If I just put words to some piece of your life, stay with me here. I keep circling back to Fantasia Barrino, and it has nothing to do with the road being smooth. It was a mess. That mess is exactly what makes her story one for us.

Picture High Point, North Carolina. Fantasia grew up there with little money and no easy road ahead. After being sexually assaulted by a classmate and facing harassment at school, she left before earning her diploma. By seventeen, she was a mother. Reading was another struggle, one she carried quietly until she found the courage to discuss it publicly. By every yardstick the world uses to divide folks into winners and the left behind, that teenager looked like somebody who had already lost the race before the starting gun.

Then 2004 arrived.

At nineteen, that young mama walked onto the American Idol stage and sang like an open wound had finally found a melody. The country voted. Barrino took the crown in season three. What a television competition could never fully capture was the hardship and determination behind that remarkable voice. Offstage, she had diapers to change, school years left unfinished, and that coat of shame society so often throws over a girl who becomes a mother too young.

Here is the part worth underlining for every Sista taking this in right now. Winning did not wipe out the rough beginning. Nothing ever does. What the victory exposed was that the beginning had never been the full truth about that girl at all. A difficult start is one chapter. Far too many of us got tricked into treating it as the final page, closing the book on ourselves before the good parts could unfold.

Think about the reading alone. Grown and already famous, this Sista went on national television in 2005 and admitted to struggling with reading and writing. Do you understand the courage in that? Plenty of people would rather carry a secret to the grave than let the world spot the gap. Fantasia sought help, worked with tutors, and eventually earned her GED. Years later, in 2023, she enrolled at Central State University to study business. The same young woman who once left school without a diploma was now pursuing a college education after becoming a household name. That kind of determination preaches a whole sermon about Black women and the lie of “too late.”

Broadway came knocking in 2007. The role was Celie in The Color Purple, and anybody who knows that character knows Celie got stitched together out of everything a person can survive. For somebody who had lived close to that, the part never felt like pretend. Then 2023 rolled around and Hollywood released a new film adaptation of the musical, and guess who showed up as Celie one more time. Critics praised her performance, and the work earned her a Golden Globe nomination. The young woman who once struggled to read was now bringing one of literature’s most unforgettable characters to life on the big screen.

None of it came smooth. Money troubles made headlines. Darkness came too, including a painful mental health crisis that Fantasia later discussed openly. It was a frightening chapter in a life already carrying more than its share of hardship. The point of this witness is not that pain skipped the door. What matters is that pain never got the last word.

Look at where things stand all these years later. Her son Dallas Xavier arrived in 2011. Marriage to Kendall Taylor followed in 2015, and Fantasia has spoken warmly about the love, encouragement, and personal growth she has experienced in that relationship. Their daughter Keziah arrived in 2021, early and tiny, a baby who spent time in the NICU before finally making it home. Add up what has stacked up since the American Idol win in 2004. Albums kept coming across the years, Free Yourself and Sketchbook among them. A Grammy Award came in 2011 for her song “Bittersweet.” Movie screens came calling. That tour bus has yet to park for good.

So no, that rough start did not become a permanent address.

I need you to hear why this lands so hard for us specifically. Black women get handed a particular kind of pressure. Let somebody stumble and everybody leans in to watch. Watch that same person win and you can almost hear the shrug. Teenage pregnancy, leaving school early, a work history full of holes, folks will line it all up like proof in a case you never signed up to stand trial for. Worse, when enough people hand down that verdict, you catch yourself saying it back in your own voice before anybody else can.

That right there is the trap. Not the setback itself, but the story we keep building on top of it.

A teenager could have let seventeen define the rest of her life. Zion, the daughter born during that very stretch the world might have written off, grew up watching a mama refuse the script others laid out for her. Imagine the lesson stitched into that household. Every setback is information, never a sentence.

Here is what I want my Sistas to take from all of this. Your transcript is not your testimony. The year things fell off track is not the year your worth got decided. Every closed door in the past is sitting back there in the past, which happens to be the one place that cannot reach forward and snatch the pen out of your hand unless you allow it.

Some of you went back to school at thirty-five with children watching every move. Some of you buried a dream back at nineteen and decided the door shut behind it. It did not. Doors like that swing back open for the ones stubborn enough to keep rattling the handle. You can still finish the degree. The business you keep putting off can still get built. Nobody is going to throw you a parade for starting over. It happens quietly, on some regular Tuesday, and counts just the same.

Fantasia did not become remarkable because the opening was pretty. That opening was brutal. She became remarkable because she refused to let the brutal part become the whole story. The woman who struggled through school became a Grammy-winning singer, an accomplished actress, a college student, and a mother who could show her children what it looks like to keep reaching for something better.

You get the same decision to make. Not next year, not once every condition lines up perfectly, but today, right where you sit.

Your past already happened. The future has not been written yet. And the beautiful, terrifying truth of it is that the pen rests in your hand.

Pick it up, Sistas. Somebody down the line is going to need your chapter on getting back up.

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.

Here is the part that gets me, the part every one of us in the cheap seats should clock. Being somebody’s wife never once ate her alive. Walking in, she was already grown, already Princeton and Harvard on paper, already carrying a career with her name stamped on it and a mouth that spoke up in any room. A wedding band changed not one bit of that.

One piece of this I flat out love. When these two first crossed paths at the Chicago law firm Sidley & Austin back in 1989, guess who held the rank? Michelle was the associate assigned to advise the fresh summer associate and show him around the place. Sit with that for a beat. Before the speeches and the motorcades, a brilliant sister already knew the office and the territory, and he had to earn his way into her good graces. That beginning tells you something sturdy about the foundation. Respect got baked in from the jump rather than bolted on later once the fancy titles arrived.

Sistas, we have all watched the other version of this story play out up close. A friend meets a decent man and slowly goes quiet. Bit by bit that big laugh shrinks. The hobbies she loved fall clean away. Pretty soon my turns into our for absolutely everything, and not in the sweet way either, more in the way where we squint and cannot quite locate the woman we knew underneath all that bending.

