(ThySistas.com) Palatable is the word nobody says to your face. It hides inside softer ones. Difficult. Aggressive. A little much. Not quite a team player. The message underneath holds steady no matter which mask it wears, and it always comes down to the same thing. You would rise faster if you were easier to swallow. Most of us learn the flavor young, in a teacher’s clipped correction or a relative’s warning about our mouth. Plenty of us then spend a good stretch of adulthood trying to sweeten ourselves into safety. Angela Davis is the reason I finally set the sugar down.

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.

(ThySistas.com) Mentorship gets framed a certain style in our heads, and most of us swallow the picture without a blink. An older woman pulls a younger one aside. They grab coffee. Out come the things nobody bothered to tell her when she was coming up. That picture is warm and it is real. It is also incomplete. Advice is generous, but it costs almost nothing to give. The rent gets paid the moment a person with actual pull decides to spend a little of it on you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Staff Writer: Brenda Poole

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

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

(ThySistas.com) Mary J. Blige has spent her whole career putting private pain on record. On the August 19 episode of Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson’s podcast, she added a personal chapter to the pile and told the hosts why she chose not to have kids. The answer had nothing to do with bitterness. She worked it out young, watched it unfold in her own family, and trusted what her eyes told her.

She watched relatives struggle to find babysitters and live with little choice or freedom. Seeing that burden while she was young helped shape her decision not to have children.

That vow is where the real conversation begins. The question worth sitting with is not whether raising a family is noble or foolish. It is why our culture keeps handing Black women a script that demands everything and returns almost nothing.

Consider what the singer raised in Yonkers actually witnessed. Her own mother had a scholarship for singing but could not pursue that dream because she had children young and needed to care for them. That gift stayed shut. The singing went into the household instead, and the daughter who grew up hearing it took what her mama never got to use and built a career on it. Pride runs all through that story. So does grief, and Blige does not pretend otherwise.

Too many of our Sistas know that toll without a famous surname attached. They know the aunt who raised five while working doubles. Some recall the neighbor whose dreams got shelved the day a first test came back positive. Black women across every zip code have watched the maternal role arrive with a mountain of duty and a thimble of backup, and they have learned to grin through the exhaustion because complaint gets read as ingratitude.

The singer refused that particular performance. “I saw a lot of people struggling,” she told her hosts, pointing to relatives who needed sitters and rarely experienced freedom. Independence became her north star. She built a career and helped launch the Strength of a Woman Festival and Summit, all of it on her own terms.

Age has complicated things for her, and she owns that. Mary now sees how valuable her relatives’ teenagers and other children are to them. The lonely part she did not hide. Sometimes I’m lonely, she told the hosts, though I’m alone plenty, and she talked about the movies she puts on and the clothes she tries on to pass a slow evening at home. She sounds settled about the road she took. The ache still turns up now and then, and she says as much without flinching.

Michelle Obama did not soften it either. Nobody has to be a mother, the former first lady said, and becoming one will not make a person complete. Her warning was aimed at anybody expecting a child to patch what is already broken in them. That baby just ends up carrying the parent’s emptiness, she said, and nobody comes out fixed. The wholeness has to be there first.

That truth lands hard in communities where a woman’s worth still gets measured by her fertility. Grandmothers ask about grandbabies before they ask about happiness. Church aunties start clucking when a wedding goes a year with no baby news. It all comes wrapped in love, which is exactly what makes it so hard to name as pressure. And it sits heaviest on Sistas who are already stretched way past thin.

This is the part people keep missing. Skipping motherhood did not turn her cold toward the young. She has poured love into her nieces and nephews and even wrote the children’s book Mary Can! to encourage young people to believe in their possibilities. You do not need a birth certificate to prove you can love somebody. When we act like there is only one true kind of nurture, plenty of Black women pay for it with years of guilt they never earned.

