting for Dateline, carrying real weight the whole run. The reporting says she was offered somewhere around two million dollars a year to stay in a smaller role and quietly accept the demotion. Two million. Think about what that number could do for your family, your peace, your retirement. She said no anyway.

Why would anybody turn that down?

Because she understood something a paycheck cannot fix. Staying meant agreeing that her value was whatever the network decided to assign her on a given Tuesday. It meant lingering in the hallway, watching another anchor sit in a seat that used to be hers, smiling for the cameras while every part of her knew better. Tamron later talked about the young women coming up behind her in journalism. She did not want them to watch her shrink. If they saw her accept less, they might believe less was all they could ever ask for.

That right there is the heart of it.

Rejection from one room has a sneaky way of convincing us it is a verdict on our total worth. Your body hangs onto it. Next thing you know you are lying awake replaying the tape, picking apart every misstep, asking yourself whether you were ever as sharp as you figured. That spiral sits on top of a single lie. It whispers that the people who shut you out were the final authority on your future.

They were not. And they hold no such power over you.

What Tamron did next is the part I need every reader to carry home. She did not spend the following season begging her way in. Instead she stepped away and took her time. Then she got busy on a project that carried her own name out front, nobody else’s. The show turned up in syndication in September of 2019, powered by nearly three decades she had already banked with a microphone in her hand. The set and format were built to shrink the distance between the host and the audience, because she wanted folks to feel close to her, not lectured at.

Now look at where the woman stands.

Two Daytime Emmy wins landed on her shelf, the first in 2020 and a second in 2022. Her program grew into the second-longest-running syndicated talk show across the Disney lineup, behind only Live with Kelly and Mark. A thousand episodes came and went. Then this past March, in 2026, the show got picked up for an eighth season, just as a stack of other daytime staples around her got pulled off the air. That same spring ABC handed her the Oscars red carpet to co-host. Sit with that for a second. An industry that once seemed ready to move past her now wanted her out front on one of television’s showiest nights. Her tagline for the fresh run says everything about her spirit. Let’s Keep Talking. A woman they tried to silence built an entire platform out of conversation, and she has no plans to hush now.

I do not share any of this so we can gloat over how the story turned out. Tamron herself has said she never measured her path against how anybody else fared after she left. That is the grown woman move right there, and it is the lesson I keep circling back to.

Strange how that goes. The spot that spits you out is real often the very thing that walks you straight into what you were built for.

I know that stings to hear while the cut is still raw. Nobody sitting out in a car after getting let go, nobody crying over the kitchen sink because a person they loved packed a bag and left, wants to be told the ache is secretly a way forward. In the middle of it the thing just feels like the end. But plenty of us can look back at what wrecked us a while ago and finally cop to it, that the mess cleared a road toward something we could not have gotten to any other way.

Black women get handed this particular test more than most. We are told to be grateful for the seat, to make ourselves smaller so the room stays comfortable, to swallow the slight and keep the peace. Tamron flipped that entire script. She treated the closing of one door as information, not as a sentence. The message was clear enough. This chapter is finished. It said nothing at all about the chapters she had left in her.

So let me talk directly to my Sistas reading this who feel written off right now.

The company that overlooked you does not get to author your ending. That man who left does not get to define what you are worth. And the circle that went cold was never the world entire, no matter how large it loomed while you were inside it. You are allowed to grieve what closed. Sit in it, feel it fully, let yourself be human about the loss. Then, when your legs steady, you get up and you build the room they never thought to offer you.

Tamron did not turn into somebody new once the dust settled. She became more fully who she already was, once she stopped waiting for permission from people who had already stopped seeing her.

That is the quiet victory available to every one of us, Sistas. Not revenge. Nothing about proving them wrong for the sake of the applause. Something steadier. The deep knowing that your life, your gifts, and your future were never truly in their hands to begin with.

None of this is a throwback story, either. As 2026 keeps moving, she is right in the thick of it, still getting her flowers from the awards folks, including another Daytime Emmy nomination this summer, still holding a loyal audience that shows up for her day after day. Close to a decade past that sudden exit, she is steering a platform built around her own name, and business is good.

So when a door swings shut in your face, stand there a beat and just breathe. Then go round up some lumber and start framing something of your own.

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.

Let me lay out what we actually know. The two met back in 2023 at Michael Rubin’s Fourth of July White Party, a creative gathering where phones were not allowed, so they found each other before they ever found each other’s feeds. They announced their engagement in the summer of 2025 and married on the first of August at a private residence in New York State. There was no livestream turning the vows into content for everybody else. When The Breakfast Club pressed her about the ballplayer a while back, she offered a single clean sentence. Happy, she said, and that was all she had to say about it.

