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.

Here is what the data says out loud. We opened 2025 with a jobless figure sitting around 5.4 percent. By December that same measure had climbed to 7.3, a level that exposed how sharply the labor market had turned against us. Diplomas did not save anybody. Among Black women, sisters holding bachelor’s degrees watched their footing slip more sharply than every other education group, and the federal government by itself shed 277,000 roles, with an estimated 95,000 of those losses falling on Black women. By early summer of this year, the headline had eased toward 5.7. Good news, supposedly. Except that softer number did not necessarily mean more of us were bringing home a check. The labor force itself had shrunk, leaving fewer Black women counted as working or actively looking for work. Some likely got tired and stopped searching. Others stepped away for reasons the headline rate cannot tell us.

I want to sit inside that stillness for a moment, because that is where the ache actually lives.

Think about who tends to give up the search. Not the one who never tried. No, the one who wore herself down to the nub trying. She rewrote that resume until the words stopped meaning anything. Sat through a webinar on personal branding during her lunch break. Rehearsed answers at six in the morning to a bathroom mirror, half of which never got asked. Bought the ring light because somebody’s cousin swore it read more professional on camera. And after the fourth no, or the twelfth, or the interviews that just went silent, which somehow cut deeper, something in her clicked off. That closing does not register anywhere official. There is no line item on a government spreadsheet for a spirit that got tired.

So let me name what I keep watching happen to grown, accomplished women I love and respect.

A friend of mine, fifty-one, twenty years in nonprofit management, got walked out of her building on a Tuesday. Nine years at that organization. She had a corner desk, a plant she named, a reputation people trusted. The travel got frozen first. Then her email login stopped working. Then a stranger from HR read her a paragraph off a laptop. By Thursday it was finished. A master’s degree, a kid in the fourth grade, and that whole weekend she spent apologizing to me, to her mama, to herself, like she had done something wrong. She hadn’t. The floor moved. She only happened to be standing on it.

That is the piece the charts miss.

When the paycheck vanishes and you did nothing to cause it, the brain goes looking for a reason inside you anyway. Strange as it sounds, that hurts less than the alternative. Own the mistake and at least there is a lever to pull, something to correct by Monday. Accept that the whole floor tilted under everybody at once and there is nothing to grab, and that thought will keep you up at two in the morning. So we reach for the version that hands us a lever. We tell ourselves we should have networked harder, spoken up less, spoken up more, worn the other blazer, stayed later, smiled bigger. We audit ourselves into the ground.

And the promotions. Lord, the ones that never come.

Here is a cruelty nobody warns you about. Do everything they told you to do. Earn the credential. Mentor the young ones. Volunteer for the committee nobody wants. Make your manager look brilliant in the meeting. Wait your turn, patiently, professionally, and then watch the title go to somebody who golfs with the director. Not once. Over and over, across years, until patience curdles into something quieter and more corrosive. Then the wondering starts, whether maybe the problem is you. Your voice. Your hair. The way you push back in a room. That wondering is expensive. It taxes a woman in a currency that never shows up on any pay stub, and she pays it every single day.

Economists and labor analysts keep using a phrase for us. Canary in the coal mine. Bellwether. They mean that when the wider economy begins to rot, Black women buckle first, because we sit stacked at the exact intersection of everything fragile. Public sector employment. Care work. Retail and service floors. Households where one income holds up a lot of people. When the system catches a cold, we get pneumonia, and we get it early. Research has estimated that more than one in five Black women in the labor force work somewhere in health care, another field where policy shifts and budget pressure can hit hard. So the pressure is not slowing down. It is loading up.

I need the Black women reading this to hear the next part plainly.

A layoff is not a verdict on your value. A stalled title is not proof you fell short. Ninety applications out, three replies back. That math is the market breaking down, not some hidden truth about you finally surfacing. Whatever is squeezing us got set in motion way before your name ever showed up on a layoff spreadsheet, and it grinds on no matter how clean your last review looked. A person can be excellent at the work and still land on the wrong side of the cut. Both are true at once, ugly as that sits.