Look closer at the arithmetic our society runs. It celebrates motherhood in speeches and abandons mothers in policy. Black women feel that abandonment sharpest, since they often face some of the deepest gaps and thinnest safety nets. The country still has no federal law guaranteeing paid family and medical leave to private sector workers. For families with two young children, child care provided by a center can cost more than rent in most major metropolitan areas. For many families, the village folks love to bring up is nowhere to be found, leaving a mother run ragged with no backup and no relief in sight. Looking hard at that and picking a different path is not selfishness. It is just paying attention.

Hearing her say it plainly loosens something for people who felt the same and kept it to themselves. Somebody out there stopped second-guessing herself this week. Some young woman decided her hesitation might be good sense instead of a flaw. It landed like it did because Blige never posed as somebody with the whole thing solved.

None of this is a knock on having kids. For a lot of folks that is the entire point of a life, and the love is as real as it gets. The argument runs the other direction. A woman who says yes with her eyes open deserves respect, and so does the one who studies the same picture and says no. That life still counts, crib or no crib.

What the Grammy winner modeled on that podcast was the freedom to author her own definition of a rich life. She studied the elders who raised her, honored their labor, and declined to repeat a bargain that had drained them dry. None of that reads as betrayal of family. That is a daughter who learned the lesson her elders paid for in sweat.

Our culture would do well to listen. Support the mothers already among us with real help, not just applause and a single Sunday in May. Stop treating a womb like a resume. And let a grown Black woman shape her days without a chorus of judgment trailing her every step. Peace got earned the hard way here, and she has every right to guard it fiercely.

One last thought is worth carrying home. Freedom means nothing if only a single option comes wrapped in approval. The real measure of progress will arrive on the day a sister can say no to the nursery and yes to herself, then hear nothing back but respect.

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.

(ThySistas.com) Every so often the news carries something that rearranges what you thought was possible. Word that Kwanza Jones and her husband, José E. Feliciano, had completed their purchase of controlling ownership in the San Diego Padres did exactly that for me. Their ownership group acquired control of the club in a deal valued at a reported $3.9 billion, the richest sale Major League Baseball has ever logged. The closing made Jones the first Black woman majority owner in MLB history, and with that single stroke a door swung open that had stayed almost airtight to anybody who grew up the way most of us did.

Understand what happened here. Jones did not petition the league for a courtesy chair at the far end of the room. She and Feliciano jointly lead the ownership group that acquired control of the club, along with the leverage stitched to it. That distinction matters more than any headline can hold, because there is a wide gulf between being welcomed as a guest and holding the keys to the building.

For generations, the relationship between us and pro sports ran one direction. We filled the stands. Caps went on our heads, rosters memorized cold, lineups argued over at the barbershop, paychecks vanished into jerseys and playoff seats. Our labor built these leagues too, our athletes carrying entire franchises on their backs while somebody else counted the receipts upstairs. Loyalty flowed up. The profit drifted elsewhere.

Kwanza reversed the direction of that flow.

Consider the road for a second. Back at Princeton she entered Amateur Night at the Apollo and took the top prize, which says plenty about her nerve long before any of the rest showed up. Music came next. Nine appearances on the Billboard charts followed, including a Top 10 dance hit, with records that moved bodies in clubs across the country. Track and field ran right beside it, with the 800 meters as her specialty at the NCAA Division I level, legs and lungs tested against the best. Law school followed, then work as a mediator in the New York City court system and as an adjunct professor teaching negotiation at New York University. A Miss Baltimore crown got picked up somewhere along the way. None of it arrived by accident or by anyone’s charity. A woman assembles a life this full only by refusing, again and again, to shrink, and every piece of it walked into a boardroom that rarely hears a voice pitched this loud.

Money has flowed out of those hands as freely as it flowed in. The couple’s initiative says it has committed more than $250 million toward education, entrepreneurship, equity and empowerment, including a $20 million gift to Princeton that stood as the largest ever given to that school by Black and Latino donors. A person built that way does not walk into a franchise hunting for a photo opportunity. She walks in with a plan.

My mind keeps drifting to the little girls who will grow up treating this story as ordinary fact. Some kid flipping past the sports page, barely paying attention, glances up and sees a woman who could pass for somebody in her own household running the top of a multibillion dollar operation. Such an image settles in deep. The ceiling a young mind quietly draws for itself shifts a few feet higher. You cannot slap a price on it, though the deal behind it still carried one.