Loving a man all the way down while keeping a firm grip on your life, those are not opposites, whatever anybody once told you. Going along with the campaigns and the moving trucks, and a level of watching that would cost most of us our sanity, never once cost her the lines she drew around the kids, the girlfriends, the gym time, that sideways humor. On the record she admitted it too, the rough patches where the sight of that man got on her last nerve. Couples therapy came up in her own writing and interviews, plain as day. Saying it out loud matters, because it kills the lie that a solid union just floats along by itself. Whole people put in the work. One of them cannot do all the carrying while the next one coasts.

Peep everything she guarded. Start with the name. Michelle Robinson was somebody long before she was anybody’s wife, and the kid raised in that tight little walk up off Euclid never really moved out. The ambition hung around too. Law firm work, public service, serving as vice president of Community and External Affairs at the University of Chicago Medical Center, the Let’s Move years, a memoir that has sold far more copies worldwide than Barack’s A Promised Land, a whole production company. Her prints are on every bit of it, not just his. Black women get fed the same old script, the one where you dim yourself so your man can glow. That page? She ripped it right out the book.

Then there are the friendships, and baby, the friendships. The girls around her, the ones showing up loud in coordinated outfits cracking up at their own jokes, made her feel like a regular person back when the rest of the country just wanted a poster. No husband was ever meant to be your whole world. Some parts of you only a good girlfriend can reach, full stop. Any man who wants you to cut your people loose so he feels more comfortable is asking for way too much, and I would side eye him for even trying.

Independence here is not about sleeping in separate rooms or running some cold little scoreboard of who owes who. Picture something warmer. Two grown folks rooting hard for each other precisely because each one shows up whole. Barack pursued the presidency and later received the Nobel Peace Prize. The former hospital executive reshaped how an entire nation pictured what a First Lady could be, then went and built media ventures that stand tall on their own merit. Neither one of them had to get smaller for the next person to win big. That is not luck, and it damn sure is not easy. You guard a thing like that on purpose, with boundaries you actually enforce and a hard no to disappearing into somebody else’s schedule.

Want to know what has Mrs. Obama’s calendar packed in 2026? A whole lot, honestly. At sixty two she is still on the mic for IMO, the podcast she runs with her big brother Craig Robinson, the pair going back and forth on relationships, friendship, family, grown kids and whatever else is on their minds. She also expanded that world in late 2025 with The Look, a limited companion podcast series tied to her book of the same name, where she talked about style, identity and how a woman sees herself on her own terms. Then there is the Obama Presidential Center, which opened in Jackson Park in June 2026, sitting on the exact side of Chicago that helped make her. You see the thread yet? All these years deep, the work still carries her stamp on it, not his.

Now, nobody is telling you to go run her exact life, seeing as the rest of us are not exactly moving into the White House. Even so, the lesson carries. Build the kind of love that pours into your days instead of draining them. Keep your own money right. Hold those girlfriends close enough to call at 2 a.m. Whatever dream you had before anybody showed up, hold it tight and feed it, even with the bills stacking and his mood gone sour. Permission is not coming in the mail. You take it.

So let me say it straight, Sistas. Loving somebody hard and keeping a grip on who you are have never been at war. Every strong couple I have watched up close, that Chicago pair dead in the middle of the list, is a couple of whole folks who picked each other and keep on picking, not two scared halves grabbing in the dark so they do not fall. Fullness like that belongs to Black women right along with everybody else. We earned partners who clap for our shine, not ones who turn it down to look bigger.

More than three decades together, and the romance was never really the whole story. What stands out is a woman who walked all the way into forever and refused to leave a single piece of herself at the door. So go on. Do the same thing.

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.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson has spent four years now living under the harshest lights this nation keeps trained on public servants. Confirmed in 2022 as the first Black woman to sit on the country’s highest bench, a jurist raised in Miami and educated at Harvard stepped into a marble building that was constructed long before such an arrival was imagined, and got straight to work. No honeymoon came stitched into the robe. Her appointment carried the weight of history, but the daily work still required questioning attorneys, examining constitutional arguments, writing opinions, and occasionally disagreeing with colleagues whose interpretations of the law differed from her own.

Here is the part folks keep confusing. Brilliance and popularity are not cousins. They are barely on speaking terms. A mind that questions, probes, and refuses to nod along on cue can make people uneasy, because agreement is comfortable and genuine thinking is not. Jackson has established a particularly active presence during oral arguments. Last term, running from October 2025 through the spring of 2026, she accounted for nearly 22 percent of the words spoken by the nine justices during oral arguments, according to a Washington Examiner review of the transcripts. Sit with that. More than anybody else on the bench. And when the rulings finally landed, the written record repeatedly found her disagreeing with the majority, sometimes in opinions bearing her name alone.

That combination, outspoken in the room and sometimes isolated in the result, illustrates the distance between independence and applause. Look at what unfolded this past August. When the majority temporarily lifted a lower court’s injunction blocking parts of the Trump administration’s proposed changes to mail voting ahead of the 2026 elections, the disagreement produced a 23-page dissent from Jackson. The majority considered the states’ legal challenge premature rather than deciding whether the underlying executive order was constitutional. Jackson argued that the decision risked introducing unnecessary uncertainty into an election season already underway. What stood out was that her objection appeared on its own paper. Sotomayor had written a separate dissent, and Kagan had joined it, yet Jackson chose to explain her concerns in language of her own. Whatever one’s interpretation of the legal questions, the episode offers a clear example of a justice choosing to put an individual argument into the public record.

Consider the written record itself. Earlier in the spring, in the Louisiana map fight called Callais, the majority ruled that a congressional district drawn to provide Black voters with greater electoral representation constituted an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. Justice Elena Kagan authored the principal dissent, joined by Sonia Sotomayor and Jackson, warning about the implications for protections against racial vote dilution. Days later, Jackson issued her own separate dissent concerning the disruption the ruling had created for Louisiana’s ongoing elections. Then, on September 24, came a public appearance at the University of the District of Columbia’s law school, where she questioned the Court’s increasing reliance on its emergency docket. Her concern centered on the practice of resolving consequential disputes through expedited proceedings, sometimes without full arguments or detailed explanations. She called for greater restraint from her colleagues. Raising institutional concerns from within the institution itself places those disagreements before the public, where they can be examined rather than left behind closed doors.

