To understand the backlash, you have to rewind a few years. In 2018, during the first Trump term, this same woman took to Instagram and spoke out sharply against the administration’s treatment of immigrant families. Something shifted in the years that followed. The girl who came up in Queens, the one who once sounded the alarm, now openly praises a president she previously criticized. It is a striking turn for someone born in Trinidad who built an early reputation on speaking up for the overlooked. There were earlier moments when her lyrics stirred political debate. Back in 2012, she referenced Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney in a song, although she later explained the lyric as sarcasm rather than an endorsement.

The transformation picked up real momentum toward the close of 2025. That November, she appeared at a United Nations event addressing violence against Christians in Nigeria, lending her voice to a cause the Trump administration had been highlighting. Then, on December 21, she surprised the crowd at Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest in Phoenix, joining Erika Kirk onstage and offering praise for both President Trump and Vice President JD Vance. January 28, 2026, brought the image that landed on phones across the country: Nicki and Trump standing together at a Washington event promoting Trump Accounts, a savings initiative that includes a one-time $1,000 federal contribution for eligible American children born between January 1, 2025, and December 31, 2028. She declared herself his number one fan, held his hand before the cameras, and later proudly displayed a Trump Gold Card.

Spring brought a lengthy TIME magazine conversation in which the Pink Friday star tried to lay it all out. Trump, she suggested, carries his own brand of energy, much the way Marilyn Monroe once commanded attention. She also spoke about feeling disappointed with Barack Obama and frustrated by the expectation that Black entertainers should automatically support Democrats. By July, Trump publicly praised her looks and talent during a White House luncheon. Her supporters cheered. The ones who cannot stand her rolled their eyes and went hunting for screenshots. Online, it became the same tired slugfest it always does, with both sides dug in well before the day was out. The gestures continued from there. She had already shared images of a Bible bearing Trump’s signature earlier in the year, another moment that left fans debating just how close the relationship had become.

All of which brings us to the present, October of 2026. The midterms are only weeks away, and Nicki has become a prominent celebrity voice publicly supporting the president. A bitter public feud with California Governor Gavin Newsom has consumed plenty of attention, particularly over his positions on transgender issues and the sharp words exchanged online. Ask her why she has changed, and her explanation reaches beyond party politics. She has described feeling drawn toward something bigger than music, a calling she believes has been developing since childhood. Whether people believe her or not is another conversation altogether.

It has been a stretch since Nicki delivered another full studio album. Pink Friday 2 landed in December 2023, and while she has released music since then, much of the conversation surrounding her lately has had less to do with records and more to do with politics. For an artist who once kept everybody guessing about her next verse, that alone says plenty about how dramatically the public conversation has changed.

So what are the folks who grew up on her supposed to do with all this? Could be growth. People change, and the hungry young striver chasing a dream at twenty rarely lines up with the person staring back in the mirror years down the road. Could be the priorities moved around on her. Money talks. A seat at the big table talks louder, and only a fool believes celebrities are somehow immune to the pull of either. But those are questions outsiders cannot answer for her, and assuming every political decision comes with a financial motive would be unfair without something concrete to back it up.

Then there is the thing a lot of us keep circling without quite landing on it. Somebody who once criticized a president’s policies turns around years later and praises that same man, and naturally people want to understand what happened in between. Nicki has spoken about feeling misunderstood, about growing tired of expectations placed on her, and about a sense of purpose that reaches back to childhood. She has also made it clear that she believes people should be free to change their minds. Those explanations may satisfy some listeners while leaving others with even more questions. Her ballot is hers, nobody is arguing that. The question underneath all of it is simpler: What exactly stayed the same?

For Sistas, the cut goes deeper. Black women have been one of the Democratic Party’s most dependable voting constituencies for generations, turning out at the polls while often questioning whether their loyalty has been properly appreciated. That does not mean every Black woman votes alike, nor does it mean any of us owes a political party lifelong allegiance. Still, when one of our own, rich and famous the world over, becomes close to a president many Black women strongly oppose, the disagreement can feel personal. For some longtime fans, it lands like your favorite auntie taking the wrong side at the cookout. Mad is not the word. Hurt gets closer, and the two are nothing alike.

