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.

They assumed wrong.

Here is what got overlooked while everybody stayed busy admiring the wrapping paper. Long before that gym scene had grown men hitting rewind, the Harlem native was already a working professional with serious range. Choreography credits before adulthood. A routine she helped create for Beyoncé’s “Ring the Alarm” back when most kids her age fretted over geometry homework. Songwriting. Producing. Directing her own visuals and winning BET’s 2023 Video Director of the Year award under her creative name, Spike Tey. That honor came for her craft, not for how good she looked on camera. The proof sat in plain view for years. Almost nobody bothered to read it.

I have watched this movie before, and so has every grown Black woman paying attention. A sister shows up talented in six directions, and the culture picks the one direction that requires the least imagination. Pretty. That word becomes a cage with a nice view. You get complimented straight into a corner, praised for the surface until the surface is all anyone believes exists. Ask any of us who ever walked into a room already sorted, already summed up, before the first sentence left our mouths. We know the feeling in our bones.

The music years told that story loud and clear. Signed young, stacked with skill, this daughter of Harlem put out real records. VII in 2014. K.T.S.E. in 2018. The Album in 2020. Bodies of work with grit and soul stitched all through them. Yet the machine around the artist kept fumbling the rollout, leaving her increasingly frustrated with how her music was being handled. By December 2020, that frustration boiled over, and the singer announced she was stepping away from recording, tired of feeling unheard and underappreciated. That was not a woman running out of talent. That was a professional refusing to keep pouring genius into a bucket with a hole in the bottom.

There’s a chapter here that makes the pattern hit harder. Back in 2016, the Harlem native married NBA guard Iman Shumpert, and the two built a loud, camera-ready life together, reality show and all. Two daughters came from that union, Junie in 2015 and Rue Rose in 2020, and motherhood never erased her creative ambitions. The marriage, however, became another complicated chapter. When their split went public in 2023, Taylor alleged in court filings that she had intentionally dimmed her own shine to maintain peace at home, even turning down recording opportunities and acting roles. Those were her allegations, but the words ought to stop every reader cold. Sit with that. A woman that gifted, describing how she made herself smaller inside her own marriage. Their divorce was finalized in July 2024, although legal disagreements over confidential divorce information continued into 2025. Through it all, Taylor kept working, raising her daughters and finding her footing beyond a relationship that had once been such a public part of her identity.

Some folks read the retirement talk as an ending. Turns out it was a hinge. She returned to music in August 2025 with Escape Room, a deeply personal project that earned a Grammy nomination for Best R&B Album in 2026. Five years away from releasing a studio album had not emptied the creative well. If anything, the comeback reminded listeners that her musical instincts were still very much alive. But while some were waiting for another record, a different chapter of her career had already begun changing the conversation.

Her acting breakthrough had actually arrived two years before that musical return. In 2023, A Thousand and One landed at Sundance with quiet force. As Inez, a mother clawing out a life for her son against every obstacle New York could throw at her, the performer showed a depth that shut mouths. The National Board of Review handed over its Breakthrough Performance prize. Critics who had never once considered anything beyond the dancing, the beauty and the abs suddenly had to reckon with an actress. Grief lived in those eyes. Rage. Tenderness worn down to the nub. None of it had anything to do with a magazine cover.

And still, some corners of the industry hesitated. One acclaimed turn can get written off as a fluke, especially when the résumé started in reality television and R&B. So the multihyphenate did the only thing that ever silences a doubter for good. Did it again, bigger.

Paul Thomas Anderson cast Teyana in One Battle After Another, the 2025 film that became a major presence throughout the 2026 awards season. Playing Perfidia Beverly Hills, a revolutionary whose story intersects with Leonardo DiCaprio’s character, the Harlem talent held her own among one of the year’s most celebrated casts. The praise was not polite. It was thunderous. This past January, the Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actress went home in her hands. An Oscar nomination followed, the first of her career, alongside individual nominations at the Actor Awards and BAFTAs. Anderson himself spoke to InStyle about her creative instincts, describing an artist who thinks like a filmmaker, listens well and never hesitates to speak her mind.