Now, Sistas, let us sit with the pressures that can accompany such visibility. Every syllable spoken by a woman occupying a historic position becomes part of a larger public conversation. Praise her and questions may arise about whether people are celebrating the achievement or evaluating the work. Question her and another debate begins over whether the criticism concerns the substance of her reasoning or the expectations placed upon women in positions of authority.

That scrutiny can become personal quickly. If you have ever been the only face like yours at the conference table, in the department meeting, or up on the leadership retreat, you already know the arithmetic by heart. Twice as good for half the welcome. Perform flawlessly and still leave wondering why the space went quiet the moment you opened your mouth. Black women have been confronting those expectations for generations, in classrooms and boardrooms and choir lofts and courtrooms. Plenty of Black women reading this have probably felt some version of that experience long before reaching the end of this paragraph.

There is another dimension to Jackson’s public life that deserves attention beyond the disagreements surrounding her judicial opinions. Lovely One, the memoir published in September 2024, became a number one New York Times bestseller, recounting a family’s journey from segregation to the Supreme Court within a single generation. Its title comes from her given name, Ketanji Onyika, meaning Lovely One, suggested by an aunt who served in the Peace Corps in West Africa. This year the book became the centerpiece of Portland’s Everybody Reads initiative, with eight thousand free copies distributed through libraries and high schools across Multnomah County. Jackson appeared at the program’s concluding event in March 2026, bringing her story of education, perseverance, family expectations, and personal ambition to readers beyond the courtroom. Picture a woman whose professional life is constantly examined stepping outside that environment to share the experiences that shaped her. As these words go to print, another Supreme Court term is approaching, with oral arguments scheduled to begin October 5. Her memoir and judicial writings offer two different windows into a life that extends well beyond the public disagreements of any single season.

Here is what I want my Sistas to carry out of all this. Favorite was never the assignment. Nobody should have to make universal adoration the price of doing meaningful work, and the people selling you that fantasy are often the ones who benefit when you shrink yourself down. A daughter of two public school educators arrived at that chamber carrying a lifetime of preparation, a professional record, and responsibilities that require far more than a pleasant public image. Ketanji Onyika has spent her years on the bench questioning, writing, explaining her disagreements, and adding her interpretation of the law to a record that will remain long after today’s arguments have faded. Her colleagues will continue reaching their own conclusions, legal scholars will continue debating those opinions, and the public will have its say. None of that requires popularity to be confused with professional accomplishment. Popularity is weather. Integrity is climate.

So the next time somebody hints that a gifted woman owes the world a smile to go along with her intelligence, remember the jurist willing to put her disagreements into writing even when nobody else signs on. Correct and welcome do not always arrive together. Honest and applauded rarely share a calendar either. A Black woman does not owe anybody a place on a favorites list simply to have her work examined seriously, her qualifications acknowledged, or her voice heard without being reduced to a personality contest. Some of us learned that lesson from our grandmothers, who understood the difference between being respected and being liked long before anybody invited them into a boardroom. Jackson’s experience offers another occasion to consider that distinction. Opinions can be challenged, arguments can be debated, and disagreements can remain disagreements. None of those things should require a woman to make herself smaller simply because the room finds her voice inconvenient.

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.

Let me back up for anybody who needs the context. Waterloo, Iowa is home ground, born there in 1976, and the decades since have gone to reporting on how race decides who gets a strong education and who gets handed the scraps. These days the work runs deep: a teaching post at Howard, a Pulitzer on the shelf, and a steady habit of building institutions. The newest venture, a bookstore and bar called North Star, is set to open in Brooklyn this fall. So we are not talking about somebody who wandered into this subject by accident. This is a life’s work, a whole heartbeat.

Around 2015, the journalist and her husband set something in motion. Living in Brooklyn, the couple enrolled their only child, Najya, in prekindergarten at P.S. 307, a predominantly Black, high-poverty public school that many wealthier families had avoided. Private tuition sat well within their budget. Other public school options were available, too. Both got waved off, on purpose, the hope being that their presence and their pull might lift the place for everybody’s babies and not only their own. The reasoning was rooted in belief. Our people deserve better than what the system usually hands out, and putting skin in the game felt like one way to say so.

Plenty of us feel that ache in the chest already. You reach a crossroads with your kid and both directions look like a gamble. Down one path sits the neighborhood spot where a baby lands among faces that look familiar, where the auntie on the corner knows the name, where nobody makes a young one feel like a guest in her own skin. Down the other path sits a place with newer books, more offerings, teachers who actually stick around, and results that shine on paper. Both roads cost something dear. Neither one comes free.

Najya, by her mama’s own telling, gained something precious on that block. The girl grew up rooted, secure about who she was, never fretting over whether the room had space for one more. That is not a small thing. Plenty of our young ones move through fancy academies feeling like the only raisin in a bowl of oatmeal, and it wears a hole in the spirit over time. Yet the tougher high school told a different tale. An assessment turned up real holes in the math, gaps in algebra and the basics that should have been locked down years before. Tutoring helped the climb, and by the end of her first semester, she was bringing home mostly A’s and B’s. She also passed her state algebra examination by the end of the school year. Still, the girl put it plain. The schooling she wanted never showed up when she needed it most.

Before anybody piles on this mother, let me say something clear. Every one of us weighing these same options is guessing. Nobody hands you a crystal ball at the hospital. Ask the Sistas doing this right now, up past midnight at the kitchen table with enrollment forms everywhere, trying to guess what a child will need five years out. Do you send your baby where the heart feels held, or where the mind gets pushed? Where the spirit is safe, or where the transcript shines? Anybody who calls that arithmetic simple has never sat down and done it. So let me put it straight to my fellow Sistas. Standing at that same fork, would you make the call this mother made for your own kids?