Chew on that for a second.

Do you know how rare that restraint has become? We live in a moment where couples build whole brands off the courtship itself. The proposal gets a videographer. A gender reveal calls for a drone. Anniversaries turn into carousel posts with captions long enough to pass for term papers. And somewhere in all that documentation, we started believing a moment is only real if strangers witnessed it happen. That is the lie I want to sit with today, because the true subject here was not this one famous couple. It is us.

Visibility is not intimacy. Let me say it plainer for the folks in the back. Being seen by thousands is nothing at all like being known by one. A million likes cannot hold you the night your daddy passes. Comments do not show up with soup when the flu has you flat on your back. Yet a whole generation of beautiful young Black women has been schooled to believe that the applause is the point, that a bond carries no value until it has been posted, tagged, and blessed by people who will never once help you move a couch.

Coco and Donovan eventually shared their wedding with Vogue, giving the public a beautiful look inside the day. But there is still a difference between choosing when to open the door and building an entire relationship with that door hanging wide open. They did not spend the courtship feeding strangers every disagreement, every date, every private milestone and every tender exchange. That distinction matters. Privacy does not mean nobody ever gets to see the joy. It means the couple decides what belongs to the public and what remains theirs.

Donovan stood at a Cavaliers media day podium once and said she brings him peace, and I have not stopped chewing on it. She brings him peace. Not spectacle, not content, not some brand extension. A ballplayer inside a league that runs on attention reached instead for the language of stillness. Our young brothers need to hear that, the ones who got sold the notion that a woman is a flex, an accessory to wave around for status.

Now let me talk to my Sistas directly, because this is really about you and me and not two famous kids who got married in New York. How many of us have watched a friend perform a whole relationship for the timeline while the actual romance rotted behind the filter? The matching outfits. Staged date nights that never once happened off camera. Captions swearing he hung the moon. Then six months later the account goes quiet and you learn she had been crying in the bathroom the entire run. We confused the highlight reel for the marriage. Somewhere along the way we mistook the audience for the union.

There is a particular weight that lands on Black women right here, and I will not pretend otherwise. We get told so often that we are unchosen, too much and somehow never enough, that when a good one finally arrives we feel this itch to prove it to everybody. See? Somebody wanted me. Look at the ring, look at my man, look at the receipts. I understand that hunger. Felt it myself, more than once. But a bond you have to broadcast before you can believe in it is a bond you do not fully trust yet.

What Coco modeled is a confidence that needs no constant witness. She knows exactly what she has. She does not need me validating it from my couch, and she is not sitting around waiting on the comment section to co-sign her joy. That is grown. Settled all the way through. A woman who understands the gap between a private life and a secret one, since a secret is what you bury out of shame, while privacy is what you guard because it is sacred.

I am not saying disappear. Nobody is preaching that you hide your happiness or act like the man does not exist. Post the wedding shoe if it moves you. Share the anniversary if your spirit says share. Let Vogue photograph the dress if that is what you want. The real question is one of source. Are you showing yourself off because the feeling is spilling over, or manufacturing a performance because the silence has started to frighten you? One flows from a full cup. The other pours out of an empty one dressed in good lighting.

My generation of Sistas has watched this culture shift in real time. We came up passing notes and holding hands in hallways where no algorithm kept score. There was a sweetness to being unseen, to belonging to one person instead of an audience of ghosts. It worries me that our daughters and our nieces are losing the muscle for that kind of belonging. They are learning to date for the feed instead of for the man standing in front of them.

So here is what I take from this young couple that much of the coverage sailed right past while it fussed over dresses, photographs and ring size. They guarded the good thing before deciding what pieces of it they wanted to share. In a world begging famous people to stream every stage, narrate every feeling and spin every milestone into a running brand, they kept the relationship itself largely between the people actually living it. I find that beautiful. Not because nobody eventually saw the wedding. Because the public never owned it.

May our daughters learn it too. Let them figure out that the deepest bonds do not need a camera to be real, that a person saying you bring him peace in a quiet room will always outrank ten thousand strangers calling you goals. And every Sista reading this ought to remember she is allowed to keep something back just for herself. You do not owe the internet your marriage. Never did.

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.

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.

She turned 68 today. Sixty-eight, that is. Been showing up on screen most of my life and she still walks into a shot and the whole thing organizes itself around her. Remember Tina. She didn’t play her. She disappeared and left Tina standing there. Or Ramonda in Wakanda, back straight, carrying grief and a whole country at once, that same tired muscle I watched my own mama use stretching one check across a month of bills.

