She mothered Tupac. Whitney Houston got that same fierce fuss in another film. Taraji came up under her wing in one story, a whole household under it in the next. Somewhere along the way, Hollywood handed her a title that stuck like honey: the Mother of Black Hollywood. Say it out loud and it feels like a hug. It is meant as one.

But sit with me a minute, because there is a splinter tucked inside that sweetness.

When a performer gets that good at cradling everyone else, a strange thing starts to happen. The public begins to see only the cradle. We forget the arms belong to a person carrying private hungers, private grief, and gifts nobody else could copy. Lewis was a Broadway force long before she turned into anybody’s screen mama. Carnegie Hall knew that voice. She racked up more than 200 concerts across a map running several continents deep, a touring life most folks would need two careers to match. Her memoir did not flinch. Bipolar disorder and sex addiction both get named straight out. So does the quiet toll of forever playing the strong one. Webster University, her alma mater, later handed her an honorary doctorate. None of that fits neatly on an apron.

Here is where the tale stops being only about the actress and starts being about a lot of us.

Ask around any family, any congregation, any office break room, and you will find her everywhere. Not the celebrity. The pattern. So many Black women spend their lives cast as the one who holds it down. We are the auntie with the guest room always made up. The church mother who counts the offering and counsels the crying. The coworker who trains every new hire and remembers each birthday. We get so skilled at nurturing that folks quietly decide nurturing is the whole of who we are. The praise sounds lovely. Underneath it sits a quiet demotion.

Sistas know this arithmetic without anyone teaching it. You give and give until giving becomes your name. People stop asking what you dream about, because they assume your dream is simply them. That flattening does not always come from cruelty. Often it arrives dressed as a compliment. So strong. Never complains. Takes care of everybody. Each of those little medals can be a cage with a bow on it.

Which is exactly why watching the diva from Kinloch, Missouri right now feels like scripture.

At 69, Jenifer is not fading into anybody’s rocking chair. This September finds her deep in the next act. Netflix has brought A Different World back with a sequel series, and there she is again as Professor Davenport for a fresh crowd of Hillman students. Production wrapped in Atlanta earlier this year, the first looks and trailer are already out, and the series premieres September 24. Coming too is a fearless one-woman show carrying her life story to the stage with comedy, honesty and hard-won peace braided into a single evening. This is not a farewell tour. The building continues.

On the wider world, her voice stays loud. When this year’s Met Gala rolled out its glitter with Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez Bezos as lead sponsors and honorary chairs, Lewis questioned why celebrities showed up amid economic and political controversies surrounding Bezos. Taraji P. Henson had separately raised similar concerns before the gala. Neither woman seemed interested in clapping politely while working people were hurting.

Barbados offered a quieter picture of the same woman. Late this summer the actress sat with young people during the island’s emancipation season celebrations and gave them something that lands harder the older you get. Chase what actually makes you smile, came the message. Do not measure your worth by applause or a paycheck. And the line that ought to hang on every weary mirror: each morning she asks herself how she means to take care of herself first, and how she can help someone else.

Read that again, sis. The Mother of an entire industry, the woman who spent decades tending everybody within reach, now opens the day by tending her own heart without forgetting what she can offer somebody else. Two years of stillness came first, of rest and reckoning, before that clarity arrived. Nobody granted permission. She took it.

This is the gift hiding inside her entire arc, and Sistas, it belongs to us.

Being somebody’s rock is beautiful. Feeding people, guiding them, showing up when everything is falling apart, that work is holy and I would never wave it off. The problem is never the caretaking itself. The problem comes when the caretaking swallows the caretaker until nothing is left over for her, until the person vanishes behind the service performed.

Black women were never meant to be reduced to what we hand out. We are not the place setting on somebody else’s table. We are the guest of honor too, with appetites and ambitions and afternoons that answer to nobody. One of us can run the whole church supper and still deserve a plate carried over, still deserve someone to ask, with no favor attached, how she is really doing.

So take the lesson from a queen teaching it out loud in her seventh decade. Sistas, put your own name somewhere on your list, and never at the very bottom in pencil. The role of everybody’s mama can be a joy you choose. It should never be the only room you are allowed to live in. The most loving thing many of us could do this season is exactly what this queen is modeling. Rest. Create something that is only yours. Speak up when the world turns ugly. Then wake up tomorrow and ask that same holy question.

How do I take care of me?

Answer it like your one wild and precious life depends on it. Because, sis, it always did.

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.

And a whole lot of grown Sistas watching at home went quiet.

Not because the tour lacks meaning. It carries plenty. Two of the biggest names in the genre share one stage, pack a football stadium, and give folks their money’s worth. I understand the pull. Those songs have soundtracked cookouts, weddings, and more than a few evenings in my own kitchen with the windows thrown open. Nobody is pretending the catalog fails to move a room.

The trouble sits somewhere else entirely.

Chris Brown pleaded guilty in 2009 to felony assault involving his girlfriend at the time, Rihanna, and photographs showing her injuries became part of the public memory surrounding the case. He was young, true. People do grow, also true. Yet his legal history did not end there. In 2017, Karrueche Tran obtained a restraining order after accusing Brown of threatening and physically abusing her. Those claims were allegations contained in her court filing. More recently, in July 2026, Brown pleaded guilty in London to affray stemming from a 2023 nightclub confrontation. Prosecutors dropped more serious assault charges as part of the resolution, and sentencing is scheduled for October.

So here is the knot I keep tugging, and I doubt I am alone in it. Can we love somebody’s music yet decline to publicly celebrate the person behind it? Do we get to sing every lyric and still question whether formal recognition from an elected official should follow?

Those strike me as two separate acts.

Nobody with good sense is begging radio stations to bury his hits or ordering you to wipe your playlist. That remains your business, your car, your speaker. The songs already exist. They will keep existing whether any of us approve of the singer or not. Streaming a track is a private choice, and private choices belong to you alone.

A Congressional Record recognition is a different animal. No playlist here. This is an elected member of Congress using the official federal legislative record to recognize an individual publicly. It does not mean Congress as a whole voted to honor that person, nor does it amount to an endorsement by the entire federal government. Still, an entry made by a member of Congress carries a different kind of public significance than one fan deciding what to play through her speakers. Crockett’s recognition of Brown and Usher was entered into that official record as a celebration of their artistic contributions.