There is a genuine cost to being the one forever explaining yourself. Black women who came up as the only face in the room remember that particular loneliness, the constant code switching, the teacher who assumed the worst before the first bell. A neighborhood campus can spare a kid every bit of that. It can hand over friendships that feel like kin, a lunchroom where the jokes land just right, a mirror wherever the eyes land. Belonging is not some luxury item. For a heart still forming, it is oxygen.

And yet. Friendships and comfort do not teach fractions. Roots, deep as they run, do not cover the science a university will one day expect a student to know cold. That is the whole bind, laid bare. A child can be happy and still get shortchanged, both at once, and a good parent misses it because those smiles at dinner are not fake. Black women have carried this exact math for generations. Do you choose the place that keeps her safe, or the one that pushes her harder? Most make that call with nobody clapping.

Here is what the whole saga reminds me. Our young ones are not props for our beliefs, however righteous those beliefs may be. Najya did her own homework, literally. A closer look at how her school measured up, and the cold numbers landed in her mama’s lap. That young lady held an opinion and deserved a real hearing long before the fallout ever showed up on a placement test. For anybody still weighing it, start asking sooner than feels comfortable. What do you actually want? Which building makes you feel most like yourself? What lights you up? A ten year old cannot run the entire household, of course, but a growing heart carries clues a grown woman should never wave off.

I don’t have a clean answer, and I won’t fake one, because what works in my house might flop in yours. Some children thrive right on their own block, held up by folks who love them. Others need the harder class and the bigger door even if it pulls them away from home for a while. What matters is watching close and being ready to reconsider the day your child tells you the truth. Nikole got there. Once her daughter made it clear that she wanted something different, this mother gave the teenager the freedom to choose her own public high school. The transition was not easy, and Najya soon discovered that a more demanding classroom brought challenges of its own. She even considered transferring to another school shortly after arriving. Yet her mother listened, found her the academic support she needed, and helped her work through those difficult first months. That took love.

What sits heaviest with me is the willingness to stand up and say, in front of God and everybody, that a big thing got done wrong. Sistas, how many of us can hold our own mess up to the light like that, let alone share it with the entire country? Staying quiet and guarding the legacy like a jewel was an option, and it got skipped. Choosing her daughter and the plain truth instead, this writer handed the rest of us permission to carry both grief and grace about the calls we have made for our families.

As of this week, the calendar stays full: teaching, building, catching heat and applause in nearly equal measure. The bookstore is on the way. The 1619 work rolls forward. And somewhere in Brooklyn, a teenager is continuing her education with a stronger academic foundation and a mother who has learned to listen more closely to what her daughter needs.

So here is my closing word to the Sistas reading this with a form to fill out and a knot sitting low in the stomach. Trust your gut, but check it against theirs. Weigh the ranking, and then refuse to bow to it. Grown Black women already know community holds a growing girl up, a good teacher does the stretching, and most children need both to grow into who they are becoming. Nobody gets it perfect. That is fine. The main thing a young one needs is a parent who keeps listening and will change her mind when the facts change. That beats any ranking on a chart, and it is the part of an education that sticks.

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.

Ask most of us what a college degree is for, and the answer arrives on reflex. It secures a good position. Land the role, keep the role, retire from the same desk with a small pension and a nice card signed by the office. That reflex, handed down with love, quietly undersells what an education truly grants. Michelle Obama has spent a lifetime illustrating the difference, and what her journey offers Black women is worth far more than any line on a business card.

I still tear up watching a young sister cross the stage in her cap and gown, and the reason has little to do with the ceremony. What moves me is the door swinging open behind her, the kind no one can lock again.

Consider where Michelle Obama began. A girl from the South Side of Chicago, raised in a cramped apartment upstairs from her great aunt, told by a college counselor that Princeton might be aiming a touch high. Michelle enrolled anyway. Sociology, with a minor in African American studies, then off to Harvard Law. By every yardstick our grandmothers would honor, the young lawyer had made it. Big firm downtown. Fancy office. A paycheck that could finally take care of her people.

Now here comes the part folks love to skip. Walked away from all of it.

The law is where she met a young man named Barack, so nobody’s mad at how that chapter went. Trouble was, the work itself never fit right. She has spoken about the dissatisfaction she felt practicing corporate law and the desire to find work that gave her a greater sense of purpose. So the woman left. City government came first. Then came a stretch pouring into young people through a nonprofit, Public Allies. Leadership positions at the University of Chicago and its medical center followed. Look at the whole run. One woman every step, carrying the same education into a new chapter whenever she decided it was time to turn the page.

Right there sits the whole lesson I want my sisters to hold.

We came up being taught that schooling was a ticket to one particular seat. Earn the diploma, land the position, cling to that position until they hand you a cheap watch and a grocery store sheet cake in the break room. Our mothers meant every word of it. They survived stretches where holding onto anything steady counted as a victory, so bless them for the wisdom that fit their season. Still, the world our daughters step into rewards the woman who bends without snapping, and real education can give you the tools to make that adjustment.

Here is how I put it to the young sistas I mentor. Your diploma is not a cage. It is a passport.

A passport does not name the single country where you must spend your days. It simply gives you the opportunity to cross into places you might never have imagined visiting. What you build on the other side belongs to you. You can practice medicine at 30 and open a bakery by 40. Teach reading for a decade, go back for that master’s, then run the entire district. Nobody has the standing to tell an educated woman her season has closed.

Look at what the former First Lady is doing this very fall of 2026. Back in June, the Obama Presidential Center opened in Chicago, and before that crowd she spoke about the importance of hope and our responsibility to act on it. Earlier this month she turned up at the US Open glowing in a bold Chanel piece, watching Coco Gauff compete in the semifinals like the royalty she is. Her production company even stepped onto Broadway this year, helping bring a revival of Proof to the stage with Ayo Edebiri and Don Cheadle. A whole book on her personal style landed in 2025, arriving after her memoir, Becoming, sold more than 18 million copies around the globe.