Think about the first place you lived on your own. A heartbreak that flattened you. That ride home at 2 a.m. after a shift that would not quit, just you and whatever came on the radio. She was in the car for a lot of it. The people who make those songs start feeling like blood even when we have never stood in the same room with them. That is a whole different tie than some streaming stat, and it is why this one stings. A politician changing positions might make you angry. Watching an artist whose music carried you through difficult years embrace politics you disagree with can hit another way entirely.

Now let me be fair about a few things. A woman’s politics are her own business, period. We never bought lifetime loyalty with the price of a concert ticket, and this reflex of tossing an artist in the trash the second they step off the approved script has gotten tired, maybe even a little scary when you really sit with it. Nicki has every right to support Trump, just as her fans have every right to question that support, criticize his policies, or decide they no longer want to spend money on her music. Nobody should have to surrender their political convictions to remain part of a fan base. You can argue with someone and still claim them. Our mamas taught us that much, fussing all through dinner and still fixing each other a plate.

So where does that leave us? Nowhere clean, probably. Might be growth. Could be a genuine change in how she sees the country and her place in it. Maybe some of those conservative ideas were sitting quietly in the background longer than anybody realized. Whatever brought her here, only Nicki knows the whole story. One thing holds steady, though. Folks never forget who sat with them through the long nights, and something in the gut catches the second a familiar tune bends into a key it never used to play. Her road is hers to walk. The rest of us get to notice, to question, to hurt a little, and to carry our own values straight into that voting booth. That conversation, messy as it has gotten, is one worth having out loud.

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.

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.

Anybody who watched her handle the president on Meet the Press understands what I mean. The exchange turned combative fast. Trump talked over her, went after her on air, and called the program crooked. Then, back in June, came an exit for the ages: an abrupt end to the interview and a walk right off the set rather than continuing to answer for his claims about California elections and January 6th.

Watch that clip again and notice Welker. Her tone stayed measured even as the interview fell apart around her.

Now here is the part that hits close to home for a lot of us. We were taught, from girlhood, that we get two scripts and only two. Swallow the insult and stay pleasant, or answer back and get labeled. There is no in between offered to us. Speak up with any heat and suddenly you are difficult, aggressive, “too much.” Stay quiet and you get read as a pushover, the kind who lets folks run all over her. That squeeze is old news to a lot of Sistas. Black women get handed that same impossible choice early, and it follows us into the office and the church vestibule alike.

Here is where Welker refused both of those tired options. There was no performing the meek, agreeable version of herself that would have made the encounter comfortable for her guest. Nor did the moderator give anybody an easy clip of her losing control on camera. Her strategy was steadiness. Every dodge got left hanging in the air. The same even register, repeated, until the swerve became obvious to anyone paying attention. That is not weakness dressed up as manners. That is control. That kind of discipline can look like nothing much on a screen. Anybody who has had to keep it together while somebody works overtime to rattle them knows exactly what it costs.

A low voice can sit on top of a whole lot of steel. The toughest folks I have known barely raised their volume, ever. An editor I answered to years back could shut down a room with one look and a few words she never bothered to say loudly. That came from being sure of her own mind. Welker came to ask real questions of the most powerful person in the country, and she kept asking them even when the interview grew tense.

The president made his displeasure with her public.

By late August the Truth Social posts arrived, with Trump saying Welker would be reported to the Federal Communications Commission for “rebuke or punishment.” His complaint followed a live NBC Washington appearance in which she said his endorsed candidates had produced “some mixed results” and that he would loom large over the coming midterms. Whatever anyone thinks of her analysis, the response was extraordinary: the sitting president was publicly calling for federal punishment of a journalist over comments made while doing her job.

That reaction is worth paying attention to. Welker did not need a screaming match to make the disagreement visible. She stayed in the same measured lane, while the conflict surrounding her became louder.

Sit with that for a moment. Every woman reading can take something from it, Black women most of all. We get told, over and over, that strength has to announce itself. Not true. Half the time the gutsiest move in a room full of hostility is to plant your feet and keep saying what you came to say. Raise your voice and somebody gets to call you emotional and slide right past the point. Steady is much harder to wave away. Sistas have always understood the difference.

None of this means our anger is illegitimate, and I would never tell a sister to bottle herself up for anybody’s comfort. Righteous fury has its place, and history moved because people got loud at exactly the right moment. But there is strategy in knowing which tool a moment calls for. Welker chose composure. Whatever Trump wanted from the exchange, she did not allow its temperature to determine hers.