Right there is where some Sistas felt the floor shift.

Because the larger conversation reaches beyond one concert. Black women have long debated how communities respond when famous men are accused or convicted of harming women, and how much weight should be given to talent, rehabilitation, accountability and time. Some people believe artistic achievement can be recognized separately from a person’s misconduct. Others believe a formal public honor inevitably says something about the person receiving it. Those positions collide hard in a case involving somebody whose music has remained enormously popular despite a documented criminal history.

That tension helps explain why Crockett’s appearance generated such a strong reaction.

Let me be fair to her for a beat, because fairness counts. Jasmine Crockett did not organize the tour, and she was not the only elected official involved in the recognition. Texas state Rep. Venton Jones appeared onstage as well, and Brown received a State of Texas legislative recognition alongside Crockett’s Congressional Record acknowledgment. Producer RoccStar was also involved in coordinating the moment. In front of a roaring stadium crowd celebrating two successful R&B careers, the presentation was framed as a celebration of music and Black cultural achievement.

Intent matters. Impact matters too. Both can exist at once.

The question sitting squarely in front of us is whether celebrating the music became tangled with publicly celebrating the person. Critics of Crockett’s appearance have argued that Brown’s documented history made the honor inappropriate, while others have defended the ability to recognize his artistic impact separately from his past conduct. That disagreement is really the heart of this entire conversation.

Reasonable folks can land on different sides of that line. Holding public office adds another layer because an elected official’s ceremonial actions receive scrutiny that an ordinary fan’s choices never will. Every public appearance can be interpreted not merely as personal enthusiasm but as a statement about what deserves recognition.

One more layer deserves a seat at this table, and it involves timing.

Crockett is approaching the end of her current House tenure after losing the Democratic primary for U.S. Senate to James Talarico in March. Her House term ends in January 2027, but she has made clear that disappearing from politics is not the plan. After the primary, Crockett created the Fueling Individual Rights Everywhere, or FIRE, PAC and has traveled around the country supporting candidates through it, with particular attention lately to down-ballot races.

Which means this is also a chapter about what Crockett does after Congress. Her public appearances, endorsements and political organizing are helping define what that next chapter looks like. That does not automatically make one concert appearance more important than it was, but it does explain why people who follow her career are paying attention to the choices she makes outside the halls of Congress.

None of this requires tearing a Sister down. Black women in public life already receive enormous scrutiny, and disagreement with one decision does not require dismissing an entire career. What happened in Arlington instead opens a broader conversation about celebrity, accountability, forgiveness and the difference between enjoying somebody’s work and formally recognizing the person who created it.

So I will hand it to you, because this conversation belongs to us. Will you dance to the record and still keep your hands in your pockets when an elected official invites you to clap for the person? Where does that line fall for you? And did Jasmine Crockett’s recognition of Chris Brown cross that line for you, or did she simply separate the artist’s accomplishments from the man’s history in the same way millions of listeners already do?

Talk to me. I am listening.

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.

News broke on September 14. A new memoir, “You Better Love What You See,” lands April 6, 2027. That title did not come from nowhere. Ralph pulled it straight out of her 2023 Critics Choice Awards acceptance speech, the speech folks were still quoting weeks later, the night she leaned into the camera and told everybody watching that people do not have to like you, love you, or even respect you. The face in the mirror is the one you answer to. That belief runs all through the new book, and across two hundred and forty pages come the receipts. Growing up as the only girl of color at a Catholic school. Joining Rutgers College’s first class of undergraduate women. And the one detail in the announcement that stopped me cold. Once, a television role got snatched away because somebody in charge decided she was not “Black enough.”

Sit with that for a second.

Not that the acting fell short. Not that a mark got missed or a scene got fumbled. Somebody with a clipboard and a budget measured the skin, the speech, the whole woman against a rule nobody bothered to write down, then stamped the file lacking. The original Deena Jones. A Dreamgirl. A Tony nominee before half of these executives could tie their shoes. Told, flat out, she wasn’t the right shade of us.

Here is the part that landed square in my chest, because I have lived a smaller version of it, and so has nearly every sister I love. A sister can step into one space and register as too much. Too loud, too dark, too country, too churchy, too sure of the ground under her feet. Then that same sister pivots, walks into the very next room, and somehow arrives as not enough. Not urban, not gritty, hair too soft, speech too polished, pick your poison. Same person. Same beautiful skin. Two opposite verdicts, and neither one was ever hers to hand down.

We know this dance. Sistas have been doing it since grade school, when one crowd said we talked white and another swore we were ghetto, and both little jabs stung the exact same way. It trails us into the office, where we soften a laugh so nobody reads us as a threat, then get passed over for seeming timid. It shows up in the group chat, in the salon chair, at the family cookout where somebody’s cousin has plenty to say about your locs or your man or the way you pronounce the word “ask.” And the sharpest cuts do not always come from white folks. Some of them arrive from our own people, which carries its own private grief.

What I respect about Ralph naming this now, at this stage, is the flat refusal to pretend it healed clean. Plenty of successful Black women reach a certain altitude and start selling the tidy version, the one where every wound became a blessing and every rejection was really a redirect in disguise. Ralph is doing something braver, laying out the scar and the origin story together. A young performer, gifted past any argument, handed a report card on her own color by people who had no business grading it.

And notice none of this comes drifting off a quiet retirement porch. The woman is fully in her season. Abbott Elementary returns for its sixth run on October 7, and the actress has been out here teasing what Barbara Howard gets up to next, treating that kindergarten classroom like sacred ground. The series will also celebrate its hundredth episode this season, another quiet number that says plenty about a show and a career people once tried their best to shrink. On Monday night, Ralph walked the Emmy red carpet while Abbott competed again for Outstanding Comedy Series. Book news by day. Emmy gown by night. That is not a woman waiting on anybody’s permission.

Which drags me back to the ugly little word sitting at the center of her story. Enough.