Add all that up. Author. Producer. Speaker who commands a room on two continents. Style icon well into her 60s. A former corporate attorney whose legal education opened doors far beyond the courtroom. Which of those counts as the real career? All of them at once, and no single one. Point is, a single job description was never going to hold her, and it will not hold you either. The schooling gave her room to keep changing her mind about who she wanted to be. She kept shedding the old version and building a new one, and I never heard her say sorry for it.

So hear me, because this matters. The label on your business card is temporary. The mind you sharpened earning that credential is yours for good. Layoffs come. Whole industries fold overnight. The company you gave 15 faithful years will replace you in a Tuesday meeting and cater the lunch while they do it. Yet nobody can repossess what you learned. Nobody can garnish your capacity to think, to write, to steady a room, to crack a hard problem after everyone else has quit.

Sit with this for a second. Not so long ago in this country’s history, there were states where teaching an enslaved Black person to read could land somebody in a world of trouble. Black women were denied opportunities to learn, and many risked punishment for pursuing an education. We carry that history. It is in us. So when you walk that credential across the stage, understand you are not just decorating a job application. You are finishing what your great grandmother may never have been given the opportunity to start. Being two, three, four different women in one life is not you being flighty. It is the whole prize. Your people were told they could only ever be one thing, if that.

Now if you are reading this stuck in some job that quit fitting you seasons ago, listen, I am not saying quit on Monday morning. Bills are real, and I respect them. What I am telling you is that the same brain which earned the paper can earn a fresh direction. You are not stuck for life. You never were. You simply lost track of what that diploma actually purchased for you.

To the sistas still deep in it, buried under loans and midterms and quietly wondering whether any of this pays off, let me speak straight. It can, though not always the way the brochure promised, and hardly ever on the timeline you prayed for. Keep going if that degree still serves the future you want to build. Black women have carried this country on tired backs while collecting less credit than they deserved, and each of us who crosses that stage can smooth the road a little for the girl coming up next.

Now I want to hear from you, sistas, because this was never meant to be a lecture I deliver alone.

Which school claimed you? Tell me. Drop the name of your university, your community college, the HBCU that raised you right, or whatever hall of learning shaped who you are today. Some of us bleed our school colors clear to the grave, and honestly, I love that about us.

And here is my real request. If you crossed that stage decades back, or you are dragging yourself through midterms right now, what would you tell a younger sister still working up the nerve to enroll? What is the thing you wish an older woman had pulled you aside and said? Talk to her like she is sitting across from you. She really is out there reading. Your voice will do more for her than one more polished speech from somebody who never walked the road she is traveling.

Here is what Michelle has taught us. The education was never the ending. It is the launchpad. Black women have every right to remake themselves as often as they please, and that paper you earned is simply the receipt proving you have already done something worth celebrating. So go on and use it, sis. Not a piece of it. All of it.

Staff Writer: Brenda Poole

BP writes about entertainment, relationships, faith, and life in general… She enjoys speaking on things Black women can relate to and hopefully giving a sista something useful along the way…

Feel free to email her at BrendaP@ThySistas.com.

Start with the trick the data plays on us. This past summer the reports showed our jobless rate dropping from 7.07 percent to 5.73 percent. Sounds like sunshine, right? Look closer and the floor gives way. Over that same stretch, employment among us fell by 212,000. Our labor force shrank by 387,000. The count of us no longer even searching climbed by 454,000. That is not the kind of comeback anybody should celebrate. Economist Katica Roy called it statistical exclusion, which is a polite way of saying women disappeared from the unemployment tally not necessarily because they found work, but because they were no longer counted as part of the labor force.

Let me talk plain, Sistas.

Back in January the jobless rate for us sat at 6.3 percent, up from 5.4 percent a year earlier, running nearly double the 3.4 percent white women were carrying. By the close of 2025 it had touched 7.3 percent, the ugliest mark in roughly four years. The Institute for Women’s Policy Research put numbers behind a trend that ought to stop you cold. Across 2025, Black women suffered disproportionate losses in professional and service occupations and ended the year with 113,000 fewer employed women than when it began.

Now here is where it stings the educated among us most.

Everybody assumes a degree is a shield. It is not. The Economic Policy Institute found that the losses from 2024 into 2025 landed especially hard on Black women with bachelor’s degrees. Their employment-to-population ratio fell 3.5 percentage points while their labor force participation rate dropped 2.3 points. Read that twice. The very sisters who did everything the playbook demanded, the diploma, the certifications, the fifteen and twenty year resumes, were among those taking the hardest hit. IWPR’s Barriers, Not Bootstraps report also documented the obstacles confronting Black women searching for work, while other analysts have estimated that roughly 600,000 Black women were economically sidelined during the broader downturn.

The federal purge did a lot of the damage. Sisters made up about 12 percent of the federal workforce while accounting for roughly 7 percent of workers nationwide, so when hundreds of thousands of federal employees departed and the federal workforce shrank by roughly a quarter million positions, we absorbed a punishment heavier than our share. Whole departments that leaned on our labor, education chief among them, took some of the sharpest blades. And the pain may not be finished. More than one in five Black women in the labor force works in health care, a field vulnerable to Medicaid reductions that some estimates say could ultimately contribute to hundreds of thousands of lost jobs across health care and the broader economy.

Let me sit with what all of this actually does to a person.

A job is never only a paycheck. It is the mortgage, the tuition envelope, the retirement account we were finally building for the first time in our family line. When it disappears, the ripple hits the whole household, since so many of us are the anchor keeping everybody afloat. Long stretches of unemployment are climbing too, with people out of work more than half a year making up roughly a quarter of the unemployed by the summer of 2026. That kind of drought wears on the spirit. Long-term unemployment can deepen anxiety, stress and depression, and you cannot separate a broken labor market from the emotional toll carried by the people trying to survive it.