Some folks will want to file this under magic and keep it moving. I understand the impulse, and the phrase carries real affection. Still, magic undersells the truth of what took place. Magic sounds like something that simply appears, sparkles, then vanishes. What she pulled off was strategy, patience, capital and plain nerve. Sistas have always possessed those qualities. We rarely got handed the room where they could compound into this species of power.

Here sits the deeper shift worth chewing on. Cheering and controlling are not cousins. They live on separate streets entirely. When you cheer, you hope the people in charge share your values and spend wisely and treat your city with care. You hold opinions and zero leverage. When you control, your values can shape policy. You help choose the people who run the operation, set spending priorities and influence how the surrounding community gets treated on a random Tuesday when no cameras are rolling. Influence stops being a feeling and hardens into a name written on a document.

That very gap is where so many of us have been stuck for such a long stretch. We supplied the heart of American culture, the taste, the rhythm, the reason a thing catches fire, while the paperwork of holding stayed in other hands. Musicians know this ache intimately. Ballplayers know it. Anybody who has watched their contribution generate a fortune they never got to touch knows it down in the marrow.

Now let me be fair about the full picture. Feliciano was named the control person under league rules, giving him the club’s formal voice in MLB matters. Cynics will wave that around like it erases the moment. It does not. Major League Baseball says Jones and Feliciano jointly lead the ownership group, and the Padres officially list Jones as a principal owner. The pair built this whole life as partners in business and at home. Watching two people pool their brilliance and buy their way into a room that never expected either of them is its own quiet testimony.

Something else I love. A refusal to dim her shine for the occasion. At the introductory press conference she entered to an upbeat Padres song she had written and performed herself, hollered that the squad was going to win it all, then stood up and snapped a photo of the reporters gathered to cover the moment. No shrinking into some muted, apologetic version of herself to seem palatable to the old guard. A grown woman strolled into the most exclusive fraternity in American sports and stayed fully who she is, thank you very much. Such freedom is the reward for every year spent earning the right to be present.

Black women have carried this country’s cultural weight without the deed to the house for a very long time. We styled the hair, wrote the hooks, coined the slang, set trends the entire planet later copied and watched the proprietor class collect the checks. So when one of us crosses from the bleachers to the boardroom, from admirer to owner, that is no small human interest item to skim past over coffee. That marks a structural crack in a very old wall, and Black women everywhere felt it.

The Padres themselves deserve a mention, still chasing a championship they have never claimed. As of August 25, they had 71-61 record, holding the final National League Wild Card spot with an edge of two games over Arizona as the handoff unfolded. Should the ring finally reach San Diego under this new leadership, the picture turns even sweeter. Picture the trophy hoisted while a sister stands among the people who control the franchise’s future.

Money is the tongue power speaks, and too often we were asked to whisper it. Kwanza did not whisper. She helped assemble the capital, signed the papers and settled into her seat as somebody who belongs there, not somebody granted temporary access that evaporates when the mood shifts.

My prayer is that the young ones treat her not as an exception but as a template. The point underneath all the celebration reads plain enough. Applause feels nice, and applause is cheap. Control is the piece that endures. Every sister reading this deserves to know that the table was never truly meant to stay closed to her, and that a few Sistas have already proven the chairs can be bought outright.

Kwanza Jones understood the assignment. Nothing at all got asked of baseball. She arrived with her partner, the capital and a winning ownership group, and made herself an owner.

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.

(ThySistas.com) Fame buys a person visibility, not ownership of her body. Somewhere along the way, folks confused a familiar face with public property, and now they act as though a celebrated athlete owes them a full accounting of whatever quietly ails her. On June 6, Simone Biles shared that she had experienced a frightening medical emergency, one she described as among the scariest moments of her life. She later told a curious follower she was not ready to discuss the details, and in July, she revealed that she had undergone an undisclosed procedure. That should have been enough. Instead, some strangers questioned her recovery, criticized her vacation plans, and acted as though her wellness were a debt owed to their curiosity.