For a long stretch I believed the fix was to satisfy every single person in the building. Be enough for this crowd, composed for the next, palatable for the ones signing the checks. You learn to code switch so smoothly that one day you cannot remember which voice was yours to begin with. Black women get worn down this way, running an audition that never actually closes, because the panel keeps rotating and the standard keeps sliding and the callback simply never comes. At some point, and Ralph clearly hit hers, you set the sides down and walk off the stage.

There sits the quiet power in her book title. Not “you better make them love what they see.” Not “you better perform until they finally clap.” You better love what you see. The only verdict Ralph chases anymore is her own. That is the sole jury with any real standing over a life.

I keep thinking about the young Sistas coming up right now, scrolling feeds that rank and rate and sort us into tidy boxes before we have even had our coffee. Somebody will tell them they are too much. Somebody else, that very same week, will inform them they are not the right kind of us. Both messages are the same lie wearing two outfits. So many Black women learn young that our color was never up for a vote, and the girl who grasps that early stops bleeding out trying to win an election that does not exist.

Ralph took the scenic route to that truth. Decades of yeses and cruel small nos, of being seen and then unseen, of a business that rarely knew what on earth to do with a dark woman who could sing the paint off the walls and act circles around the whole room. Now she hands us the map, scar tissue included, so a few of us might arrive quicker than the last generation did.

So when the memoir drops next spring, count me first in line. Not because I need another famous face urging me to love myself from a platform I will never stand on. Because this one is naming the true cost, and doing it while still in the fight, still starring on an Emmy-nominated series, still teasing next season, still refusing to sit down and be quiet. The rest of us, the Sistas grown weary of auditioning for our own reflections, could use a witness cut exactly like that.

Look in the mirror, she keeps saying. You better love what you see.

Turns out that line was never a poster for the wall. It is a whole strategy for staying alive.

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.

Lately folks love to file the icon under one address. Daytime television. The panel. Those morning arguments about politics that get clipped and shared before lunch. Fair enough, since Goldberg has anchored that famous couch for nearly twenty years. Reducing a whole career to one chair, though, cheats a woman who built entire rooms before most of us knew her face.

Think about the range for a moment. Long before the talk show, there was a solo act that traveled from tiny theaters straight to Broadway in 1984, announcing a voice unlike anything the industry had bothered to imagine. Film came next. A haunting turn in Ghost brought home the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress, and just like that, a comedian from the projects held the same prize Hollywood had guarded like a private club. Sister Act made Whoopi a household name. Drama, comedy, animation, Goldberg moved through every genre without waiting for a hall pass.

That rare EGOT sits on the shelf, the Emmy and Grammy beside the Oscar and Tony, a club so exclusive its whole membership could share a single booth. The producing credits piled up, and so did the books. Four separate times the comedian hosted the ceremony that Tinseltown treats as its holiest night. Understanding the assignment came naturally, long before anybody thought to hand it over.

Here sits the part the recaps keep skipping. Each of those firsts widened the frame for the Sistas coming up behind her. A young Black woman who auditions today and declines to swap her hair, her cadence, or her birth name for some studio mold is standing on ground this veteran already cleared. Legacy in its purest form looks less like trophies and more like who gets to stroll through after you have gone.

The proof showed up plainly this past June. Seated across from Keke Palmer at the Tribeca Festival for a talk billed as Storytellers, the elder listened as the younger star, an Emmy holder herself and nobody’s idea of lazy, spoke about what it means to become so distinct that nobody else can occupy your lane. Palmer made clear that Whoopi is one of one, and that she hopes to build the kind of career people will someday describe the same way. Two eras of Black women in a single frame, each claiming a lane, both stubborn about their names.

Honesty is what she offered up, the sort only mileage can buy. Every award imaginable, and the phone still does not just ring, Whoopi confessed. Casting still means asking to be considered. Supporting herself never stopped being the job. More than four decades after her landmark solo show helped introduce her to Broadway, Goldberg watched those characters bloom again at Lincoln Center through a new generation of Black women, with Kerry Washington taking the stage before Jurnee Smollett later stepped into the production. What the actress cut open did not seal shut behind her.

Holding a door rather than letting it slam defines how this icon has carried herself through a brutal business. Consider Sherri Shepherd. Returning to that celebrated couch only days ago, Shepherd reflected on guidance a former colleague handed over ages back, a message that has trailed her ever since. It is never about you, came the counsel. Someone else is the reason. Set the pressure down and grasp that you are ferrying people along on a trip.

The fuller version of that story deserves a frame on the wall. Broke and mid divorce during those early days at the panel, Shepherd slipped on pricey clothes she could not begin to afford, quietly scheming to return them for the cash. At the register the bill had already vanished. Goldberg had covered it. The instruction arrived wrapped in a hug as the tears fell. Pay it forward. Three words hold the entire philosophy, and you can trace their fingerprints across a whole generation of Black women handed a lift instead of a locked gate.

So what keeps this seventy year old dynamo busy right now, as autumn arrives in 2026? Quite a lot. That morning couch never lost the moderator, and Season 30 kicked off this month with the veteran still steering the conversation. Away from the studio, her plate runs fuller than performers half her age can juggle.

Warm months found the EGOT winner circling back to where the whole ride started, reinventing her landmark solo work as The Whoopi Monologues for Lincoln Center. A new documentary about her life is also in production, guided by Oscar nominated director Geeta Gandbhir and drawing from the family history Goldberg explored in her memoir about her mother and brother. The actress rolled out a publishing imprint, offering other authors the chance that long felt sealed off. Netflix has a comedy on deck too, reading like a family cookout, teaming the legend with Jenifer Lewis, Vanessa Williams, and Vivica A. Fox under a production team that includes the Obamas’ Higher Ground. Earlier this year she even turned up in Italy’s longest running television series, Un posto al sole, playing American businesswoman Eleanor Price during a guest arc. Rest, it seems, belongs to people with less on their minds.

Let it land. At the exact age when society expects Black women to drift quietly into the wallpaper, this one is founding imprints, mounting productions, and pouring into whoever comes next, all in one breath. Chasing relevance is beneath a talent like this. Relevance keeps doing the chasing instead.