Which is exactly why so many are done waiting for the boardroom to grow a conscience.

While the office keeps stalling, we are building. Roughly 2.9 million businesses now belong to Black women, about 18 percent of women-owned firms nationwide, and their numbers rose roughly 13 percent in 2025. Still, let me keep it honest. Ownership is no cushion. Black women-owned businesses averaged only around 41,000 dollars in annual revenue, compared with roughly 179,000 dollars for women-owned firms overall. Among the smaller group of companies employing workers, Black women-owned firms averaged around 650,000 dollars in revenue, still the lowest among the demographic groups measured. The culprit is not brains or hustle. Access to capital, lending gaps and investor networks remain major barriers. Many founders are still juggling the dream beside another source of income. So this migration reads less like triumph and more like survival with a business license.

Who owns this mess?

Let me spread it fairly. Companies that hung belonging banners in 2020, then quietly shredded those vows once the political weather turned, carry real guilt. So do executives who treated diversity like a press release instead of a promise. Policy earns a large slice, since gutting whole agencies and rolling back fairness initiatives changed the employment landscape for workers who had long found opportunity in government. And a culture that still calls a self assured sister aggressive, then turns around and praises a loud man for the very same energy, keeps the whole machine humming. Black women have propped up these institutions for generations, often doing the inclusion labor free of charge, and this is the thanks.

What needs to happen?

Start with the federal side, because government work was one of the few ladders that ever paid us square. Stop the bleeding, reconsider positions eliminated without a clear public benefit, and rebuild the agencies that served communities while providing stable pathways into the middle class. Enforce the anti bias laws already sitting on the books instead of letting them collect dust. Protect access to Medicaid too, because deep cuts do not stop with patients. They can reach hospitals, clinics, caregivers and the workers whose paychecks depend on the health care system.

Corporate America has homework too. Fix the first broken rung, publish promotion data by race and gender, and turn hollow mentorship into real sponsorship with money and consequences attached. Pay us what the role is worth, then defend our record the way the golf buddies get defended. Retention is cheaper than the talent hemorrhage they are pretending not to see.

For us, Sistas, the strategy shifts. Build the network you were shut out of, on purpose and without apology. Stack savings, clients and skills before you ever surrender a badge, because leaving ready beats leaving wrecked. Learn the money game, the grants and credit lines and pitch rooms, so the capital wall becomes a hurdle instead of a locked gate. And guard the sisterhood fiercely, because isolation is exactly how they win.

I am not preaching that anybody quit tomorrow. Some will stay and force change from the inside, and that is holy work. Others will walk, and that deserves respect, not a sermon about loyalty to places that showed them none.

What I will not do is call any of this quiet. Hundreds of thousands of Black women pushed to the economic sidelines is not a whisper. It is a verdict on a country that keeps announcing recovery while many of the women who built its households, staffed its agencies and earned every credential they were told to earn slip through a hole nobody wants to name. The only question left is whether anyone in charge reads the verdict before the best of us are gone for good, running our own shops and signing our own checks.

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.

I return to that scene often, because plenty of us recognize the room. We know the chair, the desk with its little nameplate, the calm and almost kind expression on a face preparing to tell us what we will never be.

Here is what makes it cut deep. The disbelief rarely shows up as cruelty. It comes dressed as realism, as concern, as someone claiming to save you from disappointment. A kid walks in believing she can reach the top shelf, and a grown person with a title and a stack of brochures gently lowers her hand. Be practical. Consider your options. Somewhere more your speed.

For Black girls especially, that lowering starts early and repeats often. We get read before we get known. A teacher decides who is gifted and who is merely loud. Somebody else sizes up who gets a shot at honors and who ought to settle for the safe track. Before a girl even knows what she is capable of, grown folks have quietly drawn a line just over her head, light enough to deny and firm enough to shape where she believes she belongs.

What that counselor missed, looking across a desk at a teenager from the South Side, was everything propping her up at home. Michelle had a family that treated her mind as a gift worth feeding. There was a brother who set a standard, and parents who refused to let either child believe the world was closed. So when a stranger with a clipboard offered a smaller life, the girl had somewhere to take that insult and set it down.

Not every one of our daughters has that. Some carry the doubt home and unpack it alone. Others swallow it whole. That is the quiet violence of low expectation, the way it can harden into prophecy when nobody stands nearby to argue back.

Off she went anyway. Princeton, then Harvard for the law degree, then a career that would eventually place her in rooms that counselor could never have pictured. The sweetest part is not the revenge of it, though there is a satisfying tang there. What lands even better is how ordinary her triumph reveals the original judgment to be. No miracle, just a capable woman who happened to have people around her who refused the smaller story. Give that same faith to a thousand more like her and watch what unfolds.

I also think about the ones who took another route entirely and did just fine. Some girl gets told she is aiming too high, and rather than fold she carries all that promise to Spelman or Howard or Hampton, schools founded to educate Black students who had been denied access to much of American higher education. On those campuses nobody has to be talked into seeing a brown face as capable. It is assumed. That certainty is the water they swim in. Black women have been walking off those yards for generations, degrees in hand, ready to run hospitals and courtrooms and schools and companies, all of them formed in a setting that started from yes rather than from suspicion.

That is the thing the naysayers keep missing. Ability was never the scarce resource. Belief was. The talent has always been abundant in our children. What runs short is the number of grown folks willing to look at a brown face and assume greatness instead of assigning limits.

I have watched it up close in my own circle. A niece told she tests poorly, when the truth was a testing system that never tried to reach her. One neighbor’s daughter got waved off from engineering because the man advising her could not picture it, though she did the math in her sleep. Each time, the pattern holds. The child is fine. What failed was the imagination of the adult in charge.

This is why the tale of that counselor keeps living in our mouths, passed between us like a warning and a rallying cry at once. It is not really about one bad conversation in a Chicago office. What haunts us is the countless versions happening right now, in schools all over, where somebody with authority quietly decides that a gifted young sister should aim for less.