The joblessness itself is not the part that scares me. We have survived lean stretches before. Our grandmothers wrote the book on it. What gnaws at me is the quiet shame underneath, how a sharp, qualified woman slowly trims her dreams down to fit whatever scraps are left, and calls it being realistic. That is not wisdom. It is a slow surrender with better manners. I have watched brilliant Sistas take themselves out of the running for jobs they had every right to chase, because one more no felt like one more than they had left in them. That is the wound that outlasts any recession. It keeps bleeding long after the economy technically recovers.

So what do we do, sitting here in the middle of it. Tell the truth to each other, for one. Quit performing fine over brunch. When a friend loses her post, nobody should rush to fix it or spin it bright. Let her be furious. Remind her, more than once if she needs it, that the ground moved and it was not her doing. Hold onto your own records too, the emails, the wins, the receipts, so that on the bad mornings there is something solid to press against the lie in your head.

And we carry two truths at once, which is a thing our people have practiced for generations. Yes, this economy is taking more than it gives, and that is real, and naming it out loud matters. And also, no market on earth gets to decide what we are worth. Our value was never up for a vote, never printed on a stub, never contingent on some director’s mood in a budget meeting.

The figure will rise again, or fall again, and the papers will make a fuss either way. Meanwhile we stay breathing and hold each other. Staying ready is the move, not because the door is fair, but because when it finally cracks open, I intend for us to be right there, degrees in hand, unbroken, and still entirely our own.

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.

Reliable is a fine word for a car. Applied to a citizen, it starts to mean predictable, and predictable slides quickly into taken for granted. A voter who can be counted on without effort receives no effort. She gets the visit to the church, the photograph, the borrowed cadence at the pulpit, and then eleven months of silence. This is not a partisan complaint. It is arithmetic. Nobody bargains hard for something already in the drawer.

What interests me more than the neglect is the enforcement. Watch what happens when one of us steps out of formation.

I know a physician, sharp and devout, who mentioned at a dinner that she had grown skeptical of certain welfare structures, that she believed some of them had bound the very families they were built to lift. She did not sneer when she said it. Her tone was the kind people reserve for a wound they have examined for years. The table did not ask her to explain. Within minutes she had been renamed. Sellout. Traitor. A sister who forgot the road that carried her. The verdict arrived long before anyone bothered with the reasoning behind her words, and the reasoning was never requested at all.

That sequence is the thing I want to hold up to the light. Disagreement I can respect, because thought without friction is not thought. What unsettles me is the speed of the excommunication, the eagerness to convict before the sentence is finished.

Let me be fair to the allegiance, because it was not born of nothing. My grandmother would have walked barefoot over gravel before she cast a ballot a particular way, and her reasons were sound. She remembered who barred the schoolhouse door and who pried it open. Carried in her too was the memory of relatives laid to rest without justice while the officials shrugged. When people cling to a coalition, they are usually holding onto a debt that somebody, at some hour, actually paid. I will not mock that. My only question is whether a kindness done in a single era binds all who follow, whether gratitude is meant to harden into a permanent obligation with no expiration.

Here is what few will say aloud at the family gathering. Devotion that forbids its own questioning has stopped being devotion. It has become a cage with a comfortable cushion.

Consider the incentives honestly. A bloc that delivers no matter the treatment teaches the recipients that treatment does not matter. Our schools continue to fail the children inside them. The grocery store charges more for less. Work long promised stays permanently on its way. And still, every fourth autumn, the same buses arrive at the same sanctuaries with a speech polished to a shine, and we are expected to feel courted. Some of us stopped feeling it a long time ago.

When we say so, the response is telling. We are informed that we have been deceived, that some clever operator must have crept into our thinking, because surely a sister could not have arrived at heresy through her own reflection. Listen closely to that reply. It erases her mind entirely. Her conclusion becomes evidence of manipulation rather than evidence of reason. There is nothing enlightened in that posture. It is the oldest condescension there is, the reflex that regards us as bodies to be mobilized and never intellects to be convinced.