What the host is doing these days makes the point even better. Still in that chair. Meet the Press finished the 2024–25 broadcast season number one among adults ages 25 to 54, the demographic television news advertisers chase hardest, and the program continued ranking number one in that key demographic season to date during 2026. Welker remains the first Black woman and first journalist of color to regularly moderate a Sunday network public affairs program. She is doing that job while a sitting president has publicly called for the FCC to punish her. That threat surfaced in late August, and here we are in September with the broadcast still going out on schedule. Sunday morning after Sunday morning, the work continues.

Let that settle for a second. The pressure did not push her out of the chair. She kept doing the job.

For the Sistas watching from their couches, from break rooms, from the middle seat on the bus scrolling the clip on their phones, there is a mirror in this. Nobody has to turn into a cartoon to be taken seriously, and nobody has to shrink down to nothing just to keep things pleasant. You can stand firm and stay graceful in the same breath. Folks who mistake that grace for surrender may discover there is a difference. That, right there, is what strength can look like when the cameras are rolling.

None of this was news to us. The women who raised us were teaching it before most of us could talk. What Welker added was the stage, a live one, with a president across the table and millions of people able to watch every interruption, every follow up and every uncomfortable moment. She kept her nerve. The question simply came one more time.

So let me ask you straight. When you watched that exchange and then saw the president publicly go after Welker afterward, what stood out to you most? I have my read on it. I suspect you have yours too.

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.

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.

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.

So when I catch Michelle Obama on my screen these days, 62 and in no hurry about a thing, the former First Lady is not really who I am looking at. It is a woman who quit fixing everybody else’s plate and, late in the game, started tending her own.

She is not the whole point, though. Think of her instead as a doorway.

Here is what her recent seasons have made plain for anybody paying attention. The girls are up and out. Malia, 28, is off building a life behind the camera, Sasha, 25, is making her own way in the world, and both of them, by their mother’s own telling, spent years trying to become people separate from the famous last name they carry. That is the good and proper order of things. Children are supposed to leave. What nobody prepares you for is the strange, ringing silence they leave behind, and someone standing in the middle of it, wondering who she is when the house has stopped calling her name.

Lately she has been honest about something plenty of us whisper and almost none of us say out loud. These days she is finished arranging her calendar around everyone else’s comfort. When she stepped back from certain rooms and certain events, folks could not fathom a wife simply picking her own schedule, so they invented a marriage falling apart to explain it. Sit with that a moment. A grown woman deciding how to spend an afternoon got turned into a headline. She named the real trouble plainly. Women, she has said, struggle with disappointing people. Sistas, does that not land right in the chest?

We know the shape of that fear intimately. We were raised inside it. Church on Sunday meant you were serving on three committees before the benediction. A job meant being twice as good for half the credit and never once flinching. Motherhood meant your own hunger came dead last, after the kids, after the husband, after your mama, after the sick neighbor down the block whose grass you also somehow ended up cutting. Black women have been the load-bearing wall of nearly every family and institution we have ever touched, and the thanks for that has mostly been a request to carry a little more.

Somewhere along the way we got handed a cruel little myth about ourselves. The strong one, the sister who does not break, does not tire, does not want. We repeated it until we believed it, and the belief cost us. You cannot rest when resting feels like betrayal, and reaching for something of your own feels like theft from the people depending on you. Plenty of us have confused being useful with being worthy, and we passed that confusion right down to our daughters like a family recipe.

Which is why the empty nest gets described as loss, a hollow, a grief. For some, it surely is. But for a whole lot of us it is the first real exhale in twenty-five years. It is the morning you wake up and the calendar is blank and, instead of panic, you feel something warm and unfamiliar move through you. Room. Actual room, in your own life, for your own thoughts, with your own name written across the top.

That is the invitation Michelle keeps holding open, and it has almost nothing to do with her resources or the podcast studio. Most of us will never have her lifestyle or her brother co-hosting a podcast while we swap stories about raising kids and getting older. That is not the part to copy. The real thing worth taking is the posture, the willingness to ask, out loud and unashamed, who do I actually want to be now. What do I want my Tuesday to feel like. If a girlfriend calls and says come on, let’s go, can I finally say yes without a committee meeting in my own head about whether I have earned it.