Why should any of it stir us, the Sistas reading on lunch breaks and at kitchen tables across the map? Representation with no staying power amounts to a photo op, nothing more. A sturdier lesson lives here. Proof that one of us can be prickly, hilarious, political, tender, and utterly unbothered by a tense room, yet still assemble something that outlasts the moment. Approval was never the ask. Being seen was, and the elder made certain the Sistas trailing behind would be seen right along with her.

Palmer captured the spirit of it without trying to sound deep. One lane, entirely your own. There sits the inheritance. Not a photocopy of anybody, just permission to stay wholly yourself and thrive regardless.

We toss the word icon around until it means next to nothing. Clear away the noise, and the genuine article stands before you. Meet the performer who declined the box. Watch the star who shattered the glass, then swept the shards so nobody behind would bleed. Thank the mentor who paid for the outfit and dried the tears. Well before the daytime debates and the viral clips, the quiet labor of making space was already underway.

Those coming up owe Whoopi Goldberg far more than a nod. They owe the promise drawn out of Sherri all that time back. Accept what landed in your hands, and pass it along. Doors stay open exactly that way. A hallway thousands walk through, that is what one woman can become.

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.

Some folks clapped. Others clutched their pearls. A whole lot of them typed a verdict before the woman had even reached the end of the block.

I’ve been chewing on this pattern a good while now, and it’s worth stopping over, especially for those of us who are Black women out here living while the world keeps some quiet tally running on us. On purpose or by pure accident, what this artist keeps showing me is a thing I already knew down in my bones. You can live as loud as you please. Somebody else is still holding the mic.

You can’t answer everybody. Try it and you’ll just go hoarse.

Think about the road this sister’s walked. Back in 2019 she was stealing scenes in Hustlers, planted right in the frame next to J.Lo and not once getting swallowed up. Then came a turn on The Mandalorian, the cartoon voice work, an Emmy for that show where she went digging for dancers built like the rest of us. For a good long minute there, Lizzo was the summer. First Black woman since 1994 to take Record of the Year at the Grammys. Those hooks played in every grocery store and blasted out of car windows all season long.

Then 2023 hit. A lawsuit. Former dancers called the set a hostile place to work, and she swore none of it was true. Some claims have since been dismissed, but the dancers’ case has continued. Here’s the part most folks skip. Once a crowd makes up its mind, people hang onto the charge and let the denial slide right off. Overnight the beloved became the punchline. Late night bits, group chats, think pieces, the circus in full.

Here’s what I keep coming back to. When the internet decides who you are, what’s a woman supposed to do with the rest of her days? Spend them explaining? Draft a rebuttal for every keyboard with a grudge? There’s no end to that road. No statement’s ever long enough. No apology lands clean enough. That mob wasn’t really asking a question, so tell me, what exactly are you supposed to answer?

Earlier this year she got on TikTok and put it on the algorithm. The rollout got buried. The system was racist and fatphobic. Half her own people, she said, had no clue new music was even on the way. Maybe the complaint held water. That June studio album, her first in four years, landed with a thud and moved roughly 2,600 album-equivalent units its opening week. Some critics were unkind. That comeback everybody loves to root for just didn’t show up on time.

And I felt for her. Not because that album was any good, but because I know that posture too well. It’s the reflex to explain yourself all over again, dead sure the right words will finally win the jury over. A whole lot of us live right there. We drag it into the office and into our own kitchens, always out to prove we earned the seat, forever shrinking a size so nobody nearby has to feel some way about our shine.

Onlookers don’t get a vote on every chapter of your life. Let me say it again for the Sistas in the back who need it stitched on a pillow. They. Do. Not. Get. A. Vote.

Now look at what she pulled at fashion week. No slinking in with an apology. No sack, no lowered eyes, none of that begging pardon for daring to take up space. Girlfriend put on a gown built to be photographed and strutted in like the last three years hadn’t laid a glove on her. Debate the dress if you like. The message isn’t up for debate. Showing up as herself, on her own clock, Lizzo had clearly decided the peanut gallery doesn’t run her calendar.

Underneath all the hot takes sits the lesson.

I’ll be plain with you, because I’m not out here selling a fairy tale. Deciding that strangers don’t get a vote isn’t the same as pretending you never took a wrong turn. Accountability is a real thing. If you did people wrong on your watch, that reckoning is yours to sit in, with them, in rooms a whole lot quieter than any comment section. What I’m pointing at is a different animal. It’s that low steady hum that never lets up on Black women, coming for our bodies, our big laughs, the plain nerve it takes to want more than we were handed. That hum isn’t accountability. It’s hunger. It only wants to watch us make ourselves smaller.

Look where she may be headed next. Lizzo is attached to star as Sister Rosetta Tharpe, the godmother of rock and roll, in a film for Amazon MGM Studios with Forest Whitaker among the producers. She’s been taking guitar lessons while preparing for the role. Sit with that pairing a second. A woman the culture tried to toss out, stepping into the shoes of somebody the culture damn near erased, one of those bold Black women history keeps trying to lose, a gospel shouter who had an electric guitar wailing before Elvis became a household name. There’s poetry in that. And a quiet middle finger, too, aimed square at everybody who wrote her off.

So no, I’m not writing today to rule on whether the music slaps or the choices were wise. None of that is my business, and truth be told it shouldn’t be eating up yours either. I’m talking to the Sistas hauling that invisible scorecard around town, the ones up at 2 a.m. drafting a defense for people who never earned a word of it. Y’all are handing a room full of strangers the ruler, letting them measure out how much space you’re allowed to take up.

So set the pen down. Set the phone down too. Some folks are going to read you wrong no matter how careful you are with your own story, and that misreading is theirs to haul around, not yours.

In real time, Lizzo keeps teaching this same lesson, mess and music and all. You can burn your one wild life answering the internet, or you can go make something, wear what you please, and let the crowd holler at the back of your head while you keep on walking.

I know which way I’m leaning. The question, my Sistas, is what you’ll choose.

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.

Then along comes this sister out of Oakland, quiet as she pleases, flipping the whole notion on its head.