Now I will get concrete, because vagueness is where honesty goes to hide.

Is a mother permitted to want her son inside a functioning classroom, even when the arrangement offends a teachers union? May she defend the value of a stable marriage in her home without being accused of shaming those who parent alone? Can she carry a conviction on abortion shaped entirely by the sanctuary she has occupied since childhood, and still find a chair in a room of marching women? Is she allowed to look at a thriving little enterprise, the kind an auntie built from a folding table and stubbornness, and conclude that a lighter tax on that enterprise lifts the poor rather than betrays them? None of these are exotic positions. They are the ordinary subjects of our private arguments, the ones we conduct freely until a recorder appears. The instant they surface in public, the speaker is handled like a defendant.

I have heard it declared that a conservative sister is a contradiction in terms. I find the claim intellectually lazy. Many of our congregations still carry deeply traditional teachings about faith, family, discipline, and personal responsibility. The elders who raised us practiced enterprise before anyone handed them the vocabulary, running kitchens and storefronts and side ventures out of dignity and need. Thrift. Faith. Family. Self reliance. A settled distrust of grand assurances from powerful men. Name for me which of those was imported from elsewhere. They were pressed into us at home. So a sister who carries them to the polls has not deserted her lineage. She may be honoring the very ancestors who were never once invited to state a preference.

Understand where I stand, so nobody mistakes this for recruitment. I am not steering anyone rightward. My quarrels with that side are real and unhealed. A great many figures who wave my values as a banner would not cross a street to assist me, and I can tell the difference between a man who esteems me and another who merely covets my grievance. Autonomy has never meant trading a master for a substitute. It means keeping the ledger on all of them, requiring each faction to come to my porch, remove its hat, and demonstrate precisely what it intends for the streets I actually inhabit.

That is the entire proposition. Not a change of jersey. A refusal to be owned by either locker room.

The rebuttal I receive most often is that unity is our sole instrument, that a fractured ballot is a squandered one, that in a country still hostile to us we cannot afford the indulgence of private conscience. I feel the fear beneath that argument, and I do not dismiss it. Yet history gives us little reason to believe that a people are strengthened by pretending they all think alike. Our power was never sameness. It was the debate itself, the deacon and the militant and the schoolteacher quarreling inside a single fellowship hall and embracing afterward regardless. We could once differ without banishing. That capacity has thinned, and I would like it restored.

There is also a hidden expense nobody tallies. Picture the one who suppresses her real view to preserve the peace. She has convictions, but experience has taught her that airing them invites exile, so she nods, and something in her contracts each time. Multiply that person across a nation and you produce a community that mistakes quiet for consensus, that never encounters its true spectrum of belief, that governs itself through dread of a label. That is not vigor. It is a body holding its breath.

So I return to the question I raised at the start. Are we permitted? The truthful answer is that permission was never anyone’s to distribute. A free person does not audition for title to her own mind. Yet permitted and protected are separate creatures, and I will not soften the second. Protection has not arrived. The price remains steep. Old friendships grow cool. The invitations slow, then cease. A cousin studies you sideways across the table at the repast.

I have chosen to pay it regardless. I would sooner be a woman who reasoned her way toward an error than one who was never granted the right to reason at all. And should enough of us reach that same decision, the labels will lose their bite, and the buses will be obliged to deliver more than a rehearsed appeal.

We are not a bloc. We are individuals with histories and minds of our own. It is well past the hour that the country, and the circles we move in, began to treat us accordingly.

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 love that woman. Let me say it plain and clear before anybody twists my meaning. When the former First Lady walks into a room, something in me stands a little taller. The way she carries her shoulders. How she looks folks dead in the eye and still smiles like your favorite auntie. The steel it took to raise those girls under a spotlight hot enough to melt most of us. Watched her speeches more than once, cried at a few. So this is not one of those pieces where one of us tears down another to prop herself up. We do too much of that already.