Think like a filmmaker. Hold that thought.

Because here is the part that should make every reader sit up. Rather than milk the moment for magazine spreads and red carpet clips, the artist turned around and bet on her own vision. Paramount has scheduled her feature directorial debut, Get Lite, for a wide theatrical release on August 20, 2027. The story follows a studious New York teenager whose life changes after meeting a charismatic beatmaker who introduces him to the city’s Litefeet dance scene. Storm Reid is on board to star and produce, while Taylor brings her years of experience as a dancer, choreographer and visual storyteller behind the camera. By September 2026, filming was already underway. From choreography credits as a teenager to directing a major studio release two decades later, the arc finally makes sense to the people who were too distracted to notice it forming.

So what is this Renaissance soul up to at the moment? Plenty. Fresh off the awards run, the multihyphenate is still attending culinary school, because apparently mastering film, music and dance left a little room on the plate. There is a new Calvin Klein campaign making the rounds this month, the kind of shoot that once would have defined the whole conversation and now reads as one small piece of a much longer story. The Hulu legal drama All’s Fair received a second-season renewal, with Taylor also serving as an executive producer. Netflix’s crime thriller The Rip put our girl alongside Ben Affleck and Matt Damon earlier this year. Music, directing, acting, fashion, executive producing and raising two daughters. The list keeps stretching, and none of it depends on a flattering camera angle.

Sister to sister, what happened to Teyana Taylor is what happens to too many of us, and I mean too many gifted Sistas who get clocked for the body and never asked about the brain. We hand the world a full deck and the world plays one card. The exhaustion of proving, then proving again, then proving a third time because the first two apparently did not count, that weight sits heavy on Black women who dare to be more than one thing at once. You get boxed as the pretty one, the fun one, the fine one, and the range you spent a lifetime building goes unread like a book nobody opened.

The difference this time is that the industry blinked first. Hollywood, slow as ever, finally caught up to what was true all along. And it did not soften the woman into something easier to sell. If anything, all those years of being underestimated gave her a deeper understanding of what she wanted from her career. The same woman whose body dominated the conversation after Fade is now discussing scripts, directing actors, shaping stories and exercising creative control over her own projects. She never had to stop being beautiful to demonstrate that she was brilliant. The world simply needed to stop treating those qualities as though they could not exist in the same woman.

For the young Sistas coming up behind her, that arc is a whole sermon. Your gifts do not expire because somebody refused to see them on schedule. Keep building in the dark, even when the applause feels reserved for somebody else. A delayed opportunity does not erase the years you spent mastering your craft. Sometimes the recognition arrives after you have already learned how to recognize your own worth, and that might be the most valuable lesson in the entire journey.

This one never needed permission to be brilliant. Beauty was only ever the first thing you noticed, never the last thing worth knowing. The rest of the world simply took its sweet time reading the whole page. Grown Black women everywhere already knew how the story ended. We were just waiting on everybody else to finish the book.

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.

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.

Staff Writer: Brenda Poole

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

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

The woman most folks still picture as Precious, the terrified teenager from that 2009 film, walked a wholly different road offscreen. Married since 2021 to Brandon Frankel, mother to twins Cooper and Maya since April 2024, the actress spent these past few years quietly wrecking a lie a whole lot of us were raised on. Nobody made Gabby earn affection by disappearing. A dating app called Raya put the two of them in the same orbit, an engagement followed in November 2020, and about four months later came a wedding right at the kitchen table, because grand ceremonies simply held no appeal.

Sit with that sequence a second. No dramatic transformation montage came first. No before and after photos. Not one twelve-month gym contract charged as the price of admission to romance. A grown woman said yes to herself, exactly as she was, and a partner said yes right back.