Zendaya turned 30 on the first of September, closing out her twenties as one of the biggest box office stars in Hollywood. Let that settle. Not the messiest. Not the one throwing drinks on some reunion couch for ratings. One of the biggest draws in the business, period. Her films have pulled roughly nine billion dollars worldwide across a career, all of it earned without ever seeming to beg for our eyes.

What a year she has had. “The Drama” opposite Robert Pattinson landed in the spring. We got one last turn as Rue in the final run of “Euphoria,” the part that made her the youngest ever to win a lead drama Emmy. Christopher Nolan folded her into “The Odyssey” as the goddess Athena. Summer brought “Spider-Man: Brand New Day,” and “Dune: Part Three” is still on the way this December. Somewhere in the middle of all that, she married Tom Holland in a ceremony mostly kept for herself. No spectacle. No press circus if she could help it.

Now, by her own mama’s telling, she has largely stepped away from social media, keeping even more of herself beyond the reach of the constant online churn. Booked to the ceiling, yet still drawing a line around what belongs to the public and what belongs to her. That kind of boundary calls for a backbone most people simply do not carry.

Here is what keeps turning in my mind, and why our Sistas need to sit with it. This queen built one of the biggest careers in the business without leaning on anger. Confrontation is not her currency. You will not catch her cooking up beef or performing fury for a camera. Her whole way of carrying herself stays measured, gracious, a touch bashful even. Still, not a soul would dare call her weak.

We got sold a lie somewhere down the line. The lie insisted that gentleness and authority could never live in the same body. It whispered that to be taken seriously, Black women have to stay hard, always braced, armored up before their feet hit the porch. Plenty of Black women wore that armor so long they forgot there was skin beneath it.

Understand me, I am not knocking the fight. Our mothers and grandmothers came by their edges honestly, and I thank God for every one of them. But look at what this sister puts on display. Tenderness and command can ride together. You can speak low and still be heard clear across the room. Ease was never the same as giving up.

Notice how quickly calm gets mistaken for shrinking. A lady keeps her tone even, and somebody decides she must not care. She measures her words instead of flinging out the first hot thing, and folks read that restraint as weakness. Such a mix up has cost a whole lot of us dearly. We came to believe the only way to prove we mattered was to get big, get loud, swallow all the air so nobody could pretend not to see us.

Zendaya strolls a red carpet in something no one predicted, offers a sentence or two, and owns the chatter for a solid week. Her pull has nothing to do with noise. It flows from knowing exactly who she is and declining to act out anybody else’s script. Filling a space, it turns out, has never required raising your volume.

The difference matters more than almost anything I could tell you. Soft and small are not kin. Being small means you shrank yourself so another person could feel taller. Being gentle means you have nothing left to prove and you rest easy in that truth. One is a cage. The other is open sky. Our young Sistas coming up behind us deserve to see that line drawn bold, because the culture keeps smudging it on purpose.

I think about the little ones in my own family, nieces with their faces buried in a screen, sizing themselves up against whatever is trending by Tuesday. They are being schooled to believe attention equals value, that whoever hollers loudest takes the crown. And here stands somebody near their age, showing them a different path. You are allowed to protect your peace. Guard your business. Let the work do your talking while your private life stays exactly that, private.

There is grown wisdom in how she moves, and the girl is only thirty. Early on she figured out what took the rest of us decades to swallow, that you do not owe this world your every feeling. Bleeding in public was never the price of being believed. Restraint turns out to be its own muscle, and maybe the harder one to build, since it asks you to hold your emotions rather than sling them at everybody within reach.

I hear folks call her dull because she declines to bring theatrics. What that says lands far more on them than on her. We have grown so cozy with chaos that peace now looks foreign. A sister gliding through this brutal industry with grace, minding her own, turning in excellent work, then going home to a life she protects like a lioness? Let that be the goal, not some rare exception.

So I will say it plain to the Sistas reading along. Loud is not the ticket to being heard. Fighting everybody is not the toll for respect. Making yourself hard was never the recipe for real strength. Some of the mightiest sisters I have ever known spoke barely above a hush and moved mountains regardless. My own mother could hush a whole room with nothing but a look, never once lifting her hand or her voice.

Watch this queen move into a season with even stronger boundaries around what the public gets to see. Married, decorated, sitting near the summit and choosing privacy over constant visibility. No one is vanishing here. This is somebody who understands her worth does not hang on being seen every single day.

Take the lesson, ladies. Be tender where tenderness suits you. Stay still when stillness serves. And do not let a single soul convince you that choosing the gentler road means you thought little of yourself. You can walk through this life with grace and open hands and remain the most formidable presence in any room you decide to enter.

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.

So here is what actually happened. On September 10, the actress and her husband, former NFL cornerback Nnamdi Asomugha, turned up together at Jay-Z’s concert at the Stade de France in Saint-Denis, just outside Paris. A quick clip surfaced on her Instagram Stories and that was the extent of it. Nothing staged, nothing captioned half to death. Just the two of them bopping along while Hov ran his catalog and Justin Timberlake popped out for a surprise performance of “Holy Grail.” Scroll a touch too fast and you would have missed it. Then it was gone, tucked back into a life she does not hand over to strangers.

And that, Sistas, is exactly the lesson.

Somewhere along the line we got it into our heads that whatever a wife keeps offline must be something she is hiding. Skip a few anniversary tributes, quit posting the matching outfits and the captions about your king, and here come the whispers. She must be going through it. Trouble at home, surely. We let the algorithm start grading our devotion, and plenty of us handed over the red pen without a fight. Love, apparently, is not real anymore until it has been documented.

Kerry never signed that contract.

She married Asomugha back in 2013, and for more than 13 years now she has guarded the life they built with a steadiness most of Hollywood cannot fathom. Her babies are rarely seen. If she and Nnamdi fight, and show me the couple that does not, we never hear a word of it. On any given week she will do a red carpet, talk up a project, get real about the acting, and then she is gone, back to a corner of her life that belongs to nobody but the folks living inside it. Call it cold if you want to. I read it as somebody who simply knows where her own fence line sits.

And here is where a lot of us fumble it. We have started treating discretion and concealment like twins, and they are nothing of the sort.