Let me be plain here. No person, decorated or ordinary, must hand over her health history because a crowd feels entitled to it. The most decorated gymnast in history spent years teaching us that lesson with her whole chest, and still the pressing continues. During the Tokyo Olympics in 2021, Biles withdrew from the team final and four individual finals after experiencing the twisties, a dangerous loss of spatial awareness that can leave a gymnast disoriented in the air. She spoke openly about protecting her mental health and physical safety, then returned to earn a bronze medal on the balance beam. Even so, she caught venom from people who never risked a vault in their lives. Now the attention has shifted toward her recent health scare, and that same intrusive tone returns, dressed up as concern.

Concern is a lovely word to hide behind. Real worry does not corner somebody and demand proof. It waits. Genuine care respects the door somebody chose to shut. What we are watching instead, at least from some of the loudest voices, is a hunger for gossip wearing the costume of care. Plenty of us recognize that outfit because we have worn its stare on our own skin.

Consider how privacy actually works for a Black woman in this culture. Our bodies have been catalogued, measured, and discussed without our permission for centuries. Doctors experimented on enslaved Black women and called it science. Magazines dissected our shapes and our hair and our supposed attitudes long before any of us signed up for the conversation. So when strangers circle a gymnast and insist she explain her medical history, that demand does not arrive on neutral ground. It lands on soil already soaked with a long history of grabbing at what belongs to us.

Sistas know this pressure in a way that lives in the bones. We have learned to smile past nosy questions at work. Plenty of us grew up with relatives who pried into our weight and our love lives, then called it care the moment we flinched. That kind of thing wears on you. Being asked to explain yourself over and over, to prove a hurt is real before anybody bothers to believe it, drains something you cannot always name. Biles has faced a public version of that same pressure, except hers plays out in front of millions of strangers at once.

Notice too how the demand shifts when the person is excellent. Mediocre men keep their secrets and nobody blinks. A gifted young talent guards a single corner of her life, and suddenly somebody decides her greatness bought them a key. Talent is not a surrender of selfhood. Winning medals does not convert a human being into an open file. This Olympian earned her fame through discipline and courage, collecting 11 Olympic medals and 30 World Championship medals along the way, yet none of that achievement obligates her to publish the contents of her doctor visits.

I sit with the word owe. Debt implies a transaction, a thing borrowed that must be returned. Simone borrowed nothing from the strangers typing at her. The Olympian gave, again and again, through performances that lifted a whole generation of little girls who now believe their bodies can fly. That is the transaction, and it was settled in full every time she chalked her hands. What the champion does with everything else is nobody’s call but hers. Maybe the details surface one day. Perhaps they stay private forever, and that is fine too.

Plenty of people claim that famous folks forfeit privacy the second they walk into a spotlight. I have yet to buy that reasoning. A performer sells her craft, not her medical file. Vocalists offer their voices, not their therapy notes. The bargain of fame was not a blanket confession, and pretending otherwise just gives entitlement a fancier coat. We can admire someone without believing we are owed access to the most tender parts of her life.

There is wisdom in how this young champion has handled all of this, and I think Sistas of a certain age can feel it. Simone is 29, but the boundary she has drawn speaks to women at every stage of life. Those of us past 40 know how parading our wounds for a crowd eventually loses its appeal. Some questions, you come to realize, do not merit an answer at all. Staying quiet quits reading as avoidance somewhere along the way, and honestly it becomes the first real gift you ever handed yourself. A grown woman guards her peace and drops the apology she used to attach to it.

All of this leads me to a tender question I turn over often, one that stretches well past this particular story. Picture a woman who spent years getting picked apart, treated like her body was everybody’s property. She built armor against the strangers reaching for a piece of her, because what else was she supposed to do. Does protecting herself mean she has to shut out the people who genuinely love her? Biles offers a clear answer without saying much at all. Her husband, Jonathan Owens, accompanied her to that July procedure, reminding us that a woman can deny the public access while still accepting love from somebody she trusts.