For Black women especially, this cuts bone deep. We get handed magazine covers and dating columns and church pew whispers all pointing the same direction, toward the notion that our fullness is a problem needing a solution before anybody could possibly cherish us. Aunties mean well nudging you toward some meal plan before your cousin ties the knot. Strangers online feel entitled to critique a body they will never stand near. The message lands identical either way.

Become less, so someone can finally count you as enough.

Sidibe rejected that whole premise. Across years of interviews, the actress talked plainly about learning to like the mirror, about therapy, about the long, unglamorous labor of building self-regard from the inside rather than waiting for a man to hand it over. By the time Frankel arrived, that foundation sat already poured. He did not complete anybody. He joined something already in motion.

Long before the ring, the truth landed on paper. Her 2017 memoir, This Is Just My Face: Try Not to Stare, refused to tidy up the rough parts, from depression to an eating disorder to the casual cruelty strangers aim at bigger bodies. Reading it, you understood something rare was taking shape, a public figure declining to perform gratitude for scraps of acceptance. The confidence people admire now did not fall out of the sky. It got built brick by ugly brick, in private, on days when the world offered every reason to believe the opposite.

These days the joy runs loud and unmistakable. Cooper and Maya turned two this past April, and their parents celebrated at an animal sanctuary out in California, where the little ones got to enjoy some time around goats and a miniature pony. Frankel regularly shares his affection for his family online, celebrating his wife as both a successful woman and a loving mother. That right there is what partnership looks like when nobody had to shrink to reach it.

Her career tells a similar story, one of a woman moving forward on her own terms. This last stretch carried real grief; her mother, singer Alice Tan Ridley, passed away in March 2025 at 72, leaving another deeply personal chapter in Gabby’s life. Sidibe has spoken openly about the difficulty of losing a parent and how motherhood helped her navigate that painful season. Even so, 2025 brought a return to work through the Lifetime drama Give Me Back My Daughter, followed by another chapter in American Horror Story in 2026. February of this year also delivered her television directorial debut, Mary J. Blige Presents: Be Happy, a film about a fifty-year-old woman trying to rediscover herself and reignite something in a marriage gone quiet. Chew on that turn a moment. Somebody told for decades to remake herself now sits in the director’s chair, shaping a story about a wife rediscovering her own spark, deciding for the film exactly what tenderness gets to look like.

Her return to American Horror Story in September 2026 brought another familiar role back into view, with Sidibe reprising Queenie in the anthology’s thirteenth season. Meanwhile, a Southern Gothic psychological drama titled Rose Moon has her attached as both star and executive producer, with production planned for Georgia. Behind the lens, in front of it, raising two toddlers, all of it happening in a chapter of life that refuses to slow down.

Here sits the part worth underlining for every sister reading along. The order of operations we got taught is a fraud. You do not lose the pounds and then get chosen. You do not reinvent yourself into a stranger’s fantasy and then get to keep the ring. What this whole arc suggests, Sistas, without one word of preaching, is that people worth having show up for who already stands in front of them. The frame you occupy today is no rough draft.

Sistas, hear me clearly. Too many of us have postponed our own living, waiting to hit a smaller size before feeling allowed to date, to wear the dress, to accept a compliment without flinching. Meanwhile, the clock keeps ticking. Toddlers grow. Films wrap. Anniversaries stack up for the folks who quit stalling and started actually living.

None of this claims health carries no weight, or that anybody owes the world a certain attitude toward their reflection. Grown folks decide for themselves what feels right inside their own skin. Gabourey has been open about her own health decisions over the years, and those choices belong to her. The point runs narrower and sharper than all that. Nobody should have to audition for plain human tenderness by morphing into a different person first.

Black women deserve to be wanted as we already come, in the abundance we carry, in the laugh that fills a room, in a confidence with nothing to prove to any scale. Gabourey did not wait around for permission, did not trade herself in for somebody else’s idea of perfection to qualify for happiness. A husband. Two babies. A directing career taking shape at 43. A whole life clearly savored. None of it required her to prove she was worthy of love by becoming somebody else first.

That, Sistas, is the quiet lesson tucked inside the fairy tale. Devotion never asked for a smaller version. It asked for an honest one.