Concealment is fear. It hides because it believes exposure would bring ruin. Discretion is another animal entirely. It is a woman deciding that some parts of her existence are simply not up for public consumption, not because they are shameful, but because they are sacred. One posture grows out of anxiety. The other grows out of dignity. That second lane is where she has always lived, and she does it without a hint of apology.

Black women, in particular, have been handed a strange and exhausting assignment. We are expected to perform our wellness. Show the world the flawless household. Post the smiling little ones. Prove, again and again, that we are thriving, that our men adore us, that our families are intact. And should we choose to keep quiet, the assumption is rarely that we are content. The assumption is that we are covering for something.

Sistas, we do not owe anybody that receipt.

Nobody is owed a parade of your husband across the timeline to confirm he treats you right. Your kids are not a photo exhibit for strangers to rate against their own. And you can absolutely sit on every rough patch, every argument, every three in the morning worry, without turning it into content for an audience that forgets you by lunchtime. What happens under your roof is yours. Full stop.

Now, people will twist this, so hear me clearly. Choosing privacy does not mean the woman has retreated from view. Far from it. If anything, her calendar right now is fuller than it has been in years.

Look at the run she is on. There is the starring turn on Apple’s series Imperfect Women, which she produced as well. There was that daring reimagining of Whoopi Goldberg’s classic solo piece at Lincoln Center, the one that took a show built for one and handed it to five performers, and Washington took her final bow on August 2 after a run that drew plenty of attention from critics. She is also set to star in and executive produce An Innocent Girl, a new Netflix thriller. Back in the winter she turned up as a presenter at the BAFTAs in London. On top of all that, the industry continues handing her major honors, the Spotlight Tribute at the Gotham TV Awards, a Lifetime Achievement nod from Essence at the Black Women in Hollywood gathering.

None of that is the behavior of somebody in hiding. It is the behavior of a grown woman who worked out, the hard way like most of us do, that you can be everywhere in your craft and still refuse to put your marriage on display. All of her fuel goes into the work, the producing, the causes she believes in. And when the day is done, she heads home, closes it all off, and keeps what is left for the handful of people who have actually earned a place in it.

That split is worth saying plainly, especially for the younger sisters watching us. Everything does not require an audience. Some joys shrink the instant you announce them. And a struggle only gets heavier once you invite a crowd to referee it. A union has plenty to manage without a comment section rendering verdicts on it.

I have known too many Black women who poured years into a good relationship, only to watch it come apart under the strain of performing it for everybody else. You get couples so busy polishing the appearance of happiness that they never get around to the dull, unglamorous work a partnership actually runs on. Patience does not come with a filter. Forgiveness has never once trended. And no clip going viral will ever stand in for two people picking each other on a plain old Tuesday, when the cameras are off and there is nothing to win.

Kerry understands this in her bones. Whatever she and Nnamdi have going, they grew it well away from the flashbulbs, and it held precisely because neither of them ever fed it to the beast.

So next time that itch hits, the one that says prove your happiness to folks who are not paying a single one of your bills, stop and ask what it is really about. Who exactly are you performing this for? Ask whether all that documentation is deepening your bond or slowly hollowing it out.

Black women are allowed a private self that is nobody’s business but our own. Your kitchen table, the bedroom, a lazy Sunday, none of it has to land on a grid for strangers to grade. You can be crazy about your husband and never once say his name online, and that quiet takes nothing away from what the two of you have.

That is the steady sermon Kerry Washington has been preaching for a whole career, one guarded, graceful choice at a time. My prayer for every last one of us Sistas is that we finally believe it. Protect your peace. Guard your home. And let the world go right on wondering.

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.

My problem is not the noise itself. It is where that noise ends up going. The venom aimed her way rarely stays put where it started. It spills. It lands on a whole category of us who recognize the script by heart, because we have lived some version of it in offices, in sanctuaries, in marriages, in families that adored us right up until we asked for something more than they were prepared to give.

Meghan drew a line. Leaving an institution far older than the country of her birth was heresy enough. Speaking on her own behalf, where the unspoken rule demanded silence and a pleasant, grateful face, pushed it past forgivable. For that act of self-possession, much of the press shifted from treating her like a fairy tale bride to casting her as a convenient villain.

Linger a while on the charge hiding under all that noise. Ungrateful. One little word carrying so much freight. It gets hurled at any sister who dares to leave a comfortable position, who divorces a provider, who resigns from the committee, who announces she will no longer host the holiday everybody just assumed she would carry until the day she died. The meaning beneath it is old and it is cruel. You were handed a seat at the table. How dare you decide the chair never actually fit.

We know this rhythm intimately. Speak firmly in a meeting and suddenly you are aggressive. Ask to be paid what the labor is worth and now you are difficult. Choose peace over proximity to power and here come the whispers that you were always a bit too much, a bit too proud, a bit too sure of yourself for your own good.

What landed on the Duchess was that old rhythm, only cranked up loud and paid for by every tabloid with a press to run. Think back to the way some of those same papers covered Catherine during that period, then look at the blades they kept sharpened for the woman with melanin in her skin. The difference was hard to miss. Graceful when they liked the face, dangerous when they did not. Sistas clocked it before the ink was even dry. Black women have been cast as the dangerous one our whole lives.

None of this is truly about a single celebrity and her grievances. It is about the cost of saying no. Refusal to shrink. Refusal to perform contentment inside a house that quietly diminished you. Refusal to stay put and stay quiet and stay small so that everyone around you can remain cozy and undisturbed.

Now let me flip the whole thing over, because marinating in grievance is not why I sat down at this keyboard.

There is a lie sold to us hard, especially once we cross into our forties and beyond. That lie says our currency is youth, and once youth fades we had best keep our heads down, tame our opinions, and act thankful anybody still glances our way. Chase the smoother face, smaller dress size, and relevance like it is sprinting away from you.

I want to preach the opposite gospel. The most interesting thing a grown Black woman can do is keep growing into herself, decade after decade, while the rest of the world waits on her to shrink. Picture the ones you truly admire at 45, at 55, at 70. There is the aunt who quit apologizing for taking up room. The teacher who finally said the honest thing at Sunday dinner, unbothered when the whole table went quiet. Somebody’s mother who left the marriage, or the pulpit, or the corner office, and built a life she picked on purpose. That is not fading. That is arriving.