We repeat it so our daughters arrive prepared, so they grasp that a no from a person with a nameplate is only an opinion and not a verdict. Our girls need to hear, early and loud, that their sense of their own worth must rest on something sturdier than the say-so of strangers who barely bothered to see them.

There is grown medicine in all of this for the women too. Plenty of Black women are still carrying some old counselor’s voice, some teacher, some manager, some relative who told them to be reasonable about their dreams. That whisper does not always leave when we grow up. It trails us into promotions we talk ourselves out of and rooms we assume were built for someone else.

Michelle’s answer to her doubter was simply to become. No speech in that office, no clapback for the ages. The whole shape of her life stood as the rebuttal. Sistas have been answering that way for a very long time, letting the diploma and the corner office and the thriving, well-raised children do the talking that words rarely manage on their own.

So when I hear that someone once told a girl from the South Side she was not enough for the Ivy she craved, I do not only feel the old sting. I feel the deep familiarity of it, and beneath that, something close to pride. Because we know this in our bones. We have lived our own versions. And the best of us, the everyday sistas raising the next batch of dreamers, are busy right now making sure the pencil line above their daughters’ heads gets erased before those young ones ever learn to believe in it.

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.

Keke Palmer said something recently that stuck with me. On the August 18 episode of Amy Poehler’s Good Hang podcast, she named a lesson picked up from Queen Latifah, and it had nothing to do with a big sit-down speech. A director once turned to the Queen and asked her to suggest an actress for a part. The answer was Keke, and that was the whole thing. No lecture, no inspirational quote fit for a coffee mug. Just a name, spoken in a place where real decisions were being made while the young talent herself sat nowhere in sight.

Sit with that for a second. The distance between those two acts is bigger than it looks.

Most mentoring dumps the entire gamble onto the person being mentored. You give her what you know, she runs off to use it, and if the door stays shut anyway, hey, you tried. Sponsorship flips that arrangement. When Latifah put Keke forward, she was staking her personal credibility on the result. Had that young actress shown up unprepared or acting a fool, it would have bounced right back on the person who vouched. Being willing to be wrong in public on somebody else’s account is a whole other level of faith, and hardly any of us get near it.

Here is what makes it land even harder. The two of them had worked together years earlier, going all the way back to Barbershop 2: Back in Business in 2004, then reuniting for Joyful Noise and Ice Age: Continental Drift in 2012. Latifah had watched her over a long stretch. Over all that time she clocked how the girl carried herself when the cameras cut off, whether the job got done right, whether there was drama or a professional at the table. That was not a favor handed to a stranger. Years of showing up had built something real, and it finally cashed out.

Palmer put it plain. Folks clock you when you least expect it, and the effort you sink in winds up doing your talking for you.

What stays with me is how little noise any of it made. There was no public spectacle around it. There was no press release about Sistas lifting each other. It happened inside the ordinary machinery of a working day, one professional telling a decision-maker, go with her. Those are the exact instances that move careers, and they almost never make the highlight reel.

Which brings me around to us. To you, reading this right now.

Have you ever put a sister’s name in a room she could not walk into herself? I do not mean encouraged her. Sending her a link to some job posting and wishing her luck does not count either. I mean spoke up for her where it mattered, when your reputation was riding on the result. There is a wide canyon between those two things, and if we are honest with ourselves, most of us live on the comfortable side of it.

Advice is the thing we give out freely, precisely because it asks nothing of us. We love handing the younger Sistas in our orbit a good talking-to about staying ready and keeping their reputations clean. All of that matters. Notice, though, how it keeps our skin out of the game. We get to feel like elders without ever risking a thing. Sponsorship demands more. It asks whether you will speak up for her to your boss, forward her portfolio to the client who trusts your taste, tell the hiring committee you would stake your standing on this woman.

I think about the gifted Black women I have watched claw their way up with talent to spare and nobody willing to speak for them. Passed over, not because they came up short, but because the folks already inside the door stayed silent. We love pointing at the gatekeepers. Fair enough. What we dodge is that a few of them wear our own faces, and keeping quiet is its own kind of decision.

A lot of us haul around a scarcity thing, quiet as it stays, the fear that only one seat exists and her getting it means mine is gone. The Queen works from the opposite place. Someone that settled can vouch for another woman, coach her, hand over part of the spotlight, and never once feel robbed. The pair are lined up to work together again on The Voice: Celebrity in spring 2027, with Palmer hosting and Queen Latifah serving as one of the coaches.

You cannot fake that. It only turns up in someone who quit believing the lie about the single chair.

None of this requires fame or a fat Hollywood Rolodex. The principle scales all the way down to your job, your church, your block, your group chat. Maybe a friend runs a little catering hustle from her kitchen, and all it takes is you naming her when the office asks who cooked. The cousin launching a boutique needs you tagging her online, not just telling her in private how proud you are. Another up for a promotion needs you in that meeting insisting the credit is earned, especially during the seconds when nobody else will say it.

I have had to check myself on this. There were stretches where I offered plenty of encouragement and precious little sponsorship, where I called a woman gifted and then went mute the instant my footing was on the line. That is not the elder I hope to become. How Latifah moved with Keke, quiet about it, not fishing for a bit of credit, taught me plenty. Most of the labor that actually holds a community together happens where no eyes reach.

So let me leave you with this, and I want a real answer, not a skim past it. Whose name did you actually say out loud this year, out where it counted? And whose are you still sitting on, promising yourself you will speak up next time?

Black women have always survived on that kind of behind-the-scenes lifting, generations of it, most never written down anywhere. Somebody spoke for you somewhere once. You may never learn who, or exactly when. That debt cannot be paid backward. It gets carried forward, to the next one coming, into rooms she has not yet learned exist.

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 church has been influential in the foundation of education for our people, and they have helped to put thousands of our people through college. Denominations like the A.M.E are rooted not only in the Word, but in activism, and education. Because of our history of intelligence having a strong place in church…anti-intellectualism in the church is damaging. The minds that need to be in the church back away, because they are scolded and judged for studying the word and applying it to the world around them. They respect tradition but that does not rank higher than righteousness.