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.

Back in 2001, a classically trained kid from Hell’s Kitchen showed up and refused to be anybody’s product. Cornrows, a keyboard, and a debut that married raw soul to a conservatory education. Fallin’ did not sound like anything else on the radio, and neither did the young woman playing it. Grown men who swore they only rode with hip hop were humming Fallin’ by that summer, and the church ladies claimed that girl for themselves. By the next year the hardware was piling up, five Grammys in one night, and even that missed the real story. Here was a singer who plainly intended to stick around, and folks could tell.

Family got as much seriousness as the music. She married Swizz Beatz in 2010 and became a wife and mother in the same year, welcoming Egypt that year and Genesis in 2014, folding his older kids into one big blended house. Egypt is already making beats and has played piano alongside his mama on television and major public stages, so the talent is clearly not staying locked in one generation. Plenty of Sistas out here run a demanding calling and a full house at once, and seeing a sister hold both without flinching means something. It is not easy, and nobody is pretending it is. She just won’t give up either half.

Then the recording career began quietly widening into something much broader. Beyond recording music, Keys was finding ways to build something of her own. Keys Soulcare, launched in partnership with e.l.f. Beauty in 2020, folded wellness and beauty into a single philosophy instead of slapping a famous face on a jar. In May 2026, ownership of the brand transferred to Keys herself, giving her entrepreneurial journey another chapter. A founding seat at She Is the Music, the nonprofit lifting up women across the industry, said much the same thing in a different key. Collecting art, backing other creatives, holding a real stake in the work itself, all of it pointed toward a legacy that could outlast any single hit song on the charts.

The boldest turn came on the stage. In 2023, Hell’s Kitchen made its Off-Broadway debut, a musical conceived by Keys, featuring her music and lyrics alongside a book by playwright Kristoffer Diaz. By April 2024, the production had reached Broadway, loosely inspired by her childhood in those Manhattan streets. That same year, alongside husband Swizz, the couple brought selections from their Dean Collection to the Brooklyn Museum under the banner Giants, showcasing an impressive collection of works by Black artists across generations. The musical pulled thirteen Tony nominations and took home two of the statues, then earned a 2025 Grammy for Best Musical Theater Album. Sit with what that leap represents. A performer became a creator of musical theater, handing a story rooted in her upbringing to a cast who could carry it before audiences night after night. Even the art collection kept traveling, with Giants opening at Newfields in Indianapolis in September 2026.

So what has the woman from Manhattan been up to across 2026? Plenty. Her debut album just turned a quarter century old, and a fresh anniversary edition sent longtime fans straight back to where it all started. Honoring the beginning while continuing to build takes a rare kind of nerve. This past June, the documentary Alicia Keys: Girl From Hell’s Kitchen, directed by One9, received its world premiere as the closing-night selection of the Tribeca Festival, offering a tender look at her origins and the creative sweat behind that Broadway production. Later that month, when the Knicks finally brought an NBA championship back to New York, guess who closed the June 18 parade belting Empire State of Mind for a city celebrating its first title in 53 years. Her son Egypt opened the musical moment at the piano with Billy Joel’s New York State of Mind before his mother took over. Imagine that for a second. The little girl who once walked those Manhattan streets had grown into a mother sharing the biggest celebration in her hometown with her own child. You could not have written a sweeter full-circle moment.

The business side kept pace with everything else. Come August, word landed that Keys had signed with Creative Artists Agency, better known as CAA, marking a new chapter in her professional representation while remaining managed by Roc Nation. The announcement also pointed toward additional projects on the horizon. With fall settling in, Keys continues exploring new creative opportunities, building partnerships, and finding fresh ways to put her name on something meaningful.