Recently she put a fine point on it. If not now, when. That question ought to be cross-stitched and hung in every kitchen where a tired mother has been putting herself off for later, because later has a way of never arriving on its own. Later has to be seized.

Picture the ordinary versions of this. The 60 year old who raised four children on a school cafeteria wage and is only now learning she is allowed to book a bus trip to Charleston just to see the water. Then there’s the auntie who mothered every child on the block and is signing up for a painting class at the rec center because color always made her happy and nobody ever asked her about happy. Or the retired nurse who spent forty years holding strangers through the worst nights of their lives and is standing in a garden center on a Saturday, buying tomato plants for a yard that will be tended for the pure pleasure of tending. These Black women are not famous. They are the whole story. Michelle Obama simply gave the feeling a face the country could not ignore.

There is grief mixed into it, sure. Nobody hands over the mothering years without a little ache. You miss the noise even when the noise nearly finished you. Some mornings your hand still reaches for the phone to remind one of them about a dentist appointment, and halfway through you remember they handle their own now. That part stings, and there is no pretending otherwise. But here is what folks are not supposed to say out loud. Michelle went on her podcast and admitted she does not miss having her daughters at home, not really, and she laughed while she said it. A generation back, that kind of confession earned you a long talk after service. Now it sounds a lot like the truth plenty of us have been swallowing for a long time.

When Black women watch her carry all of that without a word of apology, what lands is a kind of permission most of us were never handed. Permission to be a person and not only a function. Leave to disappoint a few folks and survive it. Room to admit that the version of yourself who existed only to hold others up was never the whole of you, and that the rest of you has been waiting, patient and hungry, all this time.

So take the trip. Sign up for the class you keep circling in the catalog. Turn down the next thing that leaves you hollow, and do not apologize for it. Some evening soon, let the pot go cold and take yourself out to the porch, hands empty, no one needing a thing from you. The children are grown. That wall got built, and it held. Now the woman who built it gets to walk through the door she has been holding open for everyone else and, for once, hold it open for herself.

That is the life waiting on the far side of all that giving. And Sistas, we have more than earned the right to go find 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.

Long before most of us could spell her name, she had worked this out. Watch the old footage from the early seventies, that crown of hair rising like something close to holy, and notice how her tone refused to bend for a jittery nation. Davis worked with the Black Panther Party and remained active in the Communist Party after the Panthers prohibited dual membership. Through it all, the young philosopher refused to sit down and stay grateful. Political prisoners, racism, capitalism, the machinery that grinds poor people into dust, all of it came out in full sentences that assumed you were sharp enough to keep pace. The state answered with a warrant after guns registered to Davis were used in the deadly Marin County courthouse takeover. Prosecutors accused her of participating in the plot and charged her with murder, kidnapping, and conspiracy. J. Edgar Hoover placed her on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list, and for one long season the country made her the face it loved to fear.

Here sits the part the tidy histories skip. An all-white jury acquitted her of every charge in 1972. Prosecutors failed to prove their case, but the manhunt, the headlines, and sixteen months behind bars had already turned her into a national threat, a brilliant Black woman who would not perform meekness on command. Set free, Davis kept right on talking. No apology tour. Not one softened second act thanking the captors for the growth. That refusal, more than any single speech, is the inheritance many of us keep turning over in our hands.

And Angela is turning it over herself even now, at age eighty two. This spring found her at Morgan State for the Presidential Distinguished Speaker Series, then at Pitzer delivering the commencement address to the class of 2026, then seated beside Jelani Cobb at the Brooklyn Public Library for a close reading of the Declaration of Independence during its 250th anniversary year. More than fifty years past that warrant, the scholar a government once wanted grateful and quiet gets invited to the front of the room again and again, refusing to file down a single syllable. That endurance makes its own argument.

Because the punishment she absorbed in its loudest form is the same one visiting quieter versions of us on ordinary days. Meetings taught me this. A clean, well reasoned point leaves my mouth and lands like a slap, then ten minutes later a colleague repeats my exact idea to warm nods around the table. The idea was not the trouble. My delivery of it, in a body shaped like mine, carried by a mind that would not dumb itself down for anybody, that was the offense. They name it tone. Attitude, they say. They reach for whatever word lets them dodge the honest part, which is that a thinking sista stating a position plainly reads as a threat to folks who mistook your quiet for agreement.