But there is something I have needed to say to my sisters for a long time, so I am just going to come right out with it.

We set the bar for ourselves up in the clouds and then wonder why we keep falling short of it. Degrees from schools that turn most people away. A husband who stays, and looks good staying. Your figure holding firm past forty and two babies. Work that lands your name in the history books. And through every bit of it, never letting a soul see you crack. Nobody handed us that list on paper. We breathe it in anyway, and most nights it leaves us lying awake, certain we flunked a test we never agreed to take.

I want to gently call that what it is. A lie.

You do not have to become somebody else’s masterpiece to matter. Your life was already stitched together on purpose. Nobody made you by mistake and then left you to fix yourself by copying another sister’s blueprint.

Let me tell you about my cousin Renita. She never finished college. Got pregnant her sophomore year, came home, and everybody had an opinion about what her future looked like now. Renita raised three children on a nursing assistant’s pay. Worked doubles. Sang in the choir on Sunday morning even when her feet were screaming inside her shoes. Not one of her babies went hungry. All three grew up knowing they were loved down to the marrow. Two of them own homes now. The youngest is finishing the degree his mama never got to finish. Tell me that woman is not exceptional. I dare you.

The world will hand you one narrow picture of a successful Black woman and try to convince you it is the only frame that counts. Polished. Poised. Perfectly spoken. Powerful in a way that shows up on magazine covers. There is nothing wrong with any of that. But it is not the whole story of who we are, and it never was.

Plenty of us are quiet. Others stammer the second nerves hit and never did learn to face a crowd without their hands shaking. There is the sister who is single at forty five and worn thin from folks asking when she plans to settle down, like a ring is what finishes a woman. One of us buried a marriage she fought like everything to save. Another went wide and soft in the middle after carrying life, and no amount of arm exercises is bringing back what the years took, and honey, that is fine. Some clean other people’s houses. Some teach. And a whole lot of us are still figuring it out at fifty, with no shame in that at all.

The women I was raised around did not rank each other by résumés. My grandmother would have laughed at the idea. To her, a person’s worth showed up in how they treated the folks who could do nothing for them. Whether you gave up your seat, fed a stranger who could not pay you back, kept your word when there was nobody around to hold you to it. That is a different arithmetic than the one the world runs, and I have come to trust it more than any headline.

So why do we keep grading ourselves on the world’s report card?

Part of it is love, honestly. We are so proud of the sisters who broke through. After generations of being told we were less than, watching one of us stand in the highest house in the land in her own skin, unbought and unbroken, felt like vindication for all of us. That pride is a good thing. Hold on to it. But somewhere it curdled into pressure. We took a sister meant to inspire us and turned her into a ruler to beat ourselves with. That was never her intention. She has said as much in her own way, speaking openly about self-doubt, fear, anxiety, and the difficult days that come even for someone the world sees as strong.

Even the ones we admire are not made of what we imagine.

Here is what I have come to believe after enough years and enough hard seasons to know a thing or two. Your value was settled before you did a single impressive thing. No diploma adds to it, and no divorce takes anything away. Neither a promotion nor a layoff moves that truth an inch. You were worth loving on the day you drew your first breath, and any voice telling you otherwise, even your own, is lying to you.

Comparison will rob you blind if you let it. It will have you scrolling past somebody else’s highlight reel and feeling like a failure by breakfast. It will have you looking at your own real and beautiful and hard won life and seeing only the places it does not match a picture you were never meant to copy. That kind of thinking steals the joy right out of the ordinary blessings sitting in your own two hands. The children who call you. A friend who shows up when nobody asked her to. Rent that somehow got paid. Stillness on an afternoon that owes nothing to anybody. Those things are not small. They are the substance of a life well lived.

I am not telling you to stop reaching. Reach. Go back to school if that is your dream. Build the business. Run for the office. Write the book that has been stirring in you for years. Ambition is a gift when it grows out of who you truly are and not out of a desperate need to prove you deserve to take up space. That space is already yours. It was yours the day you got here.