And this is the part that ought to land hardest for us. So many Black women grew up hearing you only get to be one thing, so pick it carefully and don’t get greedy. What Alicia pulled off runs dead against that lesson. Sing, yes. Then go build a company. Write music for the theater. Hang your art in a museum, raise your babies, and nurture a marriage through all of it. Not one piece of that asked permission first. Sistas have carried the same load for generations, in kitchens and cubicles no magazine ever bothered to photograph, which is exactly why this one lands. Somebody finally got to do it out loud, with the receipts to prove it.

Gold records dull on a wall. Fashions date the moment the next thing arrives. A number one slips off the chart and gets forgotten fast. What does not fade is the template underneath, a way of moving through the world with grace and ownership that outlasts the final encore. Ms. Keys grasped something early that plenty of famous folks never catch at all. Applause is temporary. What you create, who you stand beside while creating it, and what you hand to the ones coming up behind you, that is the part that quietly lasts.

Bigger than the melodies, then. Bigger than the trophies on the shelf and the records sold by the tens of millions. What this New York native is assembling, brick by patient brick, is a life that doubles as a lesson plan. And for the young ones taking careful notes, especially the daughters watching Black women refuse every box the world hands them, the loudest thing being made is not a sound at all. It is permission.

Staff Writer; Raven Jones

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

So the question sits heavy for those of us watching from our couches with a glass of wine. How does somebody this sharp keep signing up for foolishness?

Understand me clearly. I am not out here to drag a sister for chasing a bag. Too many Black women got told to sit down and stay grateful for scraps that were never enough to begin with. So when one of us turns her name into income, a stubborn part of me stands up and cheers. Reality television can open doors to appearance fees, brand partnerships, speaking engagements, and business opportunities that might never come along otherwise. A familiar face becomes a marketable name, and the right opportunity can turn a season of television into years of additional income. The financial possibilities are difficult to ignore.

Still, something nags.

Here is what separates our girl from the average castmate. Phaedra had an established professional career before the cameras came calling. This one has credentials that are no joke: a law degree, a legal practice that has represented clients such as Bobby Brown, a term running the Gate City Bar Association, and professional experience extending well beyond the entertainment industry. Add her education in mortuary science on top, and the woman has more than one career path available to her. When your resume looks like that, the math around selling your image changes. You are not necessarily choosing between the cameras and financial survival. You are choosing between a quieter professional life and a louder, messier kind of fame.

That choice is where the tension lives.

Reputation is a funny currency for professional Black women. It takes decades to build and about ten seconds of edited footage to dent. Our foremothers understood this in their bones. They dressed a certain way, spoke a certain way, and carried themselves like the whole race was watching, because in many rooms it was. Some of that was survival, some of it was respectability politics we have rightly begun to question. Yet underneath the old rules sat a truth that has not expired. When you are one of few in your field, every move you make can get read as evidence about the rest.

So when a lawyer becomes better known for a birthday trip to Scotland that dissolved into chaos than for her actual work before a judge, a bill comes due. Maybe not to her bank account. To the image. To the young law student who googles her and finds reality television clips competing with the accomplishments that built her professional career.

Now, the other side deserves a fair hearing, because smart people make it. Some say the strategy is a longer game than her critics realize. Visibility, they argue, can feed a legal practice and create additional business opportunities. A face people recognize can attract clients, command appearance fees, and open doors a quiet attorney might never see. The theatrics, in this telling, are not a betrayal of the diploma. They are a marketing budget nobody billed her for. There is even something subversive about Black women using a genre that has often portrayed them through conflict, then turning that exposure into financial opportunities of their own.

I hear all that. I even believe some of it.

What I keep circling back to, though, is the difference between using a platform and being used by one. The camera does not love us equally. Producers understand that disagreements, confrontations, and emotional outbursts can keep viewers talking long after an episode ends. Every genre seems to have a role reserved for the loud, sassy Sista, and reality television has made plenty of money keeping that image in circulation. The paycheck is real. So is the box it can quietly build around you.

There is also the matter of what the mess teaches the girls coming up behind us. When an accomplished woman becomes better known for her television confrontations than her professional achievements, we risk sending the message that conflict draws more attention than brilliance. Sistas already battle an assumption that we are combustible, quick tempered, and ready to swing. A hit franchise repeatedly packaging that picture, particularly around a woman whose accomplishments offer another story worth telling, does not help challenge those stereotypes one bit.