These days Meghan sits inside a brand-new chapter as I write this. Late this past summer she and her husband returned across the water with their two children, dropping 7-year-old Archie and 5-year-old Lili into new schools for an extended stretch on English ground. For now, much of the couple’s attention has been on getting the children settled into school and adjusting to life back in Britain. Read that decision plainly. Their children come ahead of whatever public spectacle follows the family, and Meghan continues to move on a timetable far more her own than the one she lived under as a working royal.

Then came the answer, right on cue. Around a dozen days after the family touched down, out went word from the palace in the form of a letter reiterating that the couple remain non-working members of the Royal Family, that their HRH styles remain in abeyance, and that their charitable and commercial work is carried out in a private capacity rather than on behalf of the monarch. Sit with the timing. Two adults move their children to a new country, bother nobody, and the palace still finds it necessary to circulate paper making sure nobody is confused about where Harry and Meghan stand. The official explanation may be administrative. The symbolism is harder to ignore.

Watch how deeply all of this unsettles folks. A grown lady past forty, unbothered, financially independent, married to somebody who chose a different life with her over the family firm, protecting her children from the same lenses that have followed her for years, and still occupying prime real estate in the collective imagination. The assignment was to disappear gracefully, and she declined it outright. That refusal reads as a threat precisely because it works.

Here is what I want my sisters to carry away from every bit of this. Staying young was never the assignment. That ship sailed on all of us, and it was never the paradise the magazines swore it was. What keeps you in the room is harder work, and far less cute. You put in year after year until folks cannot dismiss you, until you know your own worth so deep it does not wobble when somebody pokes at it. Reach that place and it stops mattering what the boss thinks, or the husband, or the palace, or some stranger hammering at a keyboard in a comment section.

Black women catch hell for that kind of knowing, worse than most, and I am not about to pretend different. Set a boundary and it gets called a tantrum. Leave and you get called bitter. Speak and you get called angry. The toll is real. Yet look closely at who ends up paying it, and again and again you find the ones who eventually got free.

The former working royal is not my heroine. I do not need her to be. What she offers, for our purposes here, is a wildly public example of a private truth Sistas have passed across kitchen tables for generations. The world will always hold opinions about Black women who decline to stay in the spot assigned to them. Let it. Their discomfort was never yours to carry.

So put your energy into the woman you are still turning into, the one waiting three or ten or twenty years up the road. She will not be younger, quieter, or easier to sit beside at dinner. What she will be is more herself than she has ever managed. That is the one who stays lodged in people’s minds long after the day’s headlines rot away. Nobody has figured out how to bottle that and sell it back to you, Sistas, and nobody ever will.

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.

Count it up. That Dallas girl who broke through in ’97 as “On & On” carried “Baduizm” into the world turned 55 this past February. Yes, Fifty-five years old. And look at the posture now, not squeezing into somebody’s notion of what a hit is supposed to sound like, not begging a teenager on some app for a little name recognition. No change to the formula, arrive as a full self and let the room adjust.

That part is worth sitting with.

Because we have all watched the other movie play out. A grown woman with a real catalog suddenly deciding the smart move is to sound like the child of somebody she once mentored. First the wardrobe changes. Then the face gets tightened. The music starts reaching for a sound that never belonged to the person making it, and something in the voice goes thin, like the trust in whatever made the work worth hearing quietly leaked out. It hurts to watch. Not because aging is a crime, but because the panic underneath it is so loud you can practically hear it in the mix.

Erykah never caught that fever.

Look at the gift from two weeks back. On the 28th of last month came “Before the World Blows: The Abi and Alan Experiment,” a full-length collaboration with The Alchemist, co-produced by Badu and Alchemist and her first studio album since 2010. 16 tracks. Recorded across 18 months between Dallas and Los Angeles. The guest list reads like an artist who knows precisely where she stands in the culture and feels no need to prove it to a soul. Thundercat. Steve Lacy. Kamasi Washington. Earl Sweatshirt. Westside Gunn. No going out to grab the flavor of the week for a little borrowed shine. Badu invited the people whose work speaks to that same strange, funny, spiritual language, and they came running.

The rollout alone told you who you were dealing with. Cryptic posters going up in Sydney and Paris and New York, teasing the project without spelling everything out. A burner phone number folks had to unlock by solving little puzzles, and whoever made it through might land on a call with the woman herself. Not somebody chasing the next generation. Somebody making the next generation come knocking.

Now let me talk to my Sistas for a minute.

Black women get sold a lie early and often. The lie insists our worth carries an expiration date stamped somewhere around 35, 40 at the very outside, and that after that our entire assignment is fighting the calendar with everything we have got. Serums. Surgery. Talking like a teenager, dressing like our daughters, shrinking ourselves into whatever shape the moment claims to crave. The message is relentless, and it lands on Black women with a particular cruelty, since we were rarely handed the grace of being called timeless to begin with.

The whole career reads as a long argument against that lie.

Trace the arc. “Baduizm” gave us the incense and the headwrap and a wisdom some of us were too young to unpack. “Mama’s Gun” got tender and raw. “New Amerykah” went cosmic and political and flat refused to sit still. Every few years the artist evolved, yet never once evolved away from the core underneath. The result was more Erykah, not less. More rooted. More willing to be exactly the person in the mirror, in front of God and everybody.

This approach is the one nobody bothers to market to us, and it happens to be the only one that works.

Becoming more completely yourself. Letting your face be your own face. Letting your curiosities turn stranger and deeper instead of safer and smaller. Trusting that the folks meant to find you will find you, while the ones who wanted a shinier, greener model were never really yours anyway. Real longevity looks like that. Not a frozen expression on a red carpet. A grown woman on a Friday night in the Midwest, singing with the band, surrounded by friends, dropping records that 17-year-olds and 57-year-olds argue about in the very same comment thread.

Nobody is telling you to skip your moisturizer. Take beautiful care of yourself, please. But there is daylight between tending your body and betraying your spirit, and plenty of us have smudged that line trying to stay palatable to people who were never going to be pleased regardless.