Soften, the world keeps telling us. Lower the voice. Ease the stance. Arrange the face into something that asks for nothing and forgives everything. Hair ought to lie down. Opinions ought to arrive wrapped in enough qualifiers that nobody feels accused of anything. Intelligence, heaven forbid the intelligence, should tuck itself behind a giggle so the men keep believing they got there first. Davis declined every layer of that bargain, and it cost her freedom for a stretch. Most of us pay in smaller, steadier coin. Passed over for the raise. Marked difficult on the review. Frozen out of the friendly circle where real careers get built.

The energy that shrinking demands stays on my mind. There is a labor nobody prints on a pay stub, the work of managing other people’s comfort with your presence. Words get measured before they leave. The smile gets rehearsed. You weigh which battles justify the reputation hit and swallow the other ninety whole. My mother did it. Her mother did it in kitchens that did not belong to her. And the cruel joke buried under all of it is that the shrinking does not buy the safety it promised. A person can play small a whole life and still get branded aggressive the single day she says no.

What Angela modeled, and what unsettles the people who built the machine, is the plain possibility of declining the whole arrangement. The scholarship on abolition was no tantrum. Rigorous, footnoted, and argued across decades of classrooms and books, the work stretches from Are Prisons Obsolete? to her collaboration with Gina Dent, Erica R. Meiners, and Beth E. Richie on Abolition. Feminism. Now. Davis followed the logic straight to the bottom instead of stopping where polite society prefers a person quit. That is the frightening part about a woman who thinks out loud without asking. She shows everybody how much of the peace depended on your cooperation.

Black women who move through the world unbothered by the palatability test tend to make everyone around them nervous, and my peace with that nervousness came hard. Maxine Waters reclaiming her time. A coworker saying the budget numbers do not add up and refusing to pretend otherwise. One young poet standing flat footed to name the thing the room agreed to leave unnamed. Same lineage, every round. The specifics shift. Yet the threat these Black women pose to a comfortable order holds steady.

None of it comes free, and painting the courage as some clean triumph would be a lie. Authenticity carries a tax, and Black women get billed at a rate nobody else spots on their statement. Relationships fall away. The reputation trails you into rooms you have not entered yet. Less capable people float upward on charm while you stay grounded by the very honesty that ought to have been an asset. Some nights the isolation sits heavy on your chest and you wonder whether the gentler road might have treated your blood pressure kinder, your sleep, your whole body. That wondering has visited me. Anyone swearing it stayed away is selling something.

Yet here is the place my feet have landed, past fifty, with more road behind than ahead. The palatable version of me was not real to begin with. A costume, worn to keep other folks calm, and costumes smother you if left on long enough. Angela handed a generation of sistas permission to peel it off. Not for any promise that the world turned safer, but because a borrowed self is its own kind of cage, one with no acquittal coming and no jury set to hear the case.

So the apologizing for the volume of my mind has quit. The words get to land where they land. When the sideways look arrives, and arrive it does, meeting it feels truer than bracing for it. A whisper and a shout carry identical truth, something it took me half a lifetime to trust. The only real question left is whether a Black woman gets free enough to say it in her own actual voice and let the nervous room rearrange itself around the verdict that our worth was never theirs to approve.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Staff Writer; Jada Williams

This sister writes about politics, money, family, and the issues that shape everyday life… Her work looks at how decisions made in government, changes in the economy, and challenges within our communities affect Black women and their families…

Feel free to email her at: JadaW@ThySistas.com.

Been watching it up close since I was a girl myself. The bright girl in class who answered too fast and got labeled a smart mouth before lunch. Then the coworker who wanted the promotion and had the nerve to voice it out loud. A lot of us figured out young how to make ourselves small. Shrink the voice down. Play the wins way off. The world sits easier with us tucked in and agreeable. Nobody says it to your face, but the message still lands, that reaching past whatever they set aside for you means something in you is broken. Foolishness of the highest order. This is the lie I came to pick apart, through somebody specific.

Lately Condoleezza Rice keeps coming to mind. Not the politics. Set the party down for a minute and look hard at the arc of the life.

Birmingham. A little Black girl in what might have been the most segregated city in the country, coming up while bombs went off blocks from where she practiced piano. That child knew Denise McNair, one of the 4 girls killed at Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. Sit with that. Carrying that grief at 8 years old and deciding, somewhere down in the marrow, that you would become so undeniably excellent the world would have no honest excuse left to turn you away.