Which brings us to where the Peach State’s own stands right now, in the fall of 2026. The lady is nowhere near slowing down. This past summer brought another full season of The Real Housewives of Atlanta, complete with a birthday trip to Scotland that gave viewers plenty to discuss. She even appeared alongside familiar faces during the Atlanta stop of The Real Housewives Ultimate Girls Trip: Roaring 20th. Come October, she turns 53, with a legal background, a reality television career, and a public profile that keeps her name in circulation. By every visible measure, our Athens native remains comfortable living in both worlds.

And you know what? Maybe that is her right. Grown and educated, she has spent enough years in the entertainment industry to understand the business better than most of us watching from home. The version of dignity I keep reaching for might be nothing more than my own comfort dressed up as principle. A woman who survived a public divorce, raised two sons while living in the public eye, and maintained a professional identity beyond reality television may have made her peace with the bargain a long time ago.

But I will say this to my Sistas watching along with me. Ask yourself what you would do holding her hand of cards. The degrees, the professional credentials, the name everybody knows, and an offer to get paid handsomely for arguing on TV. It is easy to judge from the cheap seats. It is harder to admit that some of us, handed that same envelope, might sign too.

Phaedra Parks has spent enough time in front of the cameras to know that reality television comes with rewards and consequences. Whether she considers the trade worthwhile is something only she can answer. The rest of us are left to decide whether the price was worth it, and whether the applause we give and the eyes we roll are really about her at all, or about the choices we quietly wish we were bold enough to make ourselves.

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.

Ahead of that milestone, while vacationing in Fiji, the actress shared how good she felt about entering a new decade. “Mind, body and spirit,” came the line, and honey, you believed every syllable. Then arrived the sentence that lodged itself in my chest. “Time is a construct. Age is just a number, so who cares?” Out of the mouth of a seasoned soul who has weathered plenty, those were not the words of vanity. That was testimony.

Here is where it turns personal for those of us watching from our own couches, coffee gone cold, quietly asking whether our finest chapters sit behind us or somewhere up ahead. Back in February 2026, perched on Jimmy Fallon’s set, the Academy Award winner held up a diamond and settled the rumors fans had traded for months. Engaged now to Van Hunt, a musician out of Dayton with a Grammy on his shelf, Halle connected with him during the strange hush of the pandemic. Roughly six years into their relationship, the couple has not announced a wedding date, and she is in no rush, since the joy already belongs to her.

Sit with how the star arrived at this doorstep, already at peace with her own solitude. “I’m enough by myself,” the Oscar winner told one interviewer, counting her children and her craft as an embarrassment of riches. Searching for another relationship was nowhere in her plans. By her own admission, the math was simple: if the right companion never showed, she would walk on alone and call it fine. Then he showed. Funny how that tends to happen the moment a grown woman stops begging the universe for crumbs.

Candidly, the icon has spoken about why an earlier version of herself might not have been ready for a partnership like this. “I had to go through fire and burn to get to the point of appreciating a person like him,” she confessed. Three marriages and three divorces can teach a woman plenty about herself and what she truly wants from love. By her telling, those experiences pushed her to examine herself, understand what she wanted, and recognize the kind of relationship she genuinely deserved. The years she spent alone gave her room to grow, and by the time Van came along, she had developed a clearer understanding of love and what it meant to be treated well.

Now let us sit with what all this means for us, Sistas, because Black women get handed a peculiar script early. We are cast as the strong ones, the backbones, the mules of every family, praised for endurance and rarely for softness. Buried in that arrangement, the culture forgot to promise us romance past a certain birthday. Black women hear it loud and early: shrink, settle, be thankful, stop being “too much.” An entire generation absorbed the idea that being cherished was a young girl’s privilege, and our assignment was simply to keep everybody else upright.