Ask yourself, older Sistas especially. Should a lady past 40 lock her heart up and call that wisdom, telling herself the risk is not worth it anymore? Or does she stay open to being loved by somebody who wants her and never once asks her to explain a single scar? Privacy and closeness are not fighting each other, at least not the way people tend to assume. A grown woman can hold the rest of the world at arm’s length while still letting one trusted soul come in, slow and on her own say so.

That, to me, is the deeper lesson hiding inside all this noise. The right to keep something private is also the right to choose who gets to know you fully. Nobody gets that access by force. No one claims it by shouting. It is given, freely, to the rare few who prove worthy, and everybody else can stay right there on the porch.

Black women deserve that boundary without apology. Admire us for our gifts, then let us keep our secrets. Give us doctors who truly protect us and partners who treasure us. And please, let the public finally grasp that watching a champion shine buys nobody a claim to her whole story. Simone Biles knows exactly where that line sits. She drew it herself, in her own hand, and the smartest thing the rest of us can do is respect it and tend to our own business.

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.

(ThySistas.com) Chaka Khan recently sat with a British newspaper and said out loud something plenty of grown women confess only to their closest friends. Talking about what she wants from life at 73, the Queen of Funk waved the subject of romance off. “I’m partnered out,” she told the Observer, adding that she would rather mosey along and let life do what it do than go hunting for somebody to complete her.

And Lord, you already know the kind of opinions a comment like that can stir up.

You would think the woman announced she was moving to the moon. Folks who never mailed her a birthday card suddenly feel entitled to opinions about her bedroom. Some clutch their pearls. Others want to fix her up, arrange something, locate a nice gentleman before it is “too late.” And that is exactly the kind of meddling she was trying to head off. She would not spell out any wish of her own, because the second a sister says it aloud, some well meaning busybody starts scrolling their contacts for a setup.

Real talk. She has already lived through more than most of us ever will, and not one of us gets a say in when she quits looking.

Look at who we are talking about. Ten Grammys, music sales and streams topping 70 million, a voice big enough to turn “Sweet Thing” into a full church service. She married at 17, married again down the line, and has spoken openly about how complicated relationships can become. In 2017 she came clean about a doubt that gnawed at her, wondering whether a man loved Chaka the legend or Yvette Stevens, the girl from Chicago. Sit with a question like that long enough and calling off the search stops feeling like defeat. After everything, who could blame her for being done.

Sistas of a certain age understand this without translation.

We have watched our mothers and aunties pour everything into households that did not always pour back. Many of us saw women shrink themselves to fit beside partners incapable of growth. So when one of our icons stands in her full power and declares she is content on her own, plenty of us do not hear sadness. We hear a bell ringing clear.

Peace has a way of becoming the point once the noise dies down.

There is a whole generation of older Black women rewriting the meaning of a rich existence after 50, after 60, after the kids are raised and the papers are filed and the funeral programs are tucked in a drawer. They are traveling. Some are buying the little house with the porch they always wanted. A few are gardening, mentoring, laughing at brunch until the waiter gets nervous. Their calendars fill up without a husband’s name penciled in anywhere. Companionship is welcome in that picture, sure, but nobody is holding the door for a warm body just to dodge an empty seat. The seat, it turns out, is not empty. It is finally theirs.

That shift matters, because for generations the culture handed us a single script. Get chosen. Stay married through whatever storms roll in. Measure your worth by the ring and the last name. Anything outside that lane got labeled tragic, bitter, or busted. A quiet spinster past a certain birthday was treated as a cautionary tale rather than a full human being with a passport and a pension.

The Queen of Funk just tore a page out of that script on the record.

Now, let me be fair to the other side of the coin, because peace is not the same thing as a locked heart. Picking yourself does not mean slamming the door on love for good. Plenty of folks stumble into something real in their 60s, and they will swear it beats whatever they thought they had figured out at 25. That later kind of affection usually shows up without all the theatrics. No shame at all in wanting someone to sit beside on a slow Sunday. And wanting a person to look at you like you hung the moon? Nothing wrong with that either.