In congregations with Elders that look down on the intelligence in those younger that ask questions they tend to remind of the men and women of God in the Bible that were not scholars. They focus on the leaders in the bible that were “everyday people” and hype up the importance of their humility and their being led by the Spirit which is what made them successful in ministry. No one can argue against being led by the Spirit, but everyone used by God was not uneducated.

Some of the greatest names in the book were not only intellectuals but formally educated. Moses, Soloman, and the Apostle Paul are just a few of the lives God would use to lead and teach his people. Why then are we judging and scolding intellectuals in the church. This is dangerous, and it seems to be sweeping congregations silencing men and women of God who dare to speak up regarding the word, and things going on in the world. When one doesn’t just bow to tradition and title here is a fight coming that should not be. What is unfortunate is one can also have the same fight in family where the elders of the family are clergy. Younger people find themselves in battles at church and amongst family simply because they are critical thinkers around their belief system and speak up about it.

This is not the origins of our church according to our history in this country. Anti-intellectualism in the church can divide congregations, and even harm members spiritually. We should all be working together to edify each other in Christ. Just as Peter had a place in the church, so did Paul. If we continue down this path, we are asking for our thinkers to walk away from any calling God may have on their life in terms of ministry because they may feel they value their peace. The hypocrisy is just too loud in this area. The inferior and insecure behavior that causes this must be addressed especially when it comes from those in leadership. God qualifies the called, and that includes the intellectual. Being a critical thinker and studying deeply does not mean you are not led by the Spirit. That is something that must be stated and understood because nothing feels worse than having your salvation questioned because you are an intellectual in the church.

Lastly, we must be mindful not to do to each other what has been and is still done to our people in this country. Black people have had to fight for their minds to be respected and are still fighting. We have created, invented, and built a nation that calls us intellectually inferior. Our credentials are always questioned as though our ethnicity is an invisible asterisk. We have managed to rise despite, but there are still challenges created to slow us down. Knowing this, how can we sit back and do this to each other in the most sacred space we have? How is it that we can disregard the minds God have given our congregation and communities because they often call us to account? These minds are calling us to dig deeper in our understanding of God, faith, and each other. Just as every regular mind is not devoted, every intellectual mind is not disrespectful and without Spiritual guidance. We must remember there is a place for all in the House of God as he gifts us as he sees fit, and those gifts should be valued.

Staff Writer; Christian Starr

May connect with this sister over at Facebook; https://www.facebook.com/christian.pierre.9809 and also Twitter; http://twitter.com/MrzZeta.

As a writer and advent reader, I’ve spent years learning about how our stories move through generations, and I’ve learned that storytelling has always been one of our greatest tools for survival and joy. Long before we had libraries or classrooms, we had porches, living rooms, and laps. We had elders who could turn a simple moment into a lesson. We had tales that carried our history, our humor, our warnings, and our dreams. And even now, with tablets and apps and AI reading assistants everywhere, nothing replaces the feeling of a book in a child’s hands.

Physical books slow the world down just enough for a child to breathe. They give the mind room to wander, to imagine, to question. When a child flips a page, they’re not just moving through a story—they’re practicing patience, curiosity, and focus. And for Black children especially, books become mirrors and windows. Mirrors that show them they matter. Windows that show them what’s possible.

In our community, storytelling has always been more than entertainment. It’s how we’ve kept our culture alive. It’s how we’ve passed down traditions, values, and identity. When a Black child reads a book about characters who look like them, speak like them, or come from families like theirs, something powerful happens. They see themselves as heroes. As thinkers. As creators. They learn that their voice belongs in the world.

And when those stories are shared out loud—when a parent reads to a child, or a grandparent tells a tale from their own childhood—that’s when the magic deepens. That’s when storytelling becomes a bridge between generations. I’ve seen children sit at the feet of elders, listening with their whole bodies, absorbing not just the words but the rhythm, the emotion, the love behind them. Those moments strengthen family bonds in ways no screen ever could.

In 2026, our children are growing up in a world that moves fast and doesn’t always make space for them to simply be children. They’re exposed to news, images, and pressures that can weigh on their spirits before they even understand what they’re feeling. Books offer a kind of refuge. A place where they can explore big emotions safely. A place where they can practice problem‑solving through characters who face challenges and find their way through.

I’ve watched children learn empathy from stories. I’ve watched them learn courage. I’ve watched them learn how to ask questions, how to imagine new worlds, how to dream beyond what they see. And I’ve watched families grow closer when they make reading a shared ritual—bedtime stories, Saturday morning library trips, or even just ten quiet minutes together on the couch.

There’s also something deeply cultural about holding onto physical books. They become heirlooms. A book signed by a parent. A book passed down from an older sibling. A book with worn edges because it was loved so much. These objects carry memory. They remind our children that they come from a lineage of storytellers, thinkers, and dreamers.

And yes, technology has its place. Digital tools can support learning, open access, and spark interest. But they should never replace the intimacy of reading a book together or the grounding presence of a story told face‑to‑face. Our children need both, but they especially need the kind of storytelling that roots them in who they are.

In a time when the world often tries to define Black children before they can define themselves, storytelling becomes a form of protection. A way of saying, “Here is who you are. Here is where you come from. Here is what you can become.” And physical books become the vessels that carry those truths.

So yes, in 2026, our children still need books they can hold. They need stories that honor their culture, spark their imagination, challenge their minds, and strengthen their spirits. They need the sound of our voices reading to them. They need the warmth of our presence beside them. They need the stories that remind them they are part of something bigger—something beautiful, something powerful, something deeply Black.

And as a community, we need to keep telling those stories. We need to keep passing them down. Because when we strengthen the imagination of our children, we strengthen the future of our people.

Staff Writer; Christian Starr

May connect with this sister over at Facebook; https://www.facebook.com/christian.pierre.9809 and also Twitter; http://twitter.com/MrzZeta.