Halle standing there at 60, enjoying a relationship with a man who has publicly expressed his happiness in loving her, dismantles that rotten lesson. Companionship did not skip her over the calendar. Fresh starts refused to decide her window had closed. Black women especially need that picture, because nobody hands us the fairy tale and then expects to find us inside it. If anything, the depth on display now, the scar tissue and the knowledge of self and the flat refusal to perform, offer a reminder that a woman does not have to abandon who she is to welcome a good partner into her life.

And understand, the romance is merely a single room in the house being built this season. The Academy Award winner has planted her flag squarely in menopause advocacy, a cause she has embraced as an important part of her second act. Through her wellness platform, Respin, and a partnership with Joylux, a vaginal moisturizer called Juicy Like a Peach arrived earlier this summer, aimed at addressing intimate wellness concerns that so many of us endure in silence. The product began reaching more than 400 Ulta Beauty stores in late July. Over and over the message lands plainly: our sensuality does not retire when our cycles do. “We deserve to be still alive at this time of our lives and have sex and be intimate,” the star declared, and I nearly shouted amen from the back pew.

The calendar stays packed otherwise. This year brought a turn opposite Chris Hemsworth in Crime 101, playing a disillusioned insurance broker navigating a world of wealthy clients, professional pressures, and complicated choices. Behind the camera, her production company, HalleHolly, signed a first-look unscripted deal with Stephen Curry’s Unanimous Media, giving Berry another opportunity to develop projects and bring women’s stories to the screen. She has made it clear that she has no intention of allowing herself to be erased as she grows older, and that determination has grown louder with each passing month.

So what does a regular Sista do with all this from her side of the screen? You let it rearrange your expectations, that is what. Maybe the divorce was not the end of your romantic story but the intermission. Perhaps the widowhood, the wasted decade, the fella who never truly saw you, none of that sealed your fate. Finding somebody at 55, at 63, at 71, that is not settling. A love that shows up late can carry a different kind of depth, because two grown people have had time to learn who they are and what they truly need from one another.

I keep thinking about my own aunties. Some are still waiting on a permission slip they will never need. Others found a second great romance at 70 and quit apologizing for wanting it. The ones who bloomed understood something worth remembering. They believed themselves deserving, right on schedule, wrinkles and gray and all.

Berry handed us a blueprint without even meaning to. Feel good in your skin. Build a life so full that a companion becomes an addition rather than a rescue. Reject the notion that your tenderness has soured with time. And when affection arrives, even decades later than the fairy tales swore it would, throw the door wide and let it walk in.

You were never too seasoned to be adored, Sistas. You were simply fed a story that was never true to begin with. Set it down. Your next beginning might be standing closer than you dare to hope.

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.

Fine. Page one, then.

Mellody Hobson came into the world in Chicago in 1969, the baby of six. Mama raised all of them by herself, and money was the kind of tight where you learn early which drawer holds the shutoff notices. They got evicted. Some nights the lights were off. She’s told those stories in interviews for years now, plainly, the way you’d read somebody a grocery list. Princeton followed anyway. Right after graduating in 1991, she walked into Ariel Investments, a small firm started by John Rogers Jr., and never really left.

By 2000 Ariel had made the Chicago native its president. Sit with that for a second. Barely past thirty, this sister was helping run an investment house in a field where Black women were about as common as snow in Savannah. Rogers began sharing the chief executive role with his longtime protégé in 2019. That same year, Forbes reported that Hobson owned 39.5 percent of the firm. Today Ariel manages more than $16 billion in assets and remains one of the country’s leading Black owned investment firms.

Boardrooms were next. Starbucks showed up in 2005 with a board seat. Later on, DreamWorks Animation wanted that steady hand as its chair, and JPMorgan Chase found room at its table too. In 2017 the Economic Club of Chicago elected its first African American woman leader. By March 2021 the coffee chain had handed over the gavel, making Hobson the only African American woman chairing a Fortune 500 company at the time.