So the question sits right there in the middle of the table, and I want you to actually sit with it.

Should an older woman shy away from romance because she has already given it two or three honest tries and come up exhausted? Or should she keep her heart cracked open, betting that the right sort of gentle bond could still find her on a Tuesday afternoon when least expected? Is “partnered out” a wall, or is it simply a queen refusing to beg for a thing that ought to arrive on its own?

I do not think a single answer fits every situation, and anybody selling you a tidy rule is really selling you their own fear.

What I do believe is that the choice belongs to her, to you, and to nobody standing outside the union trying to referee it. Maybe you meet somebody at 65 and wind up slow dancing in the kitchen till your knees start fussing. Plenty of us never do, and the quiet suits us just fine. Neither ending is a runner up prize.

We trip ourselves up the moment we start ranking these lives against each other, pinning a blue ribbon on the married sister and a pity face on whoever is flying solo.

Black women have been the ones holding up households and congregations and movements for generations, so long that plain rest can feel almost against the rules, like something we have to steal in secret. When a legend models the audacity of enough, she hands permission to every reader quietly wondering whether stopping is allowed. Permission is granted. It always was.

The icon has a fresh album, “Chakzilla,” arriving September 18, still creating, still hungry for the stage even as she guards her private hours. That balance holds the whole lesson. A person can stay wide open to the work she cherishes and draw a firm line around her heart at the very same time.

So decide for yourself what your next season requires. Guard your quiet if quiet is what heals you. Should tenderness keep whispering your name, do not be too proud to answer it. Just refuse to let the crowd, or the pressure, or the dread of an empty chair make the call on your behalf.

Chaka settled her own answer. The rest of us, sistas and everybody watching, get to settle ours.

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.

(ThySistas.com) Watch how folks talk about a Black woman who has her act together. The word strong gets thrown at her the way you might describe a load bearing wall. She is the one who brings the casserole when somebody dies and stays late folding programs for the repast. I have been her, and so have most of the sisters I know. We got good at it, so good that nobody thought to ask what it cost. That is why a small comment from Keke Palmer stuck with me longer than a celebrity soundbite usually does. She admitted, plainly, to setting aside private time to weep.

On Amy Poehler’s podcast over the summer, she put it without flinching. The crying happens alone and on purpose, not to recover after some collapse but as upkeep. Holding room for the tears is the point, a way to carry off stored sadness, some of it fresh and some going back years. A release. Then it was right back to the regularly scheduled madness.

Chaos is the honest word for that calendar. Keke is 32 and moving like the rent is overdue. During 2026 alone she hosted the Billboard Women in Music Awards, starred in I Love Boosters, which premiered at South by Southwest, kept a podcast rolling, and grew her sketch character Lady Miss Jacqueline into a full audio project. The ’Burbs has been renewed for a second season, with filming expected to resume in the fall, and there is a young son at home. Looking at that, you would never picture a person who schedules a real cry. Which is the whole point.

Most of us grew up on the opposite lesson. You keep moving no matter what lands on you, and if the tears come, you let them fall in the shower where the water covers for you. My Aunt Gloria buried a husband on a Saturday and taught Sunday school the next morning like the world had not cracked open, and got nothing but praise for it. That steel had roots I respect. Black women built a way of living out of not flinching, through years that would have folded anyone with softer landings. My problem is not the armor. It is that the stuff fuses to your skin, and one day you cannot recall the last time it came off.

The applause is the sneaky part. Get told enough times that you are the strong one and it becomes an assignment nobody remembers handing you. People quit checking on you because your fine is assumed. Before long you are the family backup plan, the one they call when the lights are about to get cut, while your own needs sit at the bottom of a list you never reach.

What Palmer does cuts against all of that. Rather than wait for the ache to announce itself, she goes looking, in a room set aside for the purpose, and lets it out before it sours into something meaner. Anybody who has ignored a slow leak under the sink knows how that story ends, with a warped cabinet and a bill nobody planned for. Tears read as coming apart to a lot of folks. To me it looks like a woman keeping her own house from rotting underneath.