That is where the drive came from. Not ice. Fire.

French first. Then competitive figure skating before sunrise. A piano studied long enough to consider making it the whole career, until she realized the concert stage would not be her future and discovered another calling in international politics. College finished at 19. By 38 the title read provost at Stanford, running the budget and the academic side of one of the finest universities on the planet, the first Black person and first woman to hold that post. National security adviser after that. Then Secretary of State, only the 2nd woman ever to sit in that chair and the first who looked like my aunties.

Read it back slow and tell me it isn’t remarkable.

Here is the part that gnaws at me, though. When a particular sort of man stacks a resume like that, we hand him words like driven and focused and visionary. We put his name on a library. Let a Sista pull off the identical climb and the vocabulary shifts underfoot. Now the labels arrive. Cold. Calculating. Stiff. Robotic. People still bring up how she never married, like a husband was the last box left blank on her application. They go looking in her face for something warm, and when it does not show up on demand, they count it against her.

We turn on our own too. Sistas at the salon call her hard, dismiss her entire existence in a sentence because of who she worked for, never once pausing on the ceiling she cracked getting there. And listen, you can disagree with every decision she ever signed off on. I do, on plenty. But disagreement and erasure are 2 different animals, and we keep confusing them.

Ambition in a Black woman still gets read as arrogance. Somebody has to explain to me why. A man wants the corner office and we say he has hunger. Let her want the same thing and suddenly the story becomes that she forgot where she came from, got too big for the neighborhood, abandoned the people. The measuring stick changes the second our hands reach for the top rung.

And there is this quieter charge underneath, the one nobody names out loud. That the femininity got surrendered to get this far. Traded the wife, the nurturer, the soft and available version everybody was more comfortable with. Like tenderness and towering competence cannot live in one body. My grandmother raised 9 children on a maid’s wages and could have run a small nation from her kitchen table. Do not tell me strength and womanhood are opposites. That lie was built to keep us small, and too many of us swallowed it whole.

What Rice represents, whatever you make of her ledger, is a certain refusal. A refusal to shrink so other people could feel comfortable. And a refusal to apologize for wanting the top of the mountain. That posture costs Black women something every single time, and the bill got paid in full, in public, for decades.

Now I want to turn the corner and say the thing I really sat down to say.

Somewhere along the way we let politics do to our sisterhood what slavery, redlining, and every other machine built to break us never fully managed. It divided the table. I know women who will not speak to a cousin over a ballot. Grown folks who unfollowed a lifelong friend because of a vote cast in the other direction last November. And I keep asking myself when a party registration became thicker than blood, thicker than the shared knowing that passes between 2 of us who catch each other’s eye across a crowd full of people who will never understand what we carry.

Condoleezza Rice is a Republican. Some of y’all just felt your whole chest tighten reading that, and that reaction right there is exactly what I am poking at. Because she is a Sista through and through. The R next to her name never erased the racial and gender assumptions that follow Black women into rooms of power. It never removed the expectation that she be exceptional just to be treated as capable. Whatever party she belongs to, she still had to navigate a country that has never handed Black women power without making them pay something for it.

So let me ask you plain, Sistas. Do you have a real friend, a genuine one, who votes the opposite of you? Not an acquaintance you tolerate at the reunion. A friend. Somebody you would call at 2 in the morning. If the honest answer is no, I want you to sit with why. Consider what got traded away for the comfort of a table where everybody already agrees.

We do not have to cosign each other’s ballots to protect each other’s dignity. My defense of a sister’s right to reach as high as her arms will stretch does not depend on her checking the box I check. That should be the floor, not the ceiling.

Next time you catch yourself calling an accomplished woman cold, pause. Ask whether you would use that word on a man behaving the identical way. And when party lines tempt you to cut a good one loose, remember the Black women who came up out of Birmingham, out of Mississippi, out of the worst this country could dream up, and decided they would be great anyway.

That greatness belongs to all of us. Even the ones who vote wrong.

Staff Writer; Jada Williams

This sister writes about politics, money, family, and the issues that shape everyday life… Her work looks at how decisions made in government, changes in the economy, and challenges within our communities affect Black women and their families…

Feel free to email her at: JadaW@ThySistas.com.