Now notice what happens when people discuss her today. The chatter rarely lands on the work. It circles her face instead. How does she do it. What is her secret. She does not look a day over 40, folks swear. Sounds like praise. Sit with it a second though and you hear the real question humming under all of it. How has she managed to dodge the crime of getting older.

That part right there is what gets me.

We have taken the natural arithmetic of a life and turned it into something a woman is supposed to outrun. A birthday becomes a threat. Silver coming in at the temple becomes a confession. And the highest honor we can hand a grown woman, apparently, is to swear up and down that she has somehow cheated the calendar. Say it plain and hear how strange it lands. We praise her most for looking like she has not lived the years she actually lived.

Bassett herself has pushed back against the whole fixation. Over time she has made it known, in her own steady way, that age is not something she intends to let define or limit her. She takes care of herself, but she has also spoken about the value of staying healthy, vital and present as the years move forward. That posture matters more than she probably knows. When a woman that visible refuses the panic, she loosens the collar around the rest of us.

Here is a thing my aunties never got to say out loud. The pressure lands different on us.

Sistas have been handed a peculiar inheritance. Black don’t crack, folks say, half pride and half prophecy, and there is real love inside it. Our grandmothers kept smooth skin deep into their 70s and we wear that like a family jewel. But flip the coin. If we are expected to stay forever unbothered and forever unlined, then showing our years starts to feel like a personal failure, like we let the side down somehow. A wrinkle turns into evidence that you slipped. That you did not moisturize enough, pray enough, hold it all together enough.

I have watched women I love shrink away from cameras. Sistas who ran departments and raised children and buried parents and walked through more storms than they ever advertised, suddenly skittish about one photo because the flash caught the truth of 60 years sitting on their neck. Somebody trained them to read their own faces as proof of a mistake. That training did not fall out of the sky.

Turn on a television. Scroll for 10 minutes. The message barely shifts. Youth is the currency, and a woman past a certain point had best convert every last dollar into serums and procedures and whatever a good filter can fake. Men get to ripen into something distinguished. Silver reads as wisdom on them, gravitas, a chair at the head of the table. Let a sister go gray and the whispers start about whether she has quietly given up.

Angela never got that memo, or she read it and set it right back down.

What she offers, without ever climbing on a soapbox about it, is the radical little notion that a grown woman gets to look grown. She shows up with presence where an apology is expected. The years are on her, sure enough, and she carries them like somebody who earned each one and would not trade a single chapter to pass for a stranger in her own skin.

Think about what that permission would do for the girls watching.

A 12 year old is soaking up every signal we throw off about what a female life is worth as it moves through time. If everything she sees insists that a woman peaks around 22 and spends the rest of her days in slow, desperate retreat, what exactly are we preparing her for? Terror. A lifetime of it. We would be handing that child a countdown clock and calling it beauty advice.

Now flip to the other lesson. Picture her instead watching grown women glide into their 50s and 60s still creating, running a room the way they always ran one, turning heads for reasons that have nothing to do with pretending. Bassett hands her that vision. So do the Black women in our own families who never saw a red carpet in their lives yet taught the identical class with nothing but their ordinary days.

Let me be clear about what I am not saying. Nobody has to abandon looking good. Care for your temple. Wear the bold lip, keep the gym appointment, do the small rituals that make you feel like yourself in the mirror. Vanity is human and Lord knows I have my own. This is no scolding aimed at any sister who colors the gray or swears by her serum.

The trouble was never the mirror. The trouble is the dread underneath it, that quiet belief that a woman’s clock is her enemy and every visible year is a defeat she owes the whole world an apology for.

So maybe we drop it. Instead of promising a sister she doesn’t look her age, like her actual years were some embarrassment we’ve agreed to be polite about, we could reach for something that costs a little more. Tell her she looks like she has lived. Been through the fire and she is still here, still upright. We could say her face holds a whole story worth reading slow. We could let looking 68 be a perfectly fine thing to look, no qualifier bolted on, no little clause tucked underneath about how she almost got away with it.

Sistas deserve to grow old the way the rest of the world takes for granted. Out loud. On purpose. With gray hair and laugh lines and the deep, earned satisfaction of somebody who is not fleeing a single day she was given.

Angela Bassett is getting older. Every last one of us is too, if we are lucky enough. That is not the tragedy we keep getting told to treat it as. The real loss would be reaching those good, ripe years and still believing we had to hide them, still apologizing for the sin of staying alive long enough to change.

So let her ripen. Let your mother do the same. Let yourself do it too, right out in the open, unafraid. And the next time somebody swears a woman has not aged a day, ask them gently why on earth we ever decided that was the finest thing we could think to say.

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.