There is a difference between the toughness that will not bend and the kind that knows how to set the load down at night. The first photographs beautifully. It also wears the body out on the inside while everybody claps. My mama’s generation ran on it because the times left no other choice, and plenty paid the bill in high blood pressure and swallowed words. The other kind is not weaker. It just intends to last.

Rest belongs in the same conversation. So does the word no, which some of us can barely push past our teeth, and getting up from a table where you are always refilling plates and never the one being served. Sistas learn to hear those choices as selfish, like minding yourself betrays the people leaning on you. Palmer even talked about picturing a cord to a draining relationship and cutting it over and over until it quit growing back. Call it cold if you want. That reads to me as a grown woman guarding her peace.

I came to this late. For years I picked up every call on the first ring and drove clear across town for people who would not have crossed the street for me, wearing the tiredness as proof that I mattered. The first time I let a phone buzz itself quiet and stayed put with my book, the guilt sat on me for the better part of a week. What followed the guilt was something a lot closer to relief.

None of it shrinks you. Weeping does not undo the years you held the line, and a nap does not erase the miles already behind you. A well that goes unrefilled runs dry, and then the whole household goes thirsty, you first in line.

What gets me is the timing. This is landing at the height of everything, not as a lesson pulled out of some low season. Younger Black women watching can absorb something their elders mostly learned the hard way, when they got to learn it at all. You are allowed to feel the thing. Coming apart in private and putting yourself back together takes nothing away from you.

I keep thinking about the Sista reading this who cannot recall her last real exhale, the one everybody assumes is good because she always is. Good is a costume, and it gets heavier the longer you keep it zipped. Nobody is handing out a ribbon for suffering the quietest.

Keke decided her tears rated a spot on the calendar, same as a meeting or a workout. If a sister moving at that pace can stop long enough to feel her life, the rest of us can find ten minutes. Holding it all together was never the whole assignment. Setting it down without calling yourself a failure, that is the part most of us are still working on.

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.

(ThySistas.com) Nobody hands you a manual for the season that follows a public falling short. You get parades for the wins. Flowers show up at the door. A hashtag trends for an afternoon, and folks who barely spoke to you last year suddenly remember they believed all along. Then it turns. No one warns you how quiet a room gets once the crowd thins, how quick the same people who chanted your name go looking somewhere else. You are left holding the whole load by yourself.

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.

(ThySistas.com) There was an old head in my neighborhood, a Sista who had seen plenty and said whatever she pleased. Told me once that certain women walk into a spot and the spot just bends their way. Said it like a warning, not a compliment. You take up space without asking, folks get twitchy. Have one of us be the one doing it, and twitchy grows teeth real quick.

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.

(ThySistas.com) Somewhere in a conference room this offseason, a woman sat across from executives who run a billion dollar league and walked out having helped negotiate nearly $377 million in new contract value for her clients. Her name is Nicole Lynn. If you follow football, you already know her. If you don’t, sit with me for a minute, because what this woman is teaching has almost nothing to do with the sport itself.

Her path ran through the University of Oklahoma law program, degree in hand by 2015. Early on, security guards at team hotels mistook her for somebody’s girlfriend and asked her to leave. Think about that. A trained attorney, sharp enough to read the fine print buried in these agreements, and grown men treated her like a lost fan. Returning anyway became the whole answer.

The year 2019 brought a milestone, as Lynn became the first Black woman to represent a top-three NFL draft pick when Quinnen Williams went third overall to the New York Jets. Four years after that came a $255 million extension for Jalen Hurts that briefly made him the highest-paid player in NFL history by average annual value. Lynn later became the first Black woman to represent a quarterback in the Super Bowl, and Hurts eventually went on to win a championship and Super Bowl MVP honors. Now look at 2026. Across one offseason she stacked up 4 major agreements worth nearly $377 million in reported contract value for her clients. Bijan Robinson briefly reset the running back market as the highest-paid player at his position. Quinnen Williams pulled down roughly $106 million from Dallas. After each victory the same grinning note lands online, asking whether anybody happens to have a Brinks truck handy.