That seat came with a stormy stretch, and the way it ended tells you plenty about instinct. In 2024 the Starbucks chair went after Brian Niccol, lured him away from Chipotle, gave him the chairman title, and slid into the lead independent director role. Early in 2025 came the goodbye letter, which noted that twenty years was already a long time and that not one share of the coffee giant had ever been sold. That letter wasn’t written by somebody who needed a famous husband’s name to establish her worth. She had already earned her seat at the table.

None of this was borrowed shine. Her professional accomplishments began long before the marriage, and she continued building her own career afterward.

Now, I want to be fair. George Lucas and his bride appear to adore each other. They wed in 2013 and are raising a daughter together, and I have no interest in picking at anybody’s marriage. My quarrel is with the habit of introducing accomplished women through the men beside them, as if a résumé only becomes believable once a famous husband cosigns it. Nobody opens a profile of a male banker by naming his wife. The headline writes itself for men. For us, it gets rewritten.

Sistas know this dance by heart. We watched our own mothers get called Mrs. So and So at church while they ran the finance committee, the pastor’s calendar, and half the fish fry. We have sat in meetings where a man repeated our idea ten minutes later and got the nod. When Black women see one of our own shrunk down to a plus one, it stings in a familiar place.

Marrying rich and building a career aren’t cousins, let alone twins, and I’m tired of folks treating them like they are. A marriage can start at a dinner party or a conference, by pure chance. A career? That one you pay for. You learn the trade, you eat the losses, you ride out 2008, and you keep showing up on the days nobody claps. Two decades of that preceded any wedding album. Reputation, Rolodex, judgment, fortune: all of it came first. A famous last name can open a door to a party. It cannot hand anyone a thirty year track record on Wall Street.

And don’t sleep on how she reaches back. In 2023 Ariel raised $1.45 billion for its first Project Black private equity fund, built to grow minority owned businesses and develop major corporate suppliers under Black and Latino leadership. Sports followed. Project Level, founded and chaired by the Ariel boss, closed a $250 million fundraising round in February 2026 and holds stakes in Denver Summit FC and League One Volleyball. TIME placed the financier on its 2026 list of the most influential people in sports, and Forbes followed with a spot on its ForbesBLK 50 Money Masters.

What fills the calendar right now? Opening doors, literally. The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, which the couple cofounded, opened to the public on September 22 over in Exposition Park. Years of planning and work went into bringing that vision to life. Inside is a 300,000 square foot swirl of a building with 35 galleries, and I already know I’m going to need comfortable shoes. Robin Roberts sat down with the cofounder on Good Morning America that morning to talk through the why of it all. What caught my eye, though, happened earlier in the month, when residents of the 90037 zip code got their own preview day on September 13, before the big gala on September 19. You let the neighbors in ahead of the stars when you care what the neighbors think.

Last week brought a hard call, too. Mellody resigned from the LA28 Olympics board, saying in an email that steering the new institution left no room to keep serving. Local activists in South Los Angeles had been pushing for a meeting to air their worries about how the Games would land on their neighborhoods. One pastor told LAist he saw a possible counterbalance to the rest of that committee. Whatever you make of the exit, notice who people went looking for. Not the husband. Her.

In discussing the museum, Hobson has emphasized what the institution is supposed to mean to ordinary people. That idea stayed with me. Here was a woman who grew up in Chicago without much money, helping build a place where families could walk through the doors and see their own stories reflected on the walls. That sounds like the same girl who figured out early that you don’t need anybody’s permission to belong in a room.

So here is my ask, Sistas. The next time a headline introduces a woman as somebody’s wife, read past it. Look for the start date, the titles earned, the risks taken before the ring. Black women have been building quietly for generations, and too often the credit lands on whoever is standing closest in the picture. Mellody Hobson married a legend, sure. Her own had been sitting on the ledger for years.

And to the young Sistas reading this on their phones between classes or shifts, your life begins with you. Tell it that way, and don’t let anybody else pick the first line.

Staff Writer; Jada Williams

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Staff Writer: Brenda Poole

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

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