But if you never do one headline worthy thing, hear me. If you live and die known only to a handful of people who loved you, you were still a whole and precious somebody. A mother rocking a colicky baby at three in the morning is doing holy work. So is the daughter caring for her aging parents while the world spins on without noticing. So is the one holding down a job she does not love so her family can eat.

I watched my own mother do that kind of quiet labor for thirty years. Never gave a speech in her life, never owned a designer thing. Raised five of us on a checkbook that had no business stretching as far as it did, and to this day I cannot tell you how she made a way out of no way so many times over. Her name will not show up in any history book. But she is the strongest person I have ever known, and if greatness counts for anything, she had it in a form the cameras were simply too dull to catch.

That is the thing nobody tells you. Our culture only celebrates the version of us it can photograph, the dressed up, spoken up, lit up one. Meanwhile the real work of holding families and neighborhoods and whole communities together happens in kitchens and hospital waiting rooms and church basements, done by women whose names will never trend. Those lives are not the runners up to the story. They are the story.

So stop waiting to become somebody else before you accept that you are already enough.

You do not have to be her. You never had to. What you get to be is rarer than that, the specific woman the world has never seen before and will never see again, and that, my sisters, has always been more than enough.

Staff Writer; Raven Jones

Raven writes about music, relationships, and the everyday ups and downs of Black women… She keeps it honest, encourages other sistas, and can be reached at RavenJ@ThySistas.com.

The bottom line is this “doing you’ without consequence is nonexistent for our people. That is like playing Russian roulette with life. Some young people began to understand the lesson I was trying to impart. The problem is too many of them learned the lesson, as my grandfather used to say, in blood. They saw their friends killed, experienced wrongful arrest, experienced assault, and very other kinds of trauma. This was heartbreaking as they were just teenagers.  The problem is why are we fighting with adults now over the same thing?

This idea of I’m going to “do me” is running rampant in our community. As with the young people I understand the sentiment, but the problem is the ones leading the cry now are adults. They have some experience, some understanding, and they know the price that is on the line…or they should. The time we are living in is just as perilous, some would argue, as those that came before us and we are getting closer to their reality. This is not a history book, this is 2026, and the evil in power is trying to turn back time to redefine our understanding of oppression. When some of us think of ICE we think of our brothers and sisters from different places, but do we not understand our people have been harassed, and unlawfully detained too? As adults, how we process the world around us, and how we respond to it will affect our children. We can’t tell them to practice caution in what they wear and where they go, and we can’t do the same. Disciple and control will have to come together in us so that we are not impulsive, and so that we don’t become so fed up with everything we are seeing that we just say to heck with it, I’m “doing me”.

The truth is there are events we may get a gut feeling it won’t be wise to attend. There are times we might decide it is best to stay home. Sometimes the small family gathering will have to be enough. We might not want to venture out into places we don’t know in our state and in various parts of the country. Many of us may have unplugged after the elections not caring about being bothered by the stress of knowing specifically what’s going on in the country. We may be telling ourselves we will just rest for the rest of this admiration’s term. However, the truth is any of these positions at this time might be the ultimate undoing of our people. We want to rest, live, breath, and “do us”. This has a price, and it’s not one we want to endure.

We are an innovative people. We can find ways to express ourselves, be ourselves, have out balance of peace and still be mindful of the reality around us. We may have to redefine what it means to “do you”, so that it doesn’t get us killed. Teaching the youth will mean checking back in. I’m not saying we must march and be everywhere, as I truly believe we will need to find a different way to protect ourselves and our future. But we can’t just walk around like madness is not happening and move haphazardly in spite. As I stated, I have the saying “ignorance is bliss”. In these times I’d prefer, “Just because you can do a thing doesn’t mean you should”.

Staff Writer; Chelle’ St James

May also connect with this sister via Twitter; ChelleStJames.