Here is the part I want us to actually chew on.

Lynn does not succeed by asking nicely. Victory comes because she enters the room already certain of what her client is owed, homework finished, proof in the folder. Market comparisons. Timing. Leverage nobody else bothered to notice. Hoping the other side feels generous is not the strategy. Building a case they cannot easily refuse is.

Now let me talk to my Sistas for a second.

How many of us were raised on the gospel of keep your head down and grind? Do the job, do it twice as well as everybody else, and eventually somebody up top will see you and reward you. Our mothers meant well. Their world sometimes ran that way, or at least they needed it to. That quiet approach has cost too many of us real income, real promotions, real years we will never get back.

I have watched brilliant women accept the first figure thrown at them because pushing felt rude. I have watched them thank a boss for a 2% bump while a less qualified coworker cleared 15% by simply opening his mouth. Nobody hands you your value on a silver tray. You have to name it, out loud, in a space where the temperature might drop the second you do.

That is the lesson sitting inside her climb. Study the market thoroughly enough and confidence stops being a performance. Hers rested on facts. When the claim was 9 figures, the receipts behind every dollar were already lined up.

Most of us are not haggling over football salaries. We are teachers, nurses, analysts, shop owners, managers, freelancers trying to raise a rate we set 3 years ago and never touched since. The scale differs. The principle does not.

Begin with knowing what you bring. Really knowing it. Sit down and list every skill you carry, every problem you solve that would cost the company dearly if you walked out tomorrow. Put it on paper. Read it back to yourself until you stop flinching.

Then go find out what that talent actually pays. Ask around. Comb the salary sites. Reach out to a former colleague who left for greener grass and ask, gently, what greener looked like on the paycheck. Information is the whole ballgame here. You cannot bargain for a number you never learned existed.

And when the moment arrives, resist the urge to soften yourself into nothing. So many of us apologize before the request even leaves our mouths. The ask shrinks. A nervous laugh sneaks in. We hand them an exit before anybody thought to say no. Lynn refuses that reflex. Silence does the labor. The figure gets named, and then comes the wait.

I am not pretending any of this feels natural. For women who look like we do, assertiveness gets read differently, and we all know it. Confident becomes difficult. Direct becomes cold. That double standard is real, and I will not insult anyone by acting like it isn’t. But letting it mute you only guarantees the outcome you already feared. You end up underpaid and still misjudged. So you might as well be paid correctly and let them adjust their assumptions on their own time.

There is something else worth sitting with. Nicole built her reputation representing men, operating in spaces where nobody expected her to hold the pen. Permission to belong was never something she waited on. Acting as though it already existed did the work, and eventually the room caught up to reality.

Black women have been the safety net of families, churches, and jobs forever. Showing up early is the norm. Staying late comes standard too. We repair what other people broke and rarely send an invoice for it. Somewhere along the line, a lot of us learned to measure ourselves by how much we could haul for free. Nicole reverses that arrangement completely. Her entire livelihood is making sure talent gets compensated fully, and her own fee carries the exact same seriousness.

So what does knowing your value look like on an ordinary Tuesday, for a sister who will never sit across from a team owner?

On an ordinary Tuesday it might mean sending the full bill instead of the discounted friend price. Maybe the moment calls for telling a client, I can start that project once we settle my rate. Sometimes the move is declining a promotion that piles on responsibility while the pay stays frozen. Other times the answer is walking out on an employer who keeps promising to appreciate you next quarter, next year, next never.

None of that is ego. Ego is claiming what you did not earn. What I am describing is accuracy. You are allowed to be accurate about your own price.

My beautiful Sistas, hear me clearly. The professional who negotiated all those millions was once escorted out of a hotel because a stranger could not picture her power. Convincing him was never where her energy went. Becoming undeniable is what got the investment instead.

Do the homework. Learn the market. Rehearse the ask until your voice quits shaking. Then walk in like the figure you deserve is already yours, because on paper, if you truly did the work, it is.

Somebody out there needs your particular brilliance badly enough to pay for it. Go and make them.

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.