Here is what the Dallas native grasped before most of us managed to. Staying relevant is not identical to staying 25. You stay relevant by carrying something to say and finding the nerve to say it in your own voice. Trends move on a clock nobody can beat, and the clock was never the point. The rest is marketing, and marketing has never made a single body immortal.

De La Soul understands this too. That crew could have coasted on nostalgia forever, playing the hits like a museum exhibit behind glass. Instead they gave us “Cabin in the Sky” after losing Trugoy, holding grief and joy in the same hand, still growing well into their 50s. Two legendary acts sharing one bill this month, both flatly refusing to be embalmed while they are breathing. Pay attention and there is a whole sermon in that pairing, the kind our mothers and aunties preached without ever calling it a sermon.

So as this run rolls on toward Toronto and Cleveland and eventually that grand closing night in Los Angeles, carry the lesson with you. The next generation is not a train Black women have to sprint and catch, Sistas. It is not pulling out of the station without you. And you do not owe anybody a smaller, quieter, more forgettable edition of the person you spent decades becoming.

Fifty-five and out on the road behind fresh music with the people who matter most. Making the world itself do the traveling, instead of the reverse. Not holding on for dear life. Just a grown Black woman standing still and tall in a clearing carved out ages ago, showing the rest of us exactly how it is done.

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.

The singer made it plain on September 6. Five shirts pinned to a clothesline, four carrying the names of her children, the last a blank onesie, and a caption that read, “One more person to Love.” At 40, married, settled, and thriving, she still had to hear from people wondering whether five children were too many. The peanut gallery never misses a cue.

So what is Ciara truly up to at the moment, beyond the bump? Plenty. The past year she spent running her own operation, and I mean that in every sense. Album number eight landed, she keeps speaking a tour into existence, and in July she danced through the halftime show at the 2026 MLS All-Star Game in Charlotte with choreography that would leave somebody half her age reaching for a heating pad. Along the way she claimed citizenship in Benin, honored a proud lineage, and kept the ventures humming. This pregnancy is no pause on the career. It moves right alongside the work. The tired old script says a mother trades the stage for a nursery. Ciara is out here tearing the page up.

None of this was promised a decade ago. Back in 2014 she was untangling herself from Future, the Atlanta rapper she had been engaged to, just months after giving birth to their son. That is a particular kind of hard. Leaving a relationship while adjusting to life with a newborn, as strangers online kept a running tally of who wronged whom, meant carrying private pain in public. Somehow she walked through all of it anyway.

Then Russell Wilson entered the picture. They met in 2015, and by the following year they had married. What struck me then, and strikes me still, is how he stepped toward her boy. Future Zahir was never treated as an obstacle to manage or a secret to tuck away. That child became a full member of the household, embraced by a man who understood that loving Ciara meant loving the family she already had. Blended homes are their own quiet miracle when the grown ones decide to act right, and these two decided.

From there the clan kept growing. Sienna arrived, then Win, then Amora in 2023, and now number five is stitched into the plan. Add it up and you land on four pregnancies since she first became somebody’s mama. Some folks hear that figure and clutch their chest like she confessed to a crime.

Here is where the commentary curdles, and where my patience wears thin. A lady gets pregnant at 40, inside a marriage, beside a partner who wants the child every bit as much as she does, and some of the replies are not congratulations. They are arithmetic. How many is too many? Doesn’t she know the risk? Isn’t she exhausted? When is enough finally enough? I have watched people throw confetti for the glow up, the album, the marriage, the joy, then turn cold the second that joy takes a form they would not pick for themselves.

There is a phrase that gets tossed around, advanced maternal age, and some wield it like a verdict on a person’s good sense. Physicians use age as one factor in planning careful, attentive prenatal care, not as a verdict on whether a woman should become a mother. The risks do rise with age, particularly after 40, and those realities deserve to be taken seriously with a doctor. In the comment section, though, medical language can become a cudgel, as though increased risk automatically makes a grown woman’s decision irresponsible.

Consider how differently the same story reads when it centers Russell. He gets called a provider, a family man, a keeper. Few ask whether his body can manage a fifth. No one questions his stamina or his wisdom. The scrutiny lands, as it forever seems to, on the one actually carrying the weight.

That double standard is what I want my Sistas to sit with. We say we cherish Black women, and in plenty of ways we do. The redemption arc? Reposted. The wedding? Screenshotted. The affirmations, framed on the wall. The trouble starts the moment a winner’s version of winning outgrows our own imagination. A big brood, chosen freely, somehow reads to certain onlookers as excess, as showing off, as not knowing when to quit. Yet no one scolds the person with a fifth car or a fifth house. Such a lecture stays reserved for the womb.

So I keep circling back to one plain question. What exactly is wrong with a full home these days? I came up in one, a house run by a grandmother who fed the block and asked no one’s permission. Most of the formidable Black women I admire grew up the same way. A porch crowded with cousins, an auntie for every kind of trouble, a table that stretched with one more leaf and a quick prayer. Then somewhere we got convinced that small is smart and full is foolish, that a busy house means somebody could not plan ahead. Sometimes fewer really is the right call, and that stays nobody’s business but the family making it. The other way around ought to get the same respect. A Black woman with means, a steady partner, and a hunger to fill her rooms with kids is not a cautionary tale. What she has now is the very dream a lot of our grandmothers held without ever getting the resources to guard it.

And the man beside her is fully in. Russell had been floating “Cinco” for years, publicly talking about another baby almost from the time Amora arrived. Something about that lands as healing, the sight of a Black woman being desired that way, on purpose, after she once had to leave a situation that failed to give her the future she wanted. We pour so much energy into warning young Sistas about the men who walk away. We might spend a bit more celebrating the ones who stay and ask for more.

Let the record reflect what this actually is. This is no scandal, and it is no cry for help. A grown woman, clear eyed and well loved, choosing once again to open both heart and home. If that bothers you, sit with it, because the problem is not on her side of the fence. My grandmother would have taken one look at that clothesline of little shirts and told you plain what she saw. A blessing, hung out in the sun for the whole block to